Another crossing accident

[Regularity]

We have plenty of bridges that are over 100 years old, clearly signposted, and trucks and busses still drive into them.

[DelawareAndHudson]

Probably offend someone here, BUT..... the UK is about 2.5% of the size of the United States.  Your railroads were nationalized for a long time.  I assume that means tax dollars were more accessible for projects like eliminating or rebuilding grade crossings.  The latest numbers I can find online (2020) state that there are over 130,000 PUBLIC grade crossings in the United States.  Who knows how many private ones there are.  

 

Everything is simply 'different' here than in the UK.  99% of the railroad's and their tracks/property are privately owned.  Unless a local/state/federal government steps up with tax dollars, a railroad isn't going to rebuild a grade crossing.  For one thing, there is usually an ownership issue.  When railroads 'rebuild' a grade crossing, they typically only replace the asphalt within a couple of feet of the outside of the rails.  And when a public road is resurfaced, they typically pave up to the line where the railroad did.  The railroads aren't likely to fund the lowering of their track or the raising of the public road approaches.  

 

There's another issue.  Not sure haw many of you have driven in the US, but millions of drivers here absolutely suck at driving.  They're utterly oblivious of their surroundings.  They ignore road signs, traffic signals, even crossing gates.  Maybe I've become jaded to things but I've long ago reached the point that when I hear or read about yet another grade crossing 'accident', I think "that Darwin guy was on to something".  

 

According to the Department of Transportation, there are about 5,800 train-vehicle crashes per year with 600 deaths and 2,300 injuries.  The US had nearly 37,000 hiway fatalities in 2020.  No matter what people SAY, I don't think American's REALLY value life all that much.  Almost 20,000 gun deaths.  37,000 hiway fatalities.  In light of all that and the fact that year over year, little or nothing is actually done to mitigate these numbers (not just numbers, it's actually dead Americans), there is going to be very little positive movement on those 5,800 train-vehicle crashes and the 600 deaths.  We average nearly 16 grade crossing collisions EVERY DAY.  Just accept it.  Apparently we have.  

 

Jason Cook

Indiana (#5 in railroad grade crossing collisions in 2020!)

[Regularity]

8 minutes ago, DelawareAndHudson said:

Your railroads were nationalized for a long time.  I assume that means tax dollars were more accessible for projects like eliminating or rebuilding grade crossings. 

Big assumption. Not necessarily true, either.

We know your country is bigger, with a bigger population (but much less overcrowded) but I don’t think think you have a monopoly on bad drivers. 
Railways in this country own their right of way, but where they cross a previously existing right of way, they have to pay for the level crossing, the road bridge, or even abolish it as one of the clauses of the Act of Parliament establishing the route. Once that is established, though, they don’t have to pay to replace a crossing with a bridge, or an old bridge with a newer, wider bridge. That said, I am aware of two situations where due to electrification, the railways offered to put in a new bridge as it would have been convenient for them so to do at the same time as other disruptive work, but the relevant local authorities rejected the offer as they didn’t want to spend money on the associated road improvements. In one case, they built a new bridge 20 years or so later. In the other, the council concerned still  takes to the news airwaves occasionally about the fact that the gates are down for 45 minutes of the hour during the day, and why won’t the railway replace it?

So many  people have died or had lucky escapes swerving round barriers of trying to get across them that we no longer leave it till the last moment before bringing down the barriers, but do it well in advance of a train coming. And pedestrians still attempt to climb the barriers and run across in front of a train: have s search on line.

 

Doubt if you offended anyone, but your understanding of how things are in the UK doesn’t square with my experience of living here. I think that an understanding of the physics of momentum when applied to a train approaching s level crossing, and just how robustly built trains are compared to road vehicles, is simply lacking in large portions of the population.

[mdvle]

1 hour ago, DelawareAndHudson said:

Your railroads were nationalized for a long time.  I assume that means tax dollars were more accessible for projects like eliminating or rebuilding grade crossings.

 

That would be a bad assumption.

 

The best example I can give you are the various government run train services in the US - Amtrak and the various commuter agencies.

 

Note that Amtrak doesn't get a blank cheque every year - they have to go to Congress and plead their case for funding - and as a result Amtrak has a long list of capital requirements that remain unfunded year after year

 

British Rail suffered what was essentially the same thing - having to go to the Government of the day and ask for funding for projects.

 

Thus the plentiful examples of things done on the cheap (assorted electrification, the Pacers aka Class 141/142/143/144) that would cause problems longer term, or things that didn't get done.

 

Or more recently, the ambitious expansion of electrification on the Western Region that then got scaled back, with the result that the UK is running a lot of bi-mode trains around.

 

 

[dave1905]

On 17/10/2021 at 11:51, mdvle said:

VIA, and I guess Amtrak, have (finally) started moving to an operational model of simply reversing trains instead of turning them on a lot of routes. 

 

 

The Reading was sorta doing this back in the steam era, they had a streamlined train, the Crusader, that had observation cars on each end and the tenders of the streamlined steam engines had a cowling on the back to cover the obs end when coupled to the engine, so the train set was bi-directional.  Then in the 1960's they modified a train set for service between Philadelphia and Reading with an MU cable running across the roofs of the cars so they could put an FP7 on each end.  Called the Push-Pull it operated in this configuration into the SEPTA era until the service was discontinued.

[Michael Hodgson]

3 hours ago, Regularity said:

So many  people have died or had lucky escapes swerving round barriers of trying to get across them that we no longer leave it till the last moment before bringing down the barriers, but do it well in advance of a train coming. And pedestrians still attempt to climb the barriers and run across in front of a train: have s search on line.

 

Unfortunately it's just not that simple.  If you bring down the barriers too long before the train arrives people soon get to know that, so it it increases their temptation to circumvent half barriers if they've only just come down.  Anything more than 10 seconds seems like a long time to many pedestrians and motorists.  On the other hand if you leave it late, there are going to be incidents with slow-moving traffic not getting enough warning of fast trains as at Hixon.  So it's a bit of a balancing act.  Even then, no matter how much in advance the barriers come down, there will always be some road traffic that's even slower.  That's exacerbated if some of the trains are a lot slower than the fastest on the line, because automatic crossings are initiated at some fixed point so your wait is affected by the journey time from the strike-in treadle/track circuit to the crossing itself.  This can by mitigated by level crossing predictors which adjust for line speed. 

 

I believe the authorities have done research and found that there is more crossing abuse for open (ie no barriers) crossings than half barriers, and those in turn have more abuse than full barriers.  The psychology of beating the train to the crossing is probably more of an issue in the USA, because they have such extremely long trains so American motorists have a longer wait than we do if the train wins the race to the crossing

[F-UnitMad]

5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

The psychology of beating the train to the crossing is probably more of an issue in the USA, because they have such extremely long trains so American motorists have a longer wait than we do if the train wins the race to the crossing

Nail & head = hit!!

 

[dave1905]

5 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

The psychology of beating the train to the crossing is probably more of an issue in the USA, because they have such extremely long trains so American motorists have a longer wait than we do if the train wins the race to the crossing

or not.

The number of crossing accidents and fatalities has gone down over the years as the trains have been getting longer.  

 

In 1981 when trains were 1/2 to 1/3 the size they are now there there were 4x the collisions and 3x the fatalities.

 

OLS crossing accident history

Edited October 19, 2021 by dave1905

[Regularity]

7 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Unfortunately it's just not that simple. 

Yes, but my post was already long enough.