Norwegian Railroad Disaster NOT Y2K related

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Earlier thread (can't find it right now) speculated that the trainwreck was due to y2k failure. First people interviewed said there was no way.

I just found out why. The track that it traveled on was build between 1862 and 1877. Only Diesellocomotives travel on that piece of rail. For that reason the driver of the train carry's a Cell phone.

They misplaced the cell phone numbers. That's why they had the accident.

You can check it out on http://www.bild.de/service/archiv/2000/jan/06/aktuell/zug/zug.html in german of course.

Blessings...

-- STFrancis (STFrancis@heaven.com), January 05, 2000

Answers

......Man is it getting deep. Bridges for sale....Bridges for sale. Cell phone huh..............................

-- cellmate (dimwit@dot.com), January 05, 2000.

From the Norway post:

- Two months ago the Norwegian National Rail Administration warned that lives could be lost at the turn of the millennium due to computer problems. This was revealed in an internal document from the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The Rail Administration has found Y2K bugs in its systems in Hamar. (Dagbladet)

See entire story at this Link

http://www.norwaypost.no/content.asp?cluster_id=8855&folder_id=4

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), January 05, 2000.


That may be true, but

Regardless of what kind of power the locomotive had, radios could be used. You do remember that diesel engines are used to power generators, right? (Hey DC had a few of them)

If these engineers lost the cell phone numbers, why didn't they just stop? I mean, emergency procedure #102.1 should clearly state that in event of loss of communication since you don't know what's out there, stop and find out.

I don't iknow German, so won't comment on the article, but something about this explanation either does not ring true or indicates extrememely poor planning on the part of the RR.

-- rocky (rknolls@no.spam), January 05, 2000.


Right. The trains crashed because they lost the cell phone numbers. Why the hell didn't they call the home office and find out? Why didn't the home office just go to the billing department and find their last bill? I'd have an easier time believing that they forgot to turn the phones ON than I do this story.

Now, I'm a firm believer in human-based screwups but this is stretching it...

-TECH32-

-- TECH32 (TECH32@NOMAIL.COM), January 05, 2000.


So, the rail commission says lives could be lost due to Y2k.

There's a fatal accident soon after Y2k.

Therefore, the accident must have been caused by Y2K.

Somebody needs a course in formal logic :-)

-- John H Krempasky (Johnk@dmv.com), January 05, 2000.



and the mantra continues....NOT Y2K, NOT Y2K, NOT Y2K

-- Lisa (lisadawn@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.

If you can't demonstrate that it *was* Y2K, Lisa, then I fear you have missed the whole point.

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 05, 2000.

I've spent 37 years in the Rail service, operating over 300 miles of track.

This post does not line up with reality. Every engine has radio service. If radio (or cellphone) service fails, so does your right to leave your last point of contact, unless you are operating under automatic signal control. These do fail, mostly to their default position of STOP.

History of previous head-on collisions have always pointed to human/operator error. I don't expect this to be any differant, Y2K or not.

Watch the investigative results.

-- Tommy Rogers (Been there@Just a Thought.com), January 05, 2000.


No, it was not the phones that caused the crash - read carefully - they don't know why 2 trains were on the same track. Those that didn't have the right phone numbers were NOT on the train, but outside, trying to warn.

And it is NOT ALWAYS human error. Sometimes it is signal error and switching error.

There was concern before Y2K of faulty switching due to y2k failure. We'll have to wait and see what they say.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000105/wl/crash_norway_17.html Wednesday January 5 3:08 PM ET

TV: Phone Snag Thwarted Norway Crash Warning

By Terje Solsvik

ASTA, Norway (Reuters) - Norwegian rail controllers tried to telephone two train drivers to tell them to halt before a head-on collision that killed 20 to 30 people but had a wrong list of numbers, a television report said Wednesday.

Sixteen bodies have been recovered or spotted so far in the burnt out wreckage and police have revised down the likely death toll from Tuesday's accident from an earlier estimate of 33.

``It's likely to be closer to 20 than 30,'' police spokesman Per Erik Skjefstad told Reuters.

Officials said it was unclear why the two trains were on the same track, each travelling toward each other at about 80 kph (50 mph). They collided on a curve about 160 km (100 miles) north of Oslo. Sixty-eight people survived, some with severe injuries.

Independent TV2 said rail controllers in the nearby town of Hamar realised the trains were on collision course and tried to call the drivers on mobile phones. But, quoting anonymous sources, it said the list of phone numbers was wrong.

``We are investigating these rumors. I can neither confirm nor deny them,'' Steinar Killi, director of the state railway network, told a news conference of TV2's report.

