I’ve heard the advice before that for safety’s sake, one ought not sit near the front of a passenger train.
Together with today’s disaster in Hoboken, I am now wondering:
-what are the stats on passenger train safety in the US, and perhaps also in some other countries? How many deaths/injuries per mile/trip, and how does that compare with other modes of transport?
In train crashes, what is the safest place to be? Near the front, middle, or rear of the train? Or is there no significant difference in risk?
I lecall reading some time ago that in the late 1800s, staggering numbers of Americans wee kiled in railroad accidents, I think in some years, the number was in the tens of thousands. Trying to find that statistic, ,I had no luck, but I did turn up this:
According to the National Transportation Safety Bureau, Nearly every 2 hours, a person or vehicle is hit by a train in the U.S. . . . Each year nearly 1,000 people are killed in train related accidents.*
“-what are the stats on passenger train safety in the US, and perhaps also in some other countries? How many deaths/injuries per mile/trip, and how does that compare with other modes of transport??”
This brings up a thought. Wouldn’t you think a single accident in say, India, be much worse than several in the US, just based on how much more densely packed in (and even on the outside) they are? Is that the actual case?
In the same book in which I read the information I recalled for post #2, there was a comment that internationally, US railroads have a reputation of being among the worst maintained in the world. Few other countries would allow their railroads to fall into disrepair comparable to those on which American trains run every day. Again, I have no cite, just going from memory from prior reading.
However, rail accidents are rarely the fault of poor track maintenance, but rather human error.
And yet the number of people killed or injured in automobile crashes is enormous compared to that of rail or airplane. Incidents involving those get a lot of press precisely because they’re so rare.
Even on a per-mile basis you’re something like 17 times more likely to die in a car crash than in a train crash, and air travel is safer than trains. I do think they lump in anyone killed at railroad crossings (usually someone driving or walking around the gates) in with the train fatalities though, which isn’t necessarily fair since they’re not passengers.
The trouble with transportation safety statistics is how you compare the modes of transportation: per trip, per kilometer or per hour. Flying is extremely safe per kilometer but pretty unsafe per hour. Walking the other way around. Which is not surprising given the difference in speed. Motor cycling is the unsafest whichever way you look at it, though.
The risk of being in the accident is unaffected by location.
The risk of injury once you’re in a train accident is the variable you *might *influence by seating position.
When the first factor is WAG 1 in 1 million, whether you double or half your risk by seating choice doesn’t make much real-world difference. You won’t ride enough trains in your life for 1 in 500,000 odds to manifest any differently than 1 in 2 million odds.
It’s about like buying Powerball tickets every week of your life. Whether you buy one chance or two each week, either way you’ll die before you win to jackpot. So the value of buying the extra chance is simultaneously mathematically very real and practically completely meaningless.
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As to location. … There are essentially three scripts for train crashes.
Your train rams something at the front, including another train sitting there or coming the other way. Or a non-train obstacle on the tracks, such as landslide debris or a truck or … It’d be fairly unusual for hitting something small like a car to cause any injuries to people on the train unless they happened to be standing up when the emergency braking began.
Your train, while sitting there, is rammed from behind by another train.
Your train derails at some point along the string of locos & cars.
For 1) you want to be near the back. For 2) you want to be near the front. For 3) you want to be in the car(s) ahead of the derailment. In all cases you’d like to have seat belts and soft surroundings because many (most) of the injuries come from people bouncing around like ping pong balls inside a basically intact, albeit overturned, passenger car.
I have no clue about the relative frequency of the various kinds of mishaps. There might not even be enough recent experience to form a statistically valid sample. Folks have pointed out that stats were pretty horrific 150 years ago. Those stats aren’t relevant because we don’t have the same kinds of accidents today. Better comms, better signaling, no boiler explosions, etc.
In my biz we find that mishap stats from the 1990s are ancient history. By and large we’ve cured the problems that caused most of those. We’re now working on a mostly different set of stats, problems, and fixes.
