Fatality Policy

When a rail accident with a fatality is reported, Railpage staff will start a new sticky thread inside the relevant forum. If a thread longer than 25 informative posts without needing excessive moderation exists on the incident, it will be cleaned up as per the rules of this policy and adopted as the official discussion thread on the incident. There will only be one thread per incident. By posting in the thread, users will automatically agree to the rules of the Fatality Policy, which will be inserted in the first post of the thread. Only informative discussion related to the incident will be allowed. The following types of posts will be deleted:


Condolences posts

Unsubstantiated accusations ("finger-pointing")

Reminding others of the rules - we have moderators for that! If a message is posted where the main topic of the post is in the above list, it will be deleted by Railpage staff, and the author warned.

Any misbehavior in a fatality thread carries a heavier warning. Warning levels will be issued at the staff member’s discretion. The Fatality Policy carries a three-strike clause with it. If a flame-war or anything remotely resembling one breaks out three times in that thread, it will be locked for three days. After that, it'll be unlocked and the flame-war counter reset to zero. Users involved will be warned accordingly. The strike count will be included in the threadstarter. Discussion may be terminated without warning at the choosing of RP Management at any time.

Something must be done about the large number of trucks in the roads now. This is the 3rd incident in the past week.

Two killed near Young in collision between train and truck

Hope the train crew are ok. And the lead loco.

Incidentally, I find the headline a bit misleading in that it implies that trains are again running to Young, hence unexpected for the truck driver. It’s 60km+ to the accident site from Young. Perhaps that’s the closest hospital. But using that logic, you could portray a crash at Dunedoo as “near Mudgee”.

Something must be done about the large number of trucks in the roads now. This is the 3rd incident in the past week.

Two killed near Young in collision between train and truck

Think you will find cars collide with trains as well, perhaps something must be done about inattentive drivers...

BigShunter.

Playing the devils advocate here, but surely none of the good members of this forum have never zoned out driving along a highway on a long road trip at 100km/h?

There are 20 level crossings in the 214km between Ingham and Gordonvale on the Bruce Highway, almost all of them in 80km/h and 100km/h speed zones. I can assure you, there would be very few highway users on that section of highway that would be prepared to stop at every single level crossing every single time.

Level crossing removal is really the only permanent solution to this issue until the human factor ceases to be a problem. Inattentive drivers also have head-on collisions, read-end collisions and single vehicle rollovers and collisions - it's not something restricted to level crossings.

This is not an excuse for driving whilst not in a proper state to do so and remaining vigilant.

Playing the devils advocate here, but surely none of the good members of this forum have never zoned out driving along a highway on a long road trip at 100km/h?

There are 20 level crossings in the 214km between Ingham and Gordonvale on the Bruce Highway, almost all of them in 80km/h and 100km/h speed zones. I can assure you, there would be very few highway users on that section of highway that would be prepared to stop at every single level crossing every single time.

Level crossing removal is really the only permanent solution to this issue until the human factor ceases to be a problem. Inattentive drivers also have head-on collisions, read-end collisions and single vehicle rollovers and collisions - it's not something restricted to level crossings.

This accident was on a straight unsealed rural lane in the middle of a long straight section of line with excellent sightlines from the level crossing. Crossing removal is just not viable in the thousands of situations like this.

A quick flash on our regional news indicated that it was 8215 on the Goonumbla-Port Kembla ore train, which is an 80km/h runner [if memory serves], so not the fastest freighter on that line. The workers on the b-double were relatively local. We can only await a possible inquest.

This is not an excuse for driving whilst not in a proper state to do so and remaining vigilant.

Its unreasonable to expect every driver to be 100% vigilant 100% of the time, nice utopia but it doesn't happen and why trains are fitted with vigilant monitors. Note they are not protected to protect the drivers from death, but rather cost of as trains are very expensive so the cost of vigilant monitors in freight only services.

However while we express outrage of train vs truck at LX, level crossings are nothing more than a T and + intersections for which what are the stats per year of such crashes compared to rail related, yet grade separation is limited to mostly freeways and mostly for the purposes of traffic flow, not accident prevention.

The fact is that there's not much you can do about stupidity. Some years back, I was with an Echuca crew who ran rice trains in and out of Deniliquin. "Ricies" were a fact of life in that area. On one occasion, this crew cleaned up a young local on a crossing about 10 km out of Deni, and the bloke  luckily got out alive. The following week, these same blokes were hit by the first guy's brother who didn't survive.
If somebody can't learn in a situation like that, the roads are safer without him.