Collision Course - Train

game of chance in half an hour on BBC 2 chosen the single seat on the right hand side of the front coach across the aisle from Janus stuttered further back on the platform another man was about to decide where to sit 57 year old principal of Swindon College clive brain he was due to get this 1 1 something trade and I believe his morning meeting over round and his secretary says that he rushed often and just caught the train he was large I don't mean he was fat but he was he was quite a big he was probably about 511 and and there was a presence to him I was about 30 when we actually got married for me I guess if I am honest about it I was thinking of after a slightly wild youth of settling down and having children and I was looking not only for a good husband that probably are subconsciously for somebody would be a good father who could rely on who would have that sense of responsibility my last image of Clive was off him walking along the corridor that the hallway with his dark navy blue Mackin and calling across to me and then saying when we're due to meet at 6:00 if I can't get home I'll meet you at the place where we were going to meet and I said fine see you then here's something ordinary like that and the door shut that was it other passengers remember seeing Clive waiting to board the second coach but he like Michael changed his mind this decision meant that Clive would be one of the twelve passengers in the front coach at the time of impact the very ordinariness of of our last interchange I think actually was quite was quite comforting it just felt like a normal ordinary everyday nothing special and that's how I like to think of it we don't want a Hollywood ending clive sat near the back of the carriage on the same side as michael it was now one hour before impact he and the 11 others in the front carriage had chosen the most dangerous part of the Train Janice and Michael were at the greatest risk of all I hadn't ever thought about a particular part of the Train has been more dangerous than any other so it didn't particularly worry me I sometimes thought that if I was traveling facing the way the engine was going then if anything did happen I get thrown forward and it would be safer to travel with my back to the direction I was traveling in but I've never enjoyed that quite so much I rather see the country coming to water wasn't disappearing normally if you're not sitting in the front coach you get a feeling of distance and you can see through corridors and doors but if you're in the front there is a blank wall and it occurred to me it was only a flashing thing but it did occur to me it was not a great place to sit twelve miles down the track a line of 20 hopper wagons was travelling towards them to reach its yard in Southall this 450 ton train had been cleared to cross the high-speed line into London from now on the fate of the passengers would be determined by factors and details beyond their control I bought a cup of coffee when the trolley came around and because the line used to be rocky and bumpy between Swindon and reading I'd leave the lid on and there's about right to drink when I get ready and so we pulled into reading and took the couple might adopt my coffee and we caught it already and got at full speed and I love the deeply engrossed in the work I was doing and and suddenly something happened which as it were woke me up from what I was doing it even know exactly what it was it was something quite unusual and I knew this was suggestive of some imminent problem about to happen well strangely enough in the seconds before the crash I had decided to telephone my office and I picked up my mobile phone and I keyed out my office number and all of a sudden the first thing I remember was standing on my own two feet the force of whatever it was I stood up as I was pressing the send button it was that dramatic I stood up and I was thrown bodily back down with such violence I hurt my back but that was the last second of normality I ever knew I can say that after that terror took over really it was sheer terror I had a message from a woman who was in my husband carriage that after the impact there was silence and I think what she was trying to say was there wasn't screaming there wasn't the sounds of terrible pain so I've built all that into an image that it was an ordinary journey for Clive that there was an impact that that his death probably came very quickly and that there wasn't too much pain I don't think I needed five years ago to know more and I'm not sure that I could have coped with it if I could know the actual details now I think I would like to know them and I think I could take that now once the train had to come within a mile of the hopper wagons an impact had been inevitable the passenger train was traveling from Wales towards Paddington the driver had failed to appreciate to caution signals and had passed them without responding to them when he became aware that ahead of him some distance was a red stop signal and beyond that was a freight train which was crossing his path at a rather strange angle the passenger train was traveling at 125 miles an hour and that speed takes about a mile on a third to stop the driver made a brake application but this wasn't nearly enough to slow his train down this is a model of one of the coaches or which the passenger train consisted they were built in the 1970s the designers were instructed to build a coach which would travel at 125 miles an hour which was rather faster than coaches have been traveling in the UK up until then but they didn't design it to be any safer they were designed for day-to-day operation of the coaches and not designed really to replicate what might happen to the coach in an accident but these coaches do have one safety feature that one should draw attention to and that is the windows are made of toughened glass this means that the if the need arises because of a fire because of an inability of passengers to escape through the ends of the coach means the windows can be broken and the passengers can be extricated