In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent “returns to his roots” of personal interests and discusses a slew of railroad disasters.
Transcription:
I just want to say all aboard for today’s free for All Friday, though you probably don’t want to get on this train. Welcome to the Counsel Trent podcast. I’m your host, Trent Horn. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I really want to talk about. Could be all sorts of things. And today what I want to talk about are trains, specifically, I want to talk about train disasters now, years ago here on the podcast – and I think it’s time I could probably return to it – I was fixated on plane disasters. I know I covered a fair amount of those on free for all Friday years ago. I haven’t been back to them since I’ve been back to disasters in general. That’s one of my side hobbies that I love learning about. I can get lost on YouTube for hours and hours watching disaster documentaries about ship sinking, plane crashes, train crashes, building collapses.
I don’t know exactly why I’m interested in it. I think what fascinates me about disasters is that it’s usually a sequence of events. It’s not. It’s usually not one failure. It’s a sequence of events. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine or I guess, to put it into more colloquial parlance here, have you ever played the game of mousetrap? You know, all the little pieces all comes together and the cage drops so that it would be an old millennial game right there to play mousetrap.
But it’s fascinating when you look at a disaster in hindsight to see what went wrong. It’s sort of like watching the fuze on a bomb slowly burn and it’s like, oh, and that’s why one of my favorite disaster shows actually is called Seconds From Disaster. Disasters don’t just happen. They’re a chain of critical events. Unravel the clues and count down those final seconds from disaster.
So I love that stuff. And I’ve covered a lot of plane disasters before. Plane crashes. Today, though, I want to talk about trains because I also really love trains. When I the first job I ever wanted in life was being a train engineer. I think I was like five years old. And, you know, when you were a five year old boy, there’s a poster out, it says, if you are a if you’re a five year old boy, six year old boy, you identify one of these things.
And the poster has an astronaut, a cowboy, a T rex, a locomotive. That is, it just has all of these powerful things on it. The things that boys really enjoy. front end loader, you know, or a crane. Crane digger. A construction site that’s saying little boys love trains. at the gym where my boys studied jiu jitsu, our toddler, John Paul, he’ll be there.
He’s not old enough for jujitsu yet, though. They can start you pretty young. They start even at, like, age four. And I take him outside and he watches the train go by. There’s a it goes right behind the gym. And I always have a bit of these morbid, morbid thought like, oh, man, if that train derail, like literally, the track is probably, I want to say like 30ft away from the gym and it’s a freight train that goes by probably every day when we’re there, I take John Paul out and he hears the train signals going off because it’s right by a crossing, and he goes out and he watches it go by, and he, he and I think it’s awesome to, to see, you know, this powerful, you know, thousands of tons pulling equipment along. But what if something goes wrong? So that’s why I want to talk about today. I’m just going to go to just kind of an overview of some train disasters that, really stuck with me. I mean, not that they’re like the biggest train disaster.
The biggest train disaster in history is actually probably from 2004. It’d be the Queen of the sea derailment in Sri Lanka. and train disasters in India tend to be really bad because if you’ve ever watched, like, news footage documentaries, you’ll see that trains in India are overloaded, like people. In order to get to from one place to another in India, they’ll hang on the outside of the train to, to go wherever it’s going.
So this is the Queen of the sea line, going along the coast of Sri Lanka, that the tsunami into that December of 2004, was it called the Boxing Day tsunami? the wave hit and the train was derailed. Many of the passengers were trapped in the carriages and drowned very, very tragic event. The loss of life was 1700 people.
so more so than the biggest train disasters in history tend to be collision ones. the worst one in the US. I want to see. I was like 100, 100, 150 people probably died, around that. It was the great train wreck of Nashville in 1918. But the worst train disasters tend to be collisions. Just like the worst plane disasters tend to be mid-air or collisions upon takeoff.
I think the worst airplane disaster. I think it’s the Tenerife. explosion. Two planes, one plane on takeoff, crashing another plane. It was like back in the the 70s. So that’s bad of I can’t remember Tenerife. That was like one of the biggest plane disasters out there. so these are ones that just stuck with me because I find it interesting what led up to the different events.