I remember, years ago, reading a book about bridge design (and failures). It stated that in the decade starting with 1880, one in four new railway bridges collapsed under load.
One reason, I suppose, was that the design community was just learning about the use of iron in bridge construction. And I don’t think that Indeterminate Structures Analysis was too far along then.
As someone who rode trains daily (sometimes more often) for 15 years, I’ve actually been a few train accidents although, thankfully, none truly catastrophic.
Have to agree with most of what LSLGuy says. And let me just add, most train accidents are minor, at least for the people on the train.
To the rest I’ll add - emergency braking can fling even a young, strong, experienced train rider to the floor. If that happens, don’t try to get up immediately, instead, shield your head because the odds are high stuff is about to rain down on you, if it isn’t already: other people, luggage, cups of coffee… whatever is loose in the train car.
Americans don’t travel much by train, but when they do, they travel on one of the worst systems in the world (yes, worse than India and China) :eek:
Back in 2011 the US had one of the most dangerous passenger train systems in the world (1 death per 3.4 billion km traveled*) I doubt things have changed much since then.
*Still way safer than driving (7 deaths per billion km)
I’m not disagreeing with your or their conclusions, but one of the big differences between US and Chinese railroads is that most US trains are pretty empty and most Chinese trains are very full. I’d also bet the Chinese intercity trains have more cars per train than the US ones do. So the risk per train-mile might favor the Americans, but when divided by the vastly higher average headcount the risk per passenger-mile hugely favors (16x! per the cite) the Chinese.
I doubt Chinese trains are actually 16x more crowded than American ones on average, so I suspect the truth is US trains are less safe by 2x-4x per train-mile with the larger Chinese headcount supplying the remaining 8x-4x difference.
In my industry there’s a legitimate debate about which measure of safety is most meaningful: per trip, per vehicle-time, per vehicle-distance, per passenger-time, or per passenger-distance. Depending on your target audience and your assumptions any one of them can be the most relevant for decision-making.
“…As a further precaution against accident, sleep with the feet towards the engine if you prefer to have the feet crushed, or with the head towards the engine, if you think it best to have the head crushed. In making this decision try to be as unselfish as possible. If indifferent, sleep crosswise with the head hanging over into the aisle.”
I’ve been involved or had direct knowledge of quite a few train fatalities. The vast majority were suicides. I’m also wondering if they separate those numbers out of the safety stats.
The bulk of the fatalities are suicides. Actual passenger-on-a-moving-train fatalities are really rare. It looks like being in a train station or trying to get on a train is actually more dangerous than actually travelling in one. Working track-side is a risky business though and, well, level-crossings have their risks too.
Just have to point out here that the Japanese Shinkansen (Bullet trains) network has had zero onboard fatalities* in 50 years of operation and carries around 400 million passengers a year.
Of course there is very good reasons for that. All Shinkansen tracks are dedicated high speed rails and never carry local or cargo trains in any sections at all. Often local tracks will run alongside the Shinkansen but they are never combined. All the rails are continuously welded with zero gaps. All Shinkansen tracks are either raised up or fenced in to prevent access. And there is never a level crossing, roads crossing the Shinkansen always either go underneath in a culvert or over on a bridge.
I’m pretty sure that makes Shinkansen the safest form of transport in the world, not just trains but any form of transport.
Theres a few rare cases where people got access to the tracks by climbing a fence and committed suicide, but thats very rare, usually train jumpers in Japan use the local or subway trains. And yes it is absolutely true that if you jump in front of a train in Japan your family will get sent a bill for cleanup and for the cost of the train delay.
Coremelt, if the bullet train rails are continuously welded with no gaps, how do they avoid thermal expansion and contraction issues? I can think of ways of arranging places where rails slide past each other in some configuration designed to allow for expansion, but these ideas don’t fit well with the continuous welding you describe.
