Train Wreck in Japan

Thought there might be some interest in this:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/12/25/japan.derailment.ap/index.html

Wow !

Goodness! You should post this at the trains mag forums.

How sad! Japan still seems to have an amazing safety record when you factor in the number of daily trains it runs.

Cool.

Very sad.

For now it looks like there was a possibility of high winds involved.

Interesting. I wonder if this was the narrow gauge line, as those cars are lighter than the standard gauged equipment.

FYI, my girlfriend, Maiko (who is a bit of a railfan), and I have been reading about this accident since we arrived back from my parent’s house from Christmas. Of course, she has a great advanatge, beuing fluent in Japanese. She’s provided the following translation from several late reports online. It sounds as if some microburst-type winds caught the train just as it was leaving a bridge. They were very lucky, under the circumstances, the end up on dry land.

While most JR lines are what woudl technically be narrorgauge here in the US, they are of much heavier construction than what you might think of in Colorado. Newfoundloand had similarly sized lines at 3’6" and they easily handled re-trucked standard gauge rolling stock. It will be just a little tipier, but I don’t think narrowgauge in itself had much to do with this.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL

All of the “JR” lines (what used to be the Japan National Rail, “JNR,” before the mid-80’s when they were privatized) except for the Shinkansen (“new trunk line”, from 1964) are 1067 mm. It’s interesting for me to see narrowguage rails in the US, because I always think, they are the same as the commuter train rails I grew up riding.

The train had just gone over a bridge over a river, 8 or 9 meters above the surface of the river. The last car was 100 meters south of the bridge (train was headed south) when it derailed. The bridge in question is an “open floor style” (so the line was exposed from the bottom) and there aren’t any barriers on the side of it to prevent wind. That region is known for some strong seasonal winds in the wintertime. According to the JR region office in Niigata, that bridge is known to have some winds blowing upward, but there were no special directions or restrictions in the area.

The day of the derailing, the train was 68 minutes late leaving the previous station due to bad weather and snow.

The train had 6 cars on it, each of these weighs