So the first one I have here is the Hinton train collision. This is an Alberta, Canada, 1986. You have a freight train going along the tracks, and it collided with a passenger train and normally a long train. Most train tracks in North America, in Canada, in the United States, freight trains and passenger trains, share the lines. it’s interesting when you look at a map of rail in Europe, it’s got this so many rail lines.
That’s one of things I love. My wife and I went to Europe for our honeymoon was 11 years ago, and we just got rail passes go all over the place and it’s so easy to hop on a train. And in one town, city center, get to another town. the, you know, the trains run on time. They’re very accessible and convenient.
Europe was really built with with trains in mind. When the cities were built, trains were the primary way to get people around. And roads were the thing that you use to transport goods, for example, whereas here in the U.S things are very different with the development of our interstate highway system. In the US, trains were developed primarily as the means to transport goods and services, and the and highway systems were what were used to transport people.
So trains are really unless you’re in like the Northeast Corridor. I love taking the train in southern California, but unless you’re in one of the corridors, trains are not an efficient way to really get anywhere here in the United States, or they’re not that helpful. And so in North America, when you have freight trains, the lines are pretty much dedicated to freight rail, and they share it with passenger trains.
And freight trains tend to get right of way. So not always, but when they’re traveling along, most of the rail lines have side paths. side channels where you can pull the train can pull off. It can wait there for another train to be able to pass. Very important for train safety and to keep congestion at a minimum so that you can operate multiple trains.
They don’t know exactly what happened here with the hint and train collision, but this freight train was supposed to stop at a red signal on a pullout, and it just blew right through it. And it did it and it continued on and hit a passenger train. see how many it was? 23 people were killed. It was a Canadian National Rail Canadian national freight train, and a Via Rail passenger train was called the Super Continental.
And, it was a head on collision. And both of the engineers in the front of the can, the freight train, died. And they think what happened was that this was a failure of just, railroad culture. so you would have people like, when the trains are going, when the crews are switching instead of stopping the train, and one crew gets on, the other gets off, the train could still be rolling at a very slow speed, and the crew gets on, the other crew gets off.
You’re not you don’t check the brakes during that time. And so as they were going, they were probably brake problems on the train that were not diagnosed, but also the two engineers in the front cab, either both of them may have been asleep or one of them might have died of a heart attack, and the other was actually asleep and failed to notice the red signal and failed to stop the train.
And the engineer at the back in the caboose, maybe didn’t want to usurp them. He kept trying to call them, say, hey, we’re going too fast. What’s going on here? Doesn’t get an answer. And so one of the safety features that trains have to prevent, because it’s actually pretty easy to fall asleep on a train. You don’t have to do very much.
You got to watch your your speed, obviously, but you’re not. Steering is only driving a truck. And of course people fall asleep driving trucks all the time. when they’re going, there’s a thing called deadman’s brake. And the idea is that you keep your foot on dead man’s brake, and if you fall asleep and fail to depress the the switch, the train will automatically break and come to a stop.
Well, this system eventually people saw the flaws in it that a lot of the engineers their feet would hurt after a while trying to keep this pedal pressed. And so what they would do is they wanted to go do something else in the train. Or if you have to get up and go do something, you know, what are you gonna do?
You’re going to stop the train. So they would put a lunch box like one of those heavy metal lunch boxes on the brake to depress it, to trick the system. And sometimes it would just leave that there to give their foot a break. And then the safety, the safety mechanism has been overridden and is useless. And the engineer could still fall asleep or die if he has a heart attack, for example.
so now what I think modern locomotives have is a light, response mechanism. I think it’s a light that comes on or a buzzer, but maybe a light and a buzzer, and it comes on intermittently, and you have to press a button as the engineer to show that you recognize it. If you don’t press the button, then the train, the train comes to a stop.
So that’s one there. The 1986 Hinton train collision. Next I want to talk about is the 1988 Guard Leone rail accident. And there is actually a very good Seconds to disaster, documentary about Guarda Leone. this was a disaster took place in Paris’s GA. Well, I think gars is French for station. I believe the guard at Lyon, terminal in Paris.
