Another traincrash, and quite a large one it seems.

Last night 3 trains collided under a viaduct. Two goodstrains and one passenger trains were involved.





http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/ar...treinbotsing_Barendrecht

Some pictures are shown here:
http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenl...Barendrecht__.html?p=1,1

The damage is enourmous. So far the death of the driver of one of the goods trainsis reported. Several passengers of the passenger train to (probably the Fyra to Antwerp/Brussels) got slightly injured, when this train drove into the debris of the two collided goodtrains. Lucky for them the driver of the passenger train had seen the sparks coming of both goodtrans and diceded to brake

The line Dordrecht - Rotterdam is a 4 track wide line. The imense shunting station Kijfhoek is also situated there, feeding the Roterdam Mainport. Its one of the intesively used lines inHolland with one train passing by almost every minute.

Hi,

I'm so sorry to hear about that crash, and the casualty - may s/he rest in peace.

Cem.

They gonna use Leopard tanks to clear the mess in Barendrecht, because cranes can't reach the wrecks under the A15 road bridge.

This is close to where i live.
Must add that the stretch of track where the collision occurred has no slow-speed stop protection,meaning to say that upto max.speed of 40 km/h there is no electronic interferance when train drives ignore red signals.
Story in this mornings papers said that one of the two traindrivers must have ignored a red signal.
Do also observe that two different rail-operators are involved,this is part of the so-called liberated railmarket,where companies are encouraged to compete with the semi-government operated railways,such as Railion.
It is very said that one traindriver died,the other was seriously wounded,i express my sympathy for the families of both men.
Papers are also reporting that the flow of railcargo to/from the port of Rotterdam is seriously jeopradized,with refineries and container terminals not being able to use railways to inward destinations.
This appears to be a very serious accident,not only because of personal tragedy,but also it clearly shows the bottle-neck in the transportsystem around the major port of Rotterdam.

Still one loc to go

Maybe this is just the case in the Netherlands (we do have very weak undergrounds in some places, no mountains, no mines). And those accidents (under a large viaduct) are very seldom (I hope).

This morning the tracks (2) for passengerservices are fully available again.

Seems like bureaucrazy is less than in Sweden then, would take at least a week to coordinate a joint rescue effort here...