through the broken windows the jokes felt by the passengers have been the application of the emergency brakes but then the first impact took place during the first point nine of a second massive shock waves passed down the train as the engine pushed aside the first of the yellow hoppers by this stage no passenger coaches have been hit but this would only last so long when one of the 22-ton hoppers was not struck heavily enough to push it clear it rocked back in towards Michels window at the front of the first coach at a closing speed of 70 miles an hour I can remember feeling the blur on the side of the face but I didn't actually see where it came from and everything went black and everything obviously was thrown into chaos I saw a flash of bright yellow before darkness descended that is why I have a big problem with bright yellow nowadays I saw yellow and then there was complete darkness and this dreadful hurricane of glass I remember a warm feeling it wasn't so much hitting my face as all over my face it was tangible it was very very warm but it wasn't hitting it was just a tiny push at my face and then I felt it all over my face I now know that it was my own blood that was pouring from cats hundreds of little cats as the glass imploded and I was terribly worried I'm sorry to sound so vain I was terribly worried about what would happen to my face I think once faces when I one's identity and I was really frightened about it most of the skin from the right side of my face had been removed by the fragments of glass it just stripped the skin off the face and the most striking thing was the immediate loss of sensation and loss of size I knew straight away I was basically blind in my right eye what would happen to Michael in the next tenth of a second had already been decided decades earlier it's about 1970 when we were asked to design a new coach my particular job was to look after the design of the coach body structure we needed to design a structure which is both long and strong in bending and we base it on something like this which is a tube the typical kitchen roll is strong because it the people take end loads like that without buckling and it will be it will resist bending on vibrations earlier coaches like the mark 1 had been designed as a flatbed with a box on top with their kitchen roll theory Dennis and his colleagues were trying to change the way trains were built to meet the demands of the new era of high-speed travel at the time we were designing this in the initial stages the computer programs were only just being put together only to be developed and I were very very cool in comparison what we have today we did have a calculator they had only just been invented at the time which all about 1978 at 30 years ago the new tubular design called the mark 3 was put into production but unlike cars these 1 million pound coaches could not be crushed in laboratory conditions Denis and his team had to wait for real collisions to test their theories I mean my first reaction was I was amazingly lucky to survive the impact of the wind on my face and obviously sitting within inches of a solid metal wagon coming past me at speed and that was where I thought house most likes being killed and that's something that sort of slightly sends shivers down my spine because I must been very very close to being decapitated at that stage the energy released in this impact far exceeded what the designers had been asked to plan for yet instead of buckling to crushed Michael the tubular structure around him absorbed the energy without breaking the hopper continued to scrape down the side of the second coach but apart from a point of localized damage halfway down this carriage the structure had successfully repelled the wagon the engineering decisions taken by Dennis and his team 30 years earlier had saved lives the designs team at Darby produced a very very strong coach it's got longitudinal members connected by hoops and this gave the vehicle very considerable rigidity and strength and allowed the body to withstand considerable impacts from the ends and indeed from the sides as well if the people had been in Marquand coaches the leading coaches would have been reduced to scrap metal very rapidly and there would have been far more casualties while this damage was happening to the second coach the engine 50 meters ahead was becoming derailed as it collided with more hoppers until this moment the engine had been shielding Janice and Michels coach but now it had been derailed they would face a head-on collision I was going to die and the first thing I shouted was I shouted Richard out loud Richard I'd only beaten them sorry I'd only been married 11 months to somebody I considered to be wonderful and kind and I was sorry for him but then two seconds into the crash as the engine was D railing a small part of a hoppers undercarriage was breaking free it was propelled by the energy left in the crashing wagon to a point that would radically alter the outcome of the South all rail crash the front coats which had been facing a head-on impact was derailed by the Debbie landing in its path and still traveling at over 60 miles an hour it began to topple onto its side well the falling carriage was almost a relief because it sort of punctuated what was going on I just wanted a change I wanted to be dead and gone or I wanted it to stop but it didn't stop unfortunately apart from the yellow in the instant of the crash I didn't see any color until the train stopped I wasn't aware of color just basically of sheer I've never felt terror like it and I hope to god I never I never ever feel terror like it again and I thought soon I'm going to be in bits during these extraordinary moments Janice's senses were in fact responding perfectly normally when you're in fear of your life your perception of the world is totally distorted our system is overloaded both with sensory information and was straightforward fear what's happening and that means that our recall is absolutely vivid but it might not always be absolutely accurate people report that things seem to happen in black