Excerpt from a breaking story:

Thirty-five injured in Belgian train crash

Source: AFP | Published: Saturday January 29, 5:52 AM

snip:

BRUSSELS, Jan 28 - Two passenger trains collided near Antwerp today, injuring 35 people, five of them seriously, the national railway authority said.

The cause of the accident was not immediately known.

snip

Link to story:

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0001/29/A53148-2000Jan29.shtml

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), January 29, 2000

Answers

Carl: Why do you care about a minor train wreck in Antwerp?

-- a (..a@...a.a), January 29, 2000.

"a", why do you care about what Carl cares about??

Are you in charge??

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 29, 2000.

Ray: Why do you care why I care about what Carl cares about?

Carl: Has this accident affected your life? Still have power? water?

-- a (..a@...a.a), January 29, 2000.

35 people injured in a collision between two passenger trains is not a minor story. It would be nice to know the cause which is not stated. It is also interesting that none of the major reporting services have even carried the story (they're much too busy with snow and the cuban boy to carry stories on major oil pipeline ruptures and colliding passenger trains). And the one that initially carried it as breaking news has not followed up on it. Draw your own conclusions.

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), January 29, 2000.

"a" commented:

"Carl: Has this accident affected your life? Still have power? water? "

What does this have to do with the cost of rice in China??

"a", let me lay it out in adolescent terms for you. Since NO individual or corporation or government is admitting to a y2k problem folks like Carl are spending a considerable amount of time putting together the potential pieces of the y2k puzzle. There have been many train wrecks in the past month, some or all of which may be y2l related.

Now why don't you collect your toys and scamper home, your mother has diner waiting!!

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 29, 2000.

Well, you're right. I'm an adolescent. I'm 14, almost 15. Most of the posters here are teenagers - and not very bright ones at that.

And "dinner" is spelled with two "n"s - at least outside of trailer parks.

-- a (..a@...a.a), January 29, 2000.

Thanks for the spelling lesson "a", now try to get the BIG pictue in focus and you'll be on your way !!

Pappa Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), January 29, 2000.

The clip doesn't mention if this was a head-on or side collision, but I just posted this on Michael Hyatt's forum. It might provide a *bit* of info on train collision stats:

---

I did a bit of digging on train accidents. I found some information from NTSB's site at the following link. Note that this is just for the U.S., the 1999 info is hardly out yet (their investigations take a long time to conclude), and this was just from a cursory examination of a very long page.

The most complete information (all the reports have hot links to the abstracts so I could double-check the type of accident) is from 1998. Anything earlier and you just get a headline with no link to the report.

So, what I found (roughly) was that in 1998 in the U.S. there were:

Derailments - 11
Tanker-Car Failures (chemical release) - 5
Rear-End or Side Collisions - 8
Head-On Collisions - 3

I did a search for "head" on the entire page of summaries to find all the "head-on", "head on", etc incidents and it came back with a total of 28 dating all the way back to 1967, which works out to roughly 1 per year up to the last year of complete data - 1998. Keep in mind that there may be more if they omitted that detail from the headline, but judging from the 98 data, they usually don't. It is almost always mentioned in the heading.

So from this cursory look, I would say that at least in the U.S., head-on train collisions are rare as hen's teeth. I can't imagine that other countries are much different, since they are probably all using basically the same switching, etc equipment.

If someone wants to look the data over in more detail, here is the link:

http://www.ntsb.gov/Publ ictn/R_Acc.htm

PS: Note that the above stats also include relatively minor accidents such as one freight running into the back of another in the yard, etc. Many, from what I saw didn't involve fatalities at all.

On the other hand, the stories I've seen posted on this board seem to be *major* incidents with most (if not all) involving multiple fatalities. So I'm guessing that what we're seeing this year *is* highly anomalous ... but what do I know.

-- Steve Baxter (chicoqh@home.com), January 29, 2000.

Thanks for the info Steve--very informative!

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), January 30, 2000.