It said this in a programme about trains. Now I was just wondering if someone can tell me about this now then.
According to Wikipedia that is correct, no fatal accidents since 1981, pretty damn good, and a very nice service it is too, zipping through the countryside at 200mph is a lovely feeling.
(incidentally, for those who aren’t aware, it can come as a bit of a shock to find out that the speed record for a TGV is 357mph)
Not all that amazing. Most train accidents are where roads cross the tracks, and that doesn’t happen for TGV / high speed lines. Other accidents with fatalities only happen happen once every few decades in most European countries.
That would be no passenger fatalities since 1981. As with all high-traffic rail lines, idiot drivers, pedestrians and cyclists get killed all the time. AFAIK there are no level crossings on the dedicated TGV lines but people will try to cross them anyway.
But the TGV trains also run on the conventional tracks (at conventional speeds), where they have been involved in fatal accidents at grade crossings.
It’s also almost true for the Japanese Shinkansen network. Out of >10 billion passengers served so far, there has been only one passenger fatality, and that was someone who tried to board a train as the door was closing, got his arm caught by the door and got dragged away by the train.
Other than that, there hasn’t been any fatalities from collisions, derailments, earthquakes, typhoons, etc. Which I think is remarkable, considering several major earthquakes have hit Japan since the first Shinkansen line opened in 1965. (In fact, in the 2004 earthquake, one train derailed at 120+ mph, but it remained upright and nobody was injured or killed.)
I think worldwide, the only fatal accidents on high-speed rail (i.e. trains running on dedicated high-speed track with no level crossings, wide curvature, etc) are the Eschende disaster in Germany and the Wenzhou train collision in China.
I saw a documentary several years ago about a very bad train wreck that occurred in France in which one moving commuter train hit another parked train. Many fatalities. Scores, if I recall. Happened in the 70’s I think.
Took an amazing amount of errors and things to go wrong to have occurred.
I think the collision took place in our just outside of Paris.
Anyone?
Gare de Lyon accident in 1988?
Don’t forget the Santiago de Compostela accident last year.
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Around here most of the deaths caused by trains have been suicides. I suspect that is true elsewhere as well.
As I remember this was when the train was on a standard bit of line, not dedicated high-speed track. The driver ignored the speed limit on the curve and, unlike the high-speed line, the signalling system did not over-ride his command and slow the train.
True. The unbelievable part is that the ERTMS signalling that is used to enforce speed limits ends just before this curve (as the high speed line transitions to a normal line) so this was possible in the first place.
Got any more info about that one? The Wikipedia page for shinkansen only says this:
These days they have spotters on the train platforms to ensure that everything’s OK before the train starts moving, which makes me think that the arm-caught-in-door fatality must have happened before the spotter system was implemented.