And it was a commuter train. So it’s just a single train? Well, no, it wasn’t a single train accident. It was a collision with one commuter train slamming into another parked commuter train at Guarda, Leone. This was on June 27th, 1988. And once again, just multiple different things happen. So the train is going, it’s on its way. It’s running a little bit late to Guarda Leone and then a woman pulled the emergency brake.
And then so the train just automatically stops where it’s at. She gets off. she later came forward to explain why should it. Well, they asked. I’m actually pretty amazed that she came forward because it was a huge hit. This was the thing that started the chain of events that caused the accident. And people, they couldn’t identify her, and they asked people to come forward.
And she came forward and she said, yeah, I pulled the brake because I was supposed to get my kids from. I was like from school. And the train was because it was delayed. It overshot. They decided, no, sorry, I’m mixing it up here. It was a summer timetable change. And so the train did not stop at the station.
She needed it stop at to go get her kids. She pulled the emergency brake, got off. So the, the conductor or engine engineer for the train, the guy, he gets off and the train stopped in and won’t start again. So he’s going to try to release the air brakes to get the train going. And in doing that, he accidentally he put his hand on another valve, another lever to try to, you know, pull, you know, to get the brakes going again and accidentally closed one of the valves.
and he closed the valve. And that took off all of the braking power from every single car except of the first car he was in. And when he looked at the gauges, the brakes seem fine because there’s only looking at the first car. There was also a safety mechanism to prevent the train if it didn’t have enough, pressurized air in the brakes.
So the remaining cars, it wasn’t supposed to go forward anymore. The driver, though, thought that there was a error. There’s something called, brake lock or air lock and that had accumulated because of the emergency brake deployment. So he and another, employee went manually down the line of the train to empty out what they thought was excess air clogging up the brake system, but was actually the only air needed to the little bit of air that could have been used for the brakes.
So he didn’t realize it. He had turned the train in something where it didn’t have enough braking power in the regular air brakes train goes on. he could have stopped at a station and would have realized he didn’t have enough brake power and could have stopped the disaster, but he went past the station because he was worried about being late and wanted to get the guard alone, then continues on.
It’s a downgrade into guard. Leone realizes he doesn’t have braking power. He panics in his panic. He forgets the train has a dynamic brake. A secondary brake system doesn’t deploy. It hits an emergency button that creates a blaring alarm in the train system for the train dispatches a guard, Leone, and then he runs to the back of the train and they’re calling him.
The dispatchers are calling him, saying, what train are you? What position are you? They don’t know which train is in trouble because now he hit the emergency alarm and he’s not there to tell them. So the train goes into the station and they’re not able in time to divert the Gardi Leone train instead, because they have another safety mechanism.
Once again, there’s always a sequential failure they have when you have these kind of disasters. Normally there’s safety systems that in an event of a runaway train, they could have diverted the train to platform one, which was empty, but they weren’t able to do that. And if they to it platform one, if the who was the he was he went to jail actually for a bit because the the driver Daniel Selin satu le and so Selin what did he get?
he got a four year manslaughter sentence because I think, like, 57 people died. He got everyone to the back of the train. If he got on a platform one, there might have been a fatality. Probably just injuries, because it would have slammed in an empty platform, but instead it went to platform two and hit a commuter train that was delayed, that was waiting there.
And the driver of that train was very brave. He remained on his train to evacuate passengers and to inform them to get off the train. And I think he actually died when when Sullins train crashed into him. so he got a four year manslaughter sentence in, But he was released after serving, after serving six months.
So that’s, that was guarda Leone. another braking failure. acts. I’m going to go through these in chronological order. Is the San Bernardino train disaster, May 12th, 1989, also called the Duffy Street Incident. it was a train carrying Trona. I’m not sure exactly what Trona is. I think it’s I’ve read up. It’s so funny. I’ll be like, oh, it’s Trona.
And it’s like, oh, it’s created. It makes soap box dust for processing. Well, what’s soap box is you’re trying to read what it is. It’s it’s, it was a freight train carrying, you know, a something. It’s like coal. If I make an analogy. Probably not. You know, it’s carrying a bunch of cars with this, you know, Rocky mineral stuff in on the San Bernardino line, and it’s going down a steep grade A 2% grade, which is very steep for a freight train.
