Cab safety measures could see radical changes, and the construction of earthworks near the rails could be adjusted. This is all the result of the fatal accident in the northeast of Scotland in the summer of 2020. The Rail Accident investigation Branch (RAIB) has published a report with twenty far-reaching recommendations, including driver seatbelts and airbags, measures not seen before in the rail industry in the UK.
Scotland and the UK were shocked by a crash in August 2020, when a lightly loaded passenger train derailed at a landslip south of Aberdeen, after an extreme summer storm. The derailment killed a passenger, a train guard and the driver, and wrecked a train set only recently commissioned for ScotRail, the regional passenger operator. The RAIB, the official watchdog in the UK, has been detailed in its response and put forward fully twenty critical recommendations in its report published today.
Detailed investigation
The circumstances of the accident were framed by a severe storm that had disrupted services across the country in the previous twenty-four hours. The derailed train was among the first to attempt movement after the rain and several flooding incidents. The point of the derailment was in a deep cutting, over a century old, and only recently upgraded in the past decade.
Modelling undertaken by the engineering consultancy AECOM, working on behalf of RAIB, indicated that the design of ten-year old drainage system at Carmont would have been capable of safely accommodating the flow of surface water that occurred on the morning of 12 August 2020 without causing gravel to be washed away down the steeply sloping trench towards the track.
I’m convinced that the re-assessment will come to the same conclusions as before. None of the circumstances have changed, but the frequency of train crashes has reduced. Carmont was a particularly chaotic crash with a huge amount of energy dissipated in a a very short space. If money needs to be spent, it’s better to spend it on preventing the derailment, and if a derailment happens, spend on preventing the train being displaced from the line of the track. I would doubt that providing air bags or seat belts would have helped in this situation where the power car ran off the bridge and collided with the embankment stopping almost instantly. The “g” force must have been enormous.
According to the RAIB animation, the cab separated from the rest of the loco. Airbags and belts may hinder ejection but if you are inside a projectile then the damage has already been done
Airbags work in a car because of the limited mass of the vehicle. That limitation doesn’t apply to locos (or, indeed, trucks). The essence of construction not being built to spec, however, should be more easily solved by improved processes, I hope.