If it turns out the accident was caused by the driver’s negligence, I’m not going to feel too sorry for him.
Do they have cameras around there to detect obstacles on track?
I read the driver had about 7 or 8 seconds from the previous tunnel, or curve, to find the truck by eyes and react.
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I guess it depends. If he was drunk and fucked around leaving it there, I wouldn’t feel sorry for him. If he just forgot that day to put the hand break on…I would. Mistakes happen, sometimes I don’t check my blind spots clearly. I can’t imagine if that mistake leads to a huge pileup killing everyone.
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Here is video of the train’s route. Coincidentally, same train. It appears that the train’s driver would have very little time to react due to the curve.
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Even if that’s the case, his negligence resulted in death and suffering for so many people, and he’s going to have to face the consequences.
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Sure, but I can sympathize with living with such a monumental mistake.
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I definitely wouldn’t want to be him, you can bet on that. But who knows? Maybe it will turn out that his parking brake failed.
I hope something like that is the reality.
Wouldn’t that still be his responsibility to have the truck properly maintained?
If not him personally, then someone in his company who assigns vehicles to employees?
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Well if it’s the companies fault then there’s no real first hand individual who has to bear the responsibility for this tragedy. I guess blame could be passed around.
Is that a good or bad thing? I’m not sure.
But being a maintenance worker and making a stupid mistake which results in the deaths of 50+ people would be unbearable to live with for me, I wouldn’t like anyone to experience that guilt.
I personally dont think standing passengers is a big deal, many countries of the world allow it. Things like this failure of care made the situation worse due to the standing passengers but this is a freak accident. Countless millions of trips get taken with standing passengers and nothing happens so I think it may be a bit kneejerk to ban it. Instead safety violations need to be taken more seriously. Anyway just my opinion .
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Or at least tracks better secured against intrusion. It also enhances safety as there would be less chance of someone getting splattered by a train because someone decided to walk on tracks. Or someone sabotaging tracks for whatever reason…
That and all the curves of the mountains means they really need to drive a LOT slower… so this could be a factor too. Like if there’s a curve then the train should be moving very slowly in case there are obstructions. I don’t know if the cost is worth it but some kind of anti intrusion detector would have been helpful too for curves like this. You shouldn’t be doing 100kph in a curve like this.
High speed rail tracks are elevated for a reason. If this happened in the HSR network the deaths would have been massive. TRA tracks weren’t built for speed… especially the ones on the East side was built for trains doing 50kph at MOST.
Maybe a good old fashioned guard rail is sufficient.
If somebody really wanted to sabotage a train track no amount of anti intruder gating will be sufficient.
The best thing we can realistically do is minimise risk for accidents, via fences, guard rails etc.
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Yea but at least sensors around bends where you can’t see around the corner so the engineer can stop the train before it’s too late. Trains need at least a mile to stop anyways so they need a LOT of advanced warning.
It isn’t always going to be trucks on the track, it could be boulders or mudslides too.
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Seems like a good idea to me.
That UDN video. WTF is that music!
Taiwanese Media at the lowest…
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In commuter trains yes but this train travels at 130kph. Standing passengers is a obvious danger at those speeds.
They limit those tickets to 100, I believe. Most end up sitting on the ground in the space around bathrooms and between cars. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than actually standing.
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Plus there is a lot of scallywags that get on and stand in that area that don’t have the correct ticket for those trains bypassing the limit.
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The way to prevent this is to follow the rules and they have a have a icash card make them pay the correct fare in cash. Japanese trains are good in making you pay the correct fare if you bought a cheaper ticket fare, the result is if use card or cheap ticket you take the local. In Taiwan, they do ticket checks and scan the icash 7-11/i-pass KHH cards but do not make you pay the fare upgrade , so if that is the case why not take the faster train? Before card use they checked and made you pay. Result is train not designed for people standing (ie no hard rails to hold on to) has a lot of people standing.
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