THE German ICE tragedy (p449) has shattered the excellent safety record of high speed rail travel. To date the only two serious accidents involving high speed trains both occurred last year. One was a collision in September at about 160 km/h between an IC125 and a freight train at Southall in West London in which seven people lost their lives; IC125s have been running at 200 km/h since 1976. The other was in January, when an Italian State Railways Pendolino derailed at 157 km/h on a curve at Piacenza, also resulting in seven deaths (RG 2.97 p69). Neither was on a dedicated high speed line.
There have been a number of other accidents involving trains derailing or colliding at around 160 km/h, but in some cases, such as Colwich in 1986, no passengers were killed. In Japan, the safety record of the shinkansen is impeccable. For 34 years shinkansen trains have carried billions of people at 210 km/h or more without a serious train accident, and over 130 million passengers a year now ride between Tokyo and Osaka. In France, the record is untarnished too. But there was an incident involving a TGV that is worth discussing, because in the aftermath of Eschede it was suggested that the French design might perform better in a crash than an ICE.
When a TGV derailed at 295 km/h on a section of TGV Nord in December 1993, all cars remained upright and only two passengers received minor injuries. There is little doubt that the articulated design helped, but the accident was quite different from Eschede. The TGV derailment was the result of track subsiding after floods, causing the ground to collapse into an undetected cavity. French National Railways was lucky, and there was no obstacle for the train to strike. At Eschede the near instantaneous dissipation of kinetic energy was bound to cause massive damage.
What is disturbing is the apparent disintegration rather than deformation of some of the ICE coaches, which have bodies formed of welded aluminium alloy extrusions. Photographs showed that at least one of the bodies appeared to have split along weld lines, for example between floor and bodysides. A similar effect could be observed on one of the cars at Piacenza. The casualties were far fewer, but the train did not suffer the misfortune of striking a bridge.
As to likely causes at Eschede, the out-of-round wheels phenomenon looks feasible. Out-of-round wheels are also thought to occur on TGVs, but frequent reprofiling presumably keeps the problem in check. TGVs have monobloc wheels rather than a design with tyres and a rubber insert, but it should not be forgotten that solid wheels can break too. In an extraordinary coincidence Britain’s Great North Eastern Railway suffered precisely such a failure on June 16 when a broken wheel caused the 17.30 Kings Cross - Edinburgh IC225 train to derail at 200 km/h near Sandy. Injuries were minor, but the trains were withdrawn for wheel checks. When they returned to service from June 17 speeds were limited to 130 km/h by a ruling from the Health & Safety Executive.
In the wake of the emotional horror of Eschede, it is important that money and effort is not squandered uselessly in the name of safety. It was disturbing to hear a Euro MP with a transport portfolio call for passenger lists for all forms of public transport. The suggestion was not merely that passengers’ names should be recorded, but also details of their journeys and their next of kin. How would this work on the Berlin S-Bahn or the London Underground, and to what purpose? Suggestions that trains should have seat belts fall into the same category.
Just as motorways are safer than ordinary roads, high speed lines are safer than old routes - Eschede is on a line built in the 1840s, upgraded in the 1970s for 200 km/h. New lines in Japan, France, Germany, Spain and Italy have ATP, no level crossings, and the latest track and structures technology - and have yet to kill a single passenger.
DB and other high speed operators will learn lessons from Eschede, but we have no doubt that development of the ICE network will continue. Around 27 million people rode ICEs last year, and on routes where ICEs link city pairs in under 3h, the volume of air traffic has fallen by 44%. Were the speed of ICEs to be reduced they would become less competitive, and deaths on German roads - currently over 8000 a year - would be bound to rise. o
