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Most things do not happens as they do in movies. The changes are less sudden, the incidents less surprising, the humans less attractive. But when a runaway train tore the Australian hinterland, the sequence of action that followed seems to be coming out of a Tony Scott movie.
The mess began when the engineer stopped the train of 268 cars at four locomotives and jumped to inspect one of the cars, according to the Australian Transport Safety Board. While he was on the ground (probably distracted by giant spiders and wandering kangaroos), the train moved away without anyone on board. Loaded with iron ore, she soon reached 68 mph. The train, operated by the metals, mining and oil giant BHP, traveled a remarkable 57 km before the company stopped it – taking it off the track.
No one was injured, although investigators, who are trying to determine why the train was fleeing in the first place, have described the damage to the equipment as "substantial."
Fugitive trains are rare, and fugitive trains that remain en route for nearly an hour are even rarer. "It's very unusual," says Allan Zarembski, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Delaware, who studies rail safety and derailment prevention.
However, it is logical that the railway authorities have taken some time to trace this case, given the landscape of this part of Western Australia called Pilbara: less than 50,000 people live in the region of 194 000 km mainly for its iron mining operations. And it makes sense that they moved four miles before the train arrived in Port Hedlund, which has a population of 14,000. When you crash a train, you want as few people as possible.
With regard to the derailment, Zarembski suspects BHP of having taken one of the two routes. First: they may have used railway derails or derails – relatively lightweight steel devices that attach to the top of a rail head. In more normal circumstances, derails can be used to prevent a slow train from changing lanes. But when a train moves towards a derailleur at a faster speed, the device creates a ramp that picks up the wheels of the train and pulls the undercarriage out of the track. That, well, that derails.
Some derailleurs are portable; others are permanently attached to the tracks and can be moved remotely when needed. This seems to have happened in the Pilbara – the ATSB's initial report states that the train "deliberately derailed at a set of points operated by the control center".
For a train running so fast, however, Zarembski said that a derailleur might not do the trick. "The other way to derail a train is to cut a piece of rail," he says. "You can get in with a flashlight and cut a foot or two of rail in a curve." He estimates that the entire operation could take two cuts and last for 15 to 30 minutes.
However, they did, the result was not pretty. YouTube footage claims to show the debris of the train and the railroad. BHP did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Bloomberg the derailment damaged nearly two kilometers of the track and it will take about a week for the iron ore transport to resume in the region. The shortage could lead to temporary increases in raw material prices around the world.
Here is good news: there is already a technology to avoid such an accident. Positive train control systems use GPS and train- and rail-mounted sensors to track locomotive movements and alert drivers and regulators of impending derailments or collisions. If humans do not respond to warnings, systems are designed to automatically brake trains before something terrible breaks down. Congressional legislation required US rail operators to implement positive train checks by 2015, but the Ministry of Transport has extended the deadline to December 2018 after many people have struggled to deploy. technology in time. According to the DOT Positive Control Panel, only 18 of the 40 railways had already implemented PTC on all their locomotives in July of this year.
Nevertheless, hopefully, the window of Hollywood opportunity for fugitive scenarios based on the train might well close.
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