So the train’s going along and suddenly it picks up a ton of speed. The drivers here are alert. They’re trying do everything they can, but there was a failure in communication earlier in the day about which trains had correct braking systems, which trains were operational, and there was a weight miscalculation that, the train official, railroad official who was, going through to decide how many locomotives are going to put on the train, miscalculated the weight that was being carried.
and now I think they use a different system, or they just assume maximum weight in these circumstances to make sure that enough locomotives are added to give proper braking and stopping power. And so the train is going down the hill. It picks up a ton of speed. At one point it was going 110 miles an hour. Like that’s as fast as like bullet trains in Europe.
I think even like freight, Amtrak passenger trains usually go like 80. and it was going so fast, it hit a curve by Duffy Street in San Bernardino, derailed and crashed into several homes. I want to say how many people I have. The data right here wasn’t. It’s not a huge disaster, but it was a very memorable one.
You can see all kinds of news footage for it online if you look it up. so the fatalities were, six people, four in the derailment and then two at a later disaster. So there’s a part two to this story. So it crashes. And the other reason I find this, kind of a surreal thing is, I mean, I live in Southern California.
You can still go to the area where this happened, like the houses just flattened, caught on fire, the train cars crash in, and there’s people just taking a shower in the morning, and suddenly you’re buried under a locomotive, like, what was that happen? And so these houses have been built by this behind this curve and is a dangerous place to put them.
And so they come. Four people are killed in the derailment. they, they clean up the area. There was a pressurized petroleum pipeline under the ground. And they during the salvage operation, removing the train cars, the pipeline officials were monitoring and didn’t see any problems, but there was still a defect in the pipe. And this might have been damaged during, the cleanup of the trona of some of that material left over a backhoe probably hit the pipe.
Left. an injury to it or damage. Then two weeks later, petroleum gas shoots out of the ground, ignites whole area, catch some fire. Huge firestorm emerges. And so you can go there to Duffie Street today, and you can look on Google Maps. There’s a little things as the Duffey Street, you know, icon, and you can look and see that nothing was rebuilt there.
it’s just it’s just an empty field. There’s still houses near the area where the disaster happened, but it’s just kind of surreal looking to this area where it’s just there’s a bunch of houses and then there’s just empty spot where nothing has been, has been rebuilt, because of the disaster. So next one is. So this one is not a breaking failure.
It is a failure of the of the tracks themselves. This is one that was really memorable to me because I this happened when I was eight years old. This is in 1993. So this one really I remember watching news footage of this and it was shocking to see the news footage of it. And I thought of it when you had the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore just, last month.
So there what happened there as you had that, big container ship smashed into one of the pylons of the bridge and tire Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed. Thankfully, they were able to radio and get a mayday out. And, the Baltimore police shut down the bridge. Only fatalities were a pothole crew working on the bridge. and so they will stop traffic from entering it.
Seeing that that reminded me of this incident. September 22nd, 1993, there was an Amtrak, the Sunset Limited, passenger trains, along, long distance train. And it was going, who’s going down the tracks? And what time did I want to say that this happened like during it happened during middle of the night? Oh, it happened at 253 in the morning when everybody, when people on the train were were asleep, passengers were asleep and it’s going.
And a barge had hit the bridge at the big bayou. Cannot bridge near mobile, Alabama a barge it hit it. It displaced the tracks and warped the tracks, but not enough to break the tracks. Tracks send a signal. There’s an electric signal that goes down the track. If there is a break in the track, like if the bridge had been, if the bridge had collapsed and the track had broken there, probably, there might not have.
They probably wouldn’t have been an accident because the, the red stop signal would have been illuminated. And, because when, if there’s a track break, the the signal breaks and then a red stop is activated. so it was just warp is warped enough that as the train goes down, it derails, goes into the bayou, and you can look at it online.
These haunting images, these train cars sticking out of the bayou and, the fires, it was it was just, a very big disaster that occurred. 47 people were killed, over 100 were injured. And what’s interesting here is if there is a testimony of it, of what happened, that RC scroll. So RC scroll, the late Protestant Calvin East apologist, someone whose work that that I have engaged before in my writings, he was in this disaster.
