CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Computer graphics made this train catastrophe look like a video game
Why Trains Crash (BBC 1)
At St James’s cemetery in Liverpool, there’s a monument to Tory MP William Huskisson — killed in a spectacular double-celebrity rail disaster.
Huskisson, a former Cabinet minister and Leader of the Commons, was a passenger on the Northumbrian steam train at the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool railway in 1830, when he decided to jump down from his carriage and hurry along the track to buttonhole another passenger, the Duke of Wellington.
But he lost his balance and, unable to clamber clear of the adjacent track, was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket.
According to the Guinness Book Of Records, he wasn’t even the first man to be killed in a railway accident. That was David Brook, a carpenter, who was caught in a storm walking home near Leeds in 1821 and decided to find his way by walking along the tracks of the Middleton Railway. This seemed a good idea, and wasn’t.
All this goes to show that railway accidents have been happening as long as railways have existed.
The report centred on a horrific incident last year in Odisha, India. In a three-train crash on the line from Kolkata to Bangalore on India’s east coast, 296 people were killed and more than 800 injured
Why Trains Crash, an hour-long documentary for the international This World series, concluded that the causes are broadly the same in most disasters.
Human error is almost always a factor. Mistakes with signals are common. And inadequate or decrepit equipment is frequently involved.
The report centred on a horrific incident last year in Odisha, India.
In a three-train crash on the line from Kolkata to Bangalore on India’s east coast, 296 people were killed and more than 800 injured.
A high-speed, long-distance train on a 25-hour journey ploughed into stationary goods carriages and jack-knifed into the path of an express travelling in the opposite direction.
An investigation discovered a set of points had somehow been cross-wired with a level crossing — so that, when the barrier went up, the tracks also moved.
A couple of survivors, including a man whose father was among the dead, described the impact, though their accounts conveyed little of the terror or drama.
One man remarked in a matter-of-fact way that, clinging on to a windowframe as the carriage rolled, he assumed he was probably dead but decided to hang on anyway.
The Moorish Arch at Edge Hill in Liverpool, during the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway on September 15, 1830. The service was the first to rely exclusively on steam power, run a scheduled passenger service and use a system of signalling. However, the opening was hit by tragedy when politician William Huskisson was killed by an oncoming train
Snatches of news footage from the rescue efforts, which went on all night and long into the following day, did illustrate the sheer scale of the disaster, but these were too brief. Instead, we saw animated computer graphics that made the crash look eerily unreal, like a video game.
The commentary touched on overcrowding, but failed to address how significant this was in the huge loss of life. There were no clear statistics, for example, on whether people survived the impact but died from suffocation under the weight of bodies.
Crashes in Greece, Germany and the UK were briefly mentioned. And, of course, because this was the BBC, climate change was cited as another increasingly common factor.
At least global warming can’t be blamed for the death of poor old William Huskisson.
