China HSR trains collide; 11 dead

MSNBC

Very sad, but frankly, too many people saw something like this coming.

I don't buy the story about the cause of the collision; how is it that a train behind a disabled train kept going?—are they using semaphore signaling? and how is it that a lightning strike disabled the train and not the entire section of electrification instead?

letrs not jump to any conclusions , just because it is in China . a close lightning strike would wreak havoc on any system .

David Benton wrote:let's not jump to any conclusions, just because it is in China

Sometimes there is nothing wrong with foregone conclusions, especially since the story is not logical. And it's not "just because it's in China", which implies the actual country and its people rather than its government.

David Benton wrote:a close lightning strike would wreak havoc on any system

Not a modern system, and not like this, especially a well-grounded one. Ever heard of lightning rods?

What do you think would happen in the case of a lightning strike? The train is absolutely not the highest point on an electrified railroad; therefore a lightning bolt would hit the catenary towers and the worst thing to happen would most likely be a catenary power outage, causing all trains on either side of the block that was depowered to come to a stop (ideally). This catastrophe had a lot more going wrong that can be attributed to lightning.

BTW, Reuters now reports 32 dead and 200 taken to hospital with various injuries.

I agree....there is a LOT more to this than what is being initially reported. I'll buy the lightning strike as a catalyst. Lets say the subs recovered and reclosed the line....if there was code loss in the rail, how did it not go into penalty? Granted I know NOTHING about Chinese signaling and train control, but I would have to assume as a somewhat new HSR system there would have to be some variation of 562 signaling(cabs only, no waysides). This one will be interesting, and I'm hoping the world will get the full story, and that the FRA is watching closely.

sorry , but I do know quite abit about lightning strike and its effects on electrical equipment , working on wind turbines and solar systems . yes , you should have lightning rods , and lightning arrestors , but its not going to stop the damage in a close strike or direct hit . there is simply no way to handle that much energy without some kind of damage . especially to control systems and signalling circuits .

This is a high speed line and must have signalling to allow for high speed operations (adequate stopping distance.) Therefore in case of a train disabled en route as has been reported, the rear must be protected by fail safe systems. There must be automatic train stop mechanisms. I have seen a short video of the Chinese subway operation during the 2008 summer Olympics, that the trains run on rolling block systems that permit more trains (increased capacity) perhaps provided by Siemens AG.

In case there is a train blocking the route ahead, appropriate signalling must show on the cab following behind. With high speed trains there must be stopping system for such an eventuality. How did system fail so drastically? Or is there no such system?

David Benton wrote:sorry, but I do know quite a bit about lightning strike and its effects on electrical equipment, working on wind turbines and solar systems. yes, you should have lightning rods, and lightning arrestors, but its not going to stop the damage in a close strike or direct hit. there is simply no way to handle that much energy without some kind of damage. especially to control systems and signalling circuits.

What you're saying is going a long way towards disproving the claim out of the Chinese authorities.

Is lightning really a problem for electrified systems in general? Railroad electrification is over a century old, and many electrified systems have been built in places with plenty of thunderstorms.

lpetrich wrote:Is lightning really a problem for electrified systems in general? Railroad electrification is over a century old, and many electrified systems have been built in places with plenty of thunderstorms.

I've never heard of it knocking out the Northeast Corridor in the USA. Thunderstorms are no rare event there.

I've never heard of that either.

World Lightning Strikes Map
NWS Lightning Frequency Safety Map

Let's see how much of a target the NEC will present. The most active part is NYC - DC, about 225 mi / 360 km, and with double-tracked parts about 33 ft / 10 m wide, and quadruple-tracked parts twice as wide. This gives roughly 0.5 km^2 of right-of-way area. With about 2 lightning strikes per km^2 per year, that becomes 1 lightning strike per year.

Much of Europe has a similar lightning-strike density, and much of Europe has plenty of electrified railroads. I've been unable to find much about lighting being a problem over there -- if it is.

Coverage of the incident in Today's New York Times updates the death toll to 43 and adds a very interesting thought contained within the Brief Passage selected:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/world ... train.html

Brief passage:

• The sense that transparency and safety is secondary to other concerns was present in many Weibo postings Sunday. One blogger in particular posted an eloquent appeal for more care and caution in China’s rapid development:
  
  “China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience! Don’t let the train run out off track, don’t let the bridges collapse, don’t let the roads become traps, don’t let houses become ruins. Walk slowly, allowing every life to have freedom and dignity. No one should be left behind by our era.”

Telling a Communist regime to wait for "morality" and "conscience" is like telling a militant atheist to wait for God. Really shows a lack of understanding of the collectivist mindset to exhort the "allowing (of) every life to have freedom and dignity". The phrase "our era", though, bespeaks a strong nationalistic bent and a seeming welcoming of an increase of worldwide Chinese hegemony.

Well, as the Russians know, when you steal other people's technology, you need to steal the *right* technology (the Russians ended up with diesels based on Alco and F-M designs).

It's inconceivable to me that a lightning strike could have somehow disabled the signal system and stopped one train, while allowing the train behind to proceed at full speed. Most control systems I'm familiar with, if they "lose" a train, stop everything until the problem can be diagnosed (except Washington Metro, of course -- but at least they know they have a problem).

I think it's more an example of the attitude of the Chinese bureaucracy. After all, they have 1.3 billion people. So what if they kill a few? Good comment in the previous post. People who do not respect the rule of law or intellectual property are equally unlikely to be concerned by safety or environmental issues. China's HSR network was put together with the best techology they could steal, and the various bits and pieces don't appear to fit together very well.

I must remember to find one persons blog , and turn it into an entire countries opinion next time i want to get a point across .
And i do recall the power system for the nec been disrupted by thunder storms ( not even a direct hit ), in the last year or so .

David Benton wrote:I must remember to find one person's blog and turn it into an entire country's opinion next time I want to get a point across

You would be the first person on this thread to do that, if you did.

David Benton wrote:And I do recall the power system for the NEC having been disrupted by thunderstorms (not even a direct hit), in the last year or so

I'll presume that you can provide some evidence for this. And with this presumption, did this power knockout result in the same kind of catastrophe as happened on the Fouzhou high-speed line? Which part of the NEC, Amtrak-owned, Metro-North-owned, Connecticut DOT-owned or Commonweath-of-Massachusetts-owned?