Train crash kills 48 in Taiwan’s worst rail tragedy in decades
More at the link.
No comment on the story, I’m afraid, but I have reported it for forum change - I doubt you intended it for ATMB.
Moved to MPSIMS (from ATMB).
Do we know when the truck “coasted” to the track? Did it just happen as the train approached? Or might it have been there for some time before - allowing for detection devices (if any) on the track to notify the driver of an obstruction (if it was not clearly visible)?
I read four articles about this, and one (NPR, as I recall) mentioned that it was the railway’s own truck or construction equipment that slid down the embankment. It was there to work on shoring up the embankment against landslides. If true, and combined with the fact (surmise?) that the parking brake wasn’t engaged, it looks like this changes from “railway (train crew) couldn’t do anything about it” to “railway (maintenance crew) caused it.”
Truck driver charged:
The bigger context to this is that Taiwan is notorious for accidents of this sort, in part due to a culture of sloppiness. Over the past seven years alone, there have been the following deadly mishaps:
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2014: Kaohsiung pipe explosion. 32 dead
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2014: TransAsia plane crash. 48 dead
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2015: another TransAsia plane crash. 43 dead.
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2015: Xinbei water park fire, 15 dead from burns, nearly 200 others injured by burns.
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2016:Taoyuan bus fire. 26 dead.
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2018: Yilan train crash. 18 dead
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2021: Hualien train derailment from hitting truck: 49 dead
On top of that, there have been numerous warplane crashes in the military, a crash of an Apache helicopter and also a fatal crash last year of a Blackhawk helo.
During the 1999 earthquake, it was discovered that some building constructors had substituted empty steel cans for concrete in pillars, so as to cheap out on concrete.