He writes about it at Legionnaires org and he, he gives the account and he says, you know, at 3:00 in the morning, I was awakened while flying through the air in the darkness of our cabin, I heard the screeching sound of metal against metal as the train car bounced to a halt. I was experiencing the law of inertia.
so he goes through and he talks about it and talks about how he and his wife are on the train and and she’s saying, like, I got to get my shoes. He says, forget the shoes. We need to get off now. And they go, they were in the last train so that they he looked back and he said, I think he he describes it here, actually.
Let’s see, as the danger of the fire passed, I move back toward the train and notice that our car was resting on a bridge, its wheels off the track. Ours had been the last car on the train. and he goes on the event, and then at the end of it, he talks about God’s providence, and people say it’s ill fated, but ultimately God, you know, is aware of all things and not surprised by anything.
I don’t have as strong a view as a Calvinist does necessarily, of everything that God predestined, but it’s not like God’s unaware of these things. So it’s very interesting, crossover there, with, with that particular train wreck. All right. Next up, I’m we’re going through these in chronological order. I have the copper and disaster. So this was a for train.
so funicular trains use cogs to go up very steep inclines. You typically see them at ski resorts or at glaciers. This is in copper in Austria. it was it was a funicular train designed to take people up the mountain to go skiing at the Titans on Glacier. Glacier. and it’s the deadliest rail disaster in Austrian history.
so this funicular railway was operating November 11th, 2000. And it’s, it’s a train. It just has one guy at the front cab, and it was carrying a bunch of people to go up the mountain, and there was in the back cab where you could also have another engineer. So if you’re running the train up, you’d be in the front car.
If you’re taking the train back down the mountain, the engineer would be in the back car to go back down the same way. So in the back unattended cabin there was a heating fan that was running that was not certified to be used in a moving vehicle. It was just, it was just a domestic heating fan. The use of, you know, it’s really cold and your cabin is not heated.
Well, to keep that around with you, but it caught fire, smoldered in that cab that was unattended, then burned through the lines and ignited hydraulic fluid. And in the process of doing it, started a fire. And the hydraulic fluid then caused the train to stop and busted the hydraulic lines, causing the doors of the train to fail to open.
And so it’s stuck in this tunnel. And the passengers see there’s a fire breaking out, but they can’t get out. Some of them. One group of passengers was able to break through the acrylic, reinforced glass with their ski poles, got out, and a volunteer fireman who was with them said, come with me. And he guided them out.
They were already in the tunnel. They were at the base of the tunnel. And this. So they’re this particular. It’s going up the mountain, through a tunnel up to the top of the mountain where the ski resort is. And they had started, just started into the tunnel where when the train malfunction, they get out of the car. He tells them, hey, ghost, go down with me, and there’s flames in the back.
And he says, gotta go past the flames. They go, they get through the flames. They go out the base of the tunnel and survive. Get out. And it was that decision to go down out of the tunnel, through the flames that saved their lives. and I’ll explain why. Because later, eventually the engineer was able to activate the emergency release, open the doors, get past, get at least some of the passengers out of the train.
And they proceeded. The fire now gotten very intense by this point, and they tried to go up the tunnel to the ski resort to get to safety. But absolutely none of them made it because the fire starting at the base of the tunnel created a chimney effect. The tunnel was stuck. Leaking fresh air from the outside up into the tunnel is being sucked in by the fire, and so the smoke and the toxic gases are billowing up the tunnel.
Just like just like a chimney. You, you know, you light a fire in your chimney, a fireplace is going, it’s sucking air in and the smoke is going up. Smoke is not. The smoke is doesn’t come out from the fire into your house. The it gets sucked up the chimney and goes up and out from your house. So all these people who are getting up, trying to go up this long tunnel, they absolutely had no chance because of all the smoke being sucked up, being sent right up to them.
In fact, it was so severe it went up into this, the ski resort, and four people were overcome by the smoke. They were fleeing the ski resort because all the smoke that was filling, filling it, but they left the emergency exit doors open, which continued to facilitate the chimney effect. four people were overcome by by smoke.
one of them was rescued, but, three others, asphyxiated. They died. And so that was the caption disaster. And, I want to say, oh, there was a 155 fatalities, and they just had to look over the safety systems and, you know, realize that a lot of them were not helpful because they just didn’t they didn’t think that they thought, you know, a funicular electric train.