He said that there were no signs of technical faults on the signaling system, meaning that one of the drivers drove past red signals. Both drivers were believed to have died.

New Safety Planned

Mobile telephones are the only way to communicate with drivers along the line apart from signals. A more advanced warning system is due to be installed in the summer, allowing controllers to activate the brakes.

The only other comparable train disaster in Norway was in 1975, when 27 people died farther north on the same line.

Police said that 12 bodies had been recovered from the wreck of the two trains by nightfall Wednesday and another four corpses had been spotted in the wreckage.

Police chief Magnar Lynum told a news conference that 20 people were reported missing and were feared killed in the wreckage. He said the missing probably included many of the dead, none of whom had yet been identified.

``The number of dead could easily be more than 20. Some of those killed may not have been reported missing,'' he said. Police suspected that the initial figure of 100 people aboard both trains might prove too high.

Relatives and friends attended memorial services and scattered flowers in the snow near the wreckage.

One of the trains was an express travelling from Trondheim, on Norway's west coast, south to Oslo. The other was a local train travelling north from the town of Hamar, one of the host towns for the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, to Rena.

At the crash site, workers used chainsaws to cut down pine trees to make it easier to get into the tangle of carriages, some on their sides, in sub-zero temperatures.

They carried out corpses wrapped in green bags and drove them in hearses to Oslo for identification. Searching the wreckage is likely to last several days.

Flags flew at half mast at railway stations around Norway.

At least one 12-year-old girl on a shopping trip was feared killed on the northbound train but local schools reported that several others feared missing were safe.

The accident is the worst in Europe since 31 people died near London's Paddington station in October.

Among the worst recent rail disasters in Europe, 101 people died in 1998 when a high-speed ICE express train crashed near the German town of Eschede.

-- Sonny (wwithin@nc.net), January 05, 2000.


Sonny,

I had not read the article, yet it appears they have already stated the cause:

"He said that there were no signs of technical faults on the signaling system, meaning that one of the drivers drove past red signals. Both drivers were believed to have died."

Now understand, before you arrive at a RED signal, you pass a yellow signal which requires the engineer (driver) to reduce speed and prepare to stop at the RED signal. For him to ignore Both signals is beyond logic. You can bet this is where the blame will fall.

The term CONTROLLERS in this country means DISPATCHER. He is the operater who sets the power signals for the engineer to operate according to the existing rules.

Could this be y2k defect? You will never know it!

-- Tommy Rogers (Been there@Just a Thought.com), January 05, 2000.



Actually, SPADs (signals passed at danger) are more common than one would guess, a fact which reporting into our Paddington disaster has revealed. Also despite a relay system that latches the signal state onto a display in the driver's cab, and sounds a buzzer at each signal. Even if you ignore the vast majority which are short overruns representing embarassment rather than danger, the remainder indicate that there is an irreducible level of driver errors. If you're honest with yourself about (say) your driving experiences, this should not be a surprise.

The only way to further reduce risk is to introduce equipment that will FORCE a train to stop, whether the driver notices the light or not. This is expensive - estimates range between $1M and $10M per life saved.

It was reported last night (on my radio) that the stretch of track in Norway where this disaster occurred did not yet have automatic train protection. It is scheduled for installation next year. The other failure was that the signalmen, who knew that a train had passed a red signal, did not have a correct list of the phone numbers of the drivers' mobile phones, so could not order them to stop that way (a secondary safety system disabled by management failure, a feature shared with several recent UK train crashes).

Despite all of which, it remains a lot safer to travel by train than by private car.

-- Nigel (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), January 06, 2000.


Let's get this straight:

1. They DON'T KNOW why the trains were both on the same line. They are setting up an enquiry to find out.

2. They were unable to alert the drivers, because (apparently) they had the wrong list of mobile phone (cell-phone) numbers. They don't know why the list was wrong.

3. The automatic safety system was planned to be installed, but is not yet.

here in Denmark (where I live) there is a lot of attention and reporting on this, as we have strong links with Norway (used to be part of same country, languages virtual dialects of each other). Above is what the current reports say.

-- Risteard Mac Thomais (uachtaran@ireland.com), January 06, 2000.


Norway's train drivers have started a boycott of a line where two trains crashed this week, killing at least 16 people, after a driver apparently passed a red stop signal.

"We will boycott the line with its current signalling and technical systems. They're not good enough," Stein Erik Olsen, national safety representative for Norway's 1,100 train drivers, told Reuters.

-- Risteard Mac Thomais (uachtaran@ireland.com), January 06, 2000.


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