Train crash between Bedford and Luton

[june35]

Hope everyone is okay but it looks serious. I wonder what caused it, you don’t hear of many train crashes these days.

It's the East Midlands Railway services which use the affected Midland Mainline route. Neither train involved in the crash was a slower Thameslink service (although those trains do use the same route as EMR services, from Bedford to London St Pancras). It was the Luton Airport Express (an EMR service) from Corby, which collided with the EMR high speed service from Nottingham (which was reportedly stationary at the time). The Luton Airport Express is a commuter service to London, in addition to serving the airport, as only a handful of the high-speed services stop south of Kettering now on their way to London. It's the main service into London now for people from Wellingborough, Bedford and Luton (and the only service from Corby).

East Coast Mainline is a completely different line. Their services go to Kings Cross, not St Pancras (although both mainline stations are served by the same underground station).

My thoughts are with all those who are affected. I use the line regularly, so have been following this story closely.

It's tragic, but incidents like this are incredibly rare. Seatbelts are not necessary on trains and would not necessarily have lessened the injury toll. If anything, there could have been fair more fatalities. If a fire had broken out, seatbelts would have been a recipe for disaster as they often lock and jam in a high speed crash. Seated passengers might not have been flung from their seats, but they still would have been hit by flying luggage and standing passengers, and potentially might have then been trapped in those seats unable to escape further danger.

It's wrong for people to speculate on the cause. Hopefully answers will come in time.

I’m struggling to find anything accurate here, for a nerd you have got so much wrong.

I was surprised about this incident because I didn't think it could even happen these days but we don't have the fail-safes in place everywhere on the network because it's so expensive. I actually thought that if a driver passed a red signal the train was brought to a halt automatically (but then, the driver who died might not have passed a red signal).

I think seatbelts were discussed after the Ladbroke Grove crash and it was decided it wasn't practical. What is more serious is the suggestion that seats came away from their fixings and were thrown around, no wonder some people are very badly injured in that case.

Only on Mumsnet.

If there are seatbelts, and people are required to use them, then you would need staff to go up and down the aisles to check everyone is belted up... like on an aeroplane.
Except this would have to be at every stop. It would be ridiculous. Plus it would mean no standing room, so less people on each train. Some people would never get home from work!

Main reason is trains are on tracks and don't crash that often.

Let's use different language for a second, would you bet your house on the fact it had nothing to do with malicious tampering of signals by any means?

.... curious if that means you think it was a result of human error?

I ask because "hacker" might not give the same image. I wrote a report about cyber crime in 2015 and even then hacking was used for many more crimes than bank account fraud. My report focused on the hacking of some state's infrastructure by an adversarial state. That was 10 years ago, when the world was more stable.

Given how narrow the seats are on my commute I really don’t fancy some man groping round by my arse to click the seatbelt 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Yes, I'd bet my house on it not being malicious tampering either. This stuff just doesn't happen. You can't just turn a red signal green on a whim. Ever since Victorian times, there's been very complex safety systems in place to make sure a signal can't fail in a dangerous manner, i.e. show a green indication when it should be red.

The Clapham disaster in 1988 was, however, caused by a signal that was incorrectly wired by a member of staff who had been working excessive overtime. That was an exceptional circumstance, and I can't think of a time any other technical failure like that has occurred.

The idea of Russian hackers changing signals is absolutely impossible, so it can definitely be ruled out.

Speculation about malicious tampering serves no purpose on a thread like this, and only encourages the conspiracy theorist nutters tinfoil hat brigade.

Let's do what the officials have asked, and not speculate at all.

If you believe you have information to impart, then perhaps you could contact the authorities and talk to them.

Absolutely. Outlandish ideas like these are ridiculous, and don't help anybody. Some people are bizarrely paranoid about terrorism - the thought never even crossed my mind that terrorism had anything to do with this.

I can think of several possibilities, but that's because I work in the industry and I know how systems work. I'm not going to speculate about them here, it wouldn't be helpful to do so, but they all relate to some kind of technical failure, or human error, or both. There's not a chance in hell this was malicious or deliberate.

I think maybe PP watched Nightsleeper (about a train that is hacked) and thought it was based on a true story 😆

It’s all being analysed and assessed by the RAIB, they are incredibly professional and specialist - genuine answers will come, speculating helps no one. It’s a terribld incident, extremely unusual and tragic :(

Yeah, that show was completely preposterous.

Yes, the failsafe systems are extensive, but there are exceptions where trains can be signed off to run without all the failsafe's in place. And I suspect that will be where the investigation will have begun.

I don't think hacking is that far-fetched but I think if you were going to go to that trouble you'd do something with a much higher profile service like a French TGV or an aeroplane.

Same. I wonder if the tracks were tampered with and an IT failure also happened. It's a terrible accident.

I really wouldn't rule out terrosism there were a spate of train crashes in Europe recently too

Trust me, it's MASSIVELY far-fetched.

It's not terrorism.

"It's a terrible accident"

This. It will probably turn out to be several things at once in a twist of fate, all of which combined together to cause it.

Exactly.

Some of the wild speculation I'm seeing is ridiculous.

Some of this sounds a bit like all the carp you get immediately post aircraft accidents/serious incidents.

There appears to be an increasing reluctance by the general public to believe anything can be accident, where perhaps combination of human performance and other factors have aligned in an unfortunate manner...

These days there seems to an immediate rush to blame Russia/hacking/terrorism - that's very very rarely the case.

Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, most accidents are down to simple human factors like fatigue, distraction, stress, misunderstanding or miscommunication. It's almost certainly that, or technical failure.

It didn't even cross my mind that terrorists were involved. Terrorism on the railway looks completely different, and is much more like the attacks on the London transport network of 2005, and the previous IRA bombing campaign.

I've read a lot of accident investigations, and so far there's nothing about this that looks suspicious or unusual. It has all the hallmarks of a typical rail accident. It's probably only provoking wild speculation because such accidents are now so rare - this is the first fatal rear-end collision on the UK rail network since 1988.

My Dad is a long time retired signalling expert & gave evidence at both the Southall & Ladbroke grove crashes

He talked about the recent crash at great length (non stop) today over his father's day lunch!

I know very little about rail safety or signalling but I'll try to summarize what he said (the bits I was paying attention to)

There won't be one single failure that will have caused it. There will be a combination of factors.

The rail line is not one that has been upgraded to ETCS which is the safest system & will automatically stop a train from getting close to another.

The stationary (nottingham) train had stopped due to a technical fault so is likely to have stopped at an awkward point on the network (not at a signal) which could have compromised the safe stopping distance. This alone would not have resulted in the crash but could have been a contributing factor.

Signals passed at danger (SPAD) are not common on the line but are possible. A SPAD /red or double amber would give an audible warning which the driver must over ride. If they do not over ride it then the brakes will be automatically applied (eg if driver was incapacitated), the more sophisticated ETCS system which was not present would have automatically prevented the train from entering the protective 'envelope' or track circuit.

Because the line does not have ETCS the driver could have acknowledged the SPAD warning & continued or if he was incapacitated or distracted - did not acknowledge the warning & the brakes were automatically applied then the stationary train in an awkward location on the track system may not have given a safe stopping distance, there are also other factors including whether the rails were slippery, expansion due to heat & many others.

It's impossible to say & the investigation will be complex & thorough.