It’s just going up this track on cogs. There couldn’t be a major fire like this. But they didn’t take into account what would happen if someone put a device in the engineer cab that could ignite the hydraulic fluid? each of the cabins had fire extinguishers, but they were in a locked, area where only, like a driver would be able to access, the doors didn’t have, you know, emergency failsafe releases on them.
So every safety device you come across in the world is really created in blood. a lot of I’ve thought about actually writing a whole book on this. The things in the world that keep us safe, they were created, usually after something went wrong, say, oh, I wish we really had this. And now we do have it.
All right, next one up, though, is more of a funny incident because there are no fatalities. Nobody got hurt. It was later adapted into a film. This is the CSX 8888 incident, also called the Crazy Eights incident. It was a runaway train in Ohio. May 15th, 2001. locomotive was carrying 47 cars, some of them with hazardous chemicals that ran uncontrolled for about, two under two hours, sometimes reaching up speeds of 51 miles an hour.
it was finally halted by a railroad crew in a second locomotive, which caught up with the runaway train and coupled their locomotive to the rear car. Okay, here’s what happens. Says here the engineer noticed a misaligned switch in the tracks and concluded that his train, although moving slowly, would not be able to stop short of it. He decided to climb down from the train, correctly align the switch, and reboard the locomotive.
Before leaving the cab. The engineer applied the locomotives independent air brake. During mainline operation. He would have also applied the automatic air brake, which would set the brakes new to the train cars, but as is normal for entry yard movements, the air brakes of the train were disconnected from the locomotive. They weren’t functional. Moreover, applying the locomotives brakes disabled the dead man’s switch, which would otherwise would have applied the brakes and cut the engine power.
That’s why the train continued on. so the engineer had also tried to apply dynamic brake to slow the train to a crawl to make it very, very slow. so as you as the engineer climbed down from the cab line, the switch, he attempted to reboard the accelerating locomotive. However, he was unable to do so and was dragged for about 80ft, receiving minor cuts and abrasions.
The train rolled out of the yard and began its 65 mile journey. Attempts to stop the train with a portable derail, or failed to derail, or was thrown off the track by the force of the train police officers attempted to shoot the red fuel cut off button. They tried to shoot it to get the train, to stop, and that didn’t work.
So it’s kind of a nobody got hurt. Thankfully. So it’s it’s a that’s not it could have been really bad, but it’s kind of a funny thing to see. You know, a lot of it is human error and incompetence. The only reason I think about this one is because it was adapted into a film with Denzel Washington called unstoppable.
the 2010 is based on this. So, and I love Denzel Washington film. So let me see. I probably I’ve got to have a clip of the trailer here because it’s so it’s just so over the top. How the how they, how they describe it in the trailer, which was later than made fun of in a in a Saturday Night Live Saturday night Live episode, we have an unmanned train rolling into a highly populated area with no air brakes.
Yeah, we worried about, in terms of cargo, eight freight cars of hazardous chemicals. We’re not just talking about a train. We’re talking about a missile the size of the Chrysler Building. I need to know where that train is. We’re not exactly sure. You’re not sure? We’ll find out what that it gets worse. I got 150 students coming in on some field trip.
One track, 16 train that size going as fast. We’ll vaporize anything in front of me. I’m not risking this company just because some engineer wants to play hero. It’s. It’s unstoppable. All right, well, that was, that was a series of train disasters. As others I could have talked about. there was, I’m kind of going on a bit here.
there’s a 2008 Chatsworth collision. engineer is is in, Los Angeles area. Metrolink. He was texting. He was texting a railroad fan. Missed the signal, and then, collided with another train. So a lot of it. Yeah, it’s human error. And so we got to. Why? We got to get that, that I, I to it.
And now the father Justin’s out of a job. Maybe he can be the guy that runs trains. Sorry. Is that too soon? Too soon? All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. And I hope you have a very blessed weekend.