and white and in fact so they should black and white system is more primitive why bother to process the nuance of color when all you really want to know is where's the exit during the emergency response the mind is altered it works much faster than usual it scans the visual field for what's really salient and discards the rest they can see the person pointing the shotgun at them with absolute clarity but all the things - left and right and up and down they might have no knowledge about whatsoever almost as if the visual system says hey what's really worth looking at let's concentrate on that and then base our actions on the basis of those salient points in the visual field all this has a great impact on our perception of time we judge time by noticing the frequency of events when not much is happening time hangs on our hands we tend to get bored however when were pleasantly engaged in something time rushes by and that's the normal way life goes one thing after another but what if were in peril of our lives we've got total sensory overload everything we notice may be a matter of life and death in that special circumstance then time can almost seemed to stand still while all this was going on it seemed to me to be taking a lifetime but realistically about 10 minutes in total was what I felt I'd suffered the 10 minutes of a physical pain and mental torture it was just like torture the coach slid on its side for less than four seconds but in falling the purpose and shape of the environment was transformed the safety glass designed to save life in cases of fire impacted on the ground dust and debris filled the coach as eight trap doors opened in what had become the floor Michaels seat was now near the ceiling I was held across the cage she wasn't aggression of falling as if you just dropped off something else hurled across the couch and I wasn't conscious of quite what I hit I said it was most likely I'd hit the table because that's what I was most like it sit right up against when I met the far side of the coach in fact I'd broken six ribs down at the back of my chest on the left hand side had there not been something to stop me will be it damaging me quite a lot on the way then it seems highly likely that I'd have gone out of the window and it's apparent that that was the fate of other people on the train who were less lucky than me I come home from work a little earlier than usual and my daughter Sally and I had gone out to the shops for just a short while that must have been at about Hoppus three four o'clock and as we were driving back up the drive of our house my older daughter Rebecca was standing in the drive sat further back than Michael Clive brain-2 was thrown across the coach we kept phoning and eventually I didn't watch any of the news headlines because of as the evening went on the news began to show more and more of the details of the crash and I didn't really want to see that and then it's about 1:00 in the morning a police car drove up and as soon as it drove up the drive I knew clive and another man behind him fell through the windows and under the sliding train 3.5 seconds into the crash they were the first fatalities at Southall and the only people to die in the first coach the police came with Clive's belongings mainly his briefcase things that had been in his briefcase his diary and a few other things not much in the way of items of clothing I immediately noticed that his watch was missing and the watch had a particular significance I think for us because I had bought it for him as a birthday present about two years before that when just before his birthday I'd said well he no come on what would you really like for your birthday and he said you know I'm well into my 50s now and I've never had an expensive watch I really would like to have an expensive watch before I died of course he didn't realize the significance of that I was aware that it probably couldn't be found because I had been very clearly warned that that class body was not in a a very good state I've been told I shouldn't look at you know shouldn't look when I'd immediately said I want to go and see him they'd said we really advise you not to so putting turn two together I realized that the watch might have gone but I made a really big thing about it so I my hope was by making a big issue about it they'd really make a big effort to find it and they did and about three or four days later the watch the watch came back I'm not sure why I wear it it's probably a combination of different seasons I suppose I'm keeping it safe it's unlikely to be lost while I'm wearing it and I feel there might be a time when I take it off and pass it on to his son Clive's death and that of the other passenger occurred because they were able to leave the moving coach this came about not through some mechanical error but because the glass fitted in the windows did precisely what it was designed to do to break in case of emergency yet on other occasions this glass had saved lives like all safety decisions made on behalf of the millions who take the train each day it had always been a calculated risk a lot of people think of safety management as some kind of war which there'll be a glorious ending something like a Battle of Waterloo or a lüneburg Heath when there's absolute safety but actually the safety management business is like a guerilla war there is really there are no winners all you can hope to do is to hold the men in the black pajamas back for as long as possible and as long as there's heavy metal and railways there will always be hazards our lives are made up of all kinds of systems from the solar system down to railway systems hospital systems whatever and the only way you can actually prevent risks is to shut down the system totally when we operate within system we can't see the whole picture when we add something to it like an extra barrier or an extra safeguard there are unforeseeable consequences I suppose a classical instance of this is in a zinc or a 14:15 French Knights were wearing leading edge armor beautifully articulated would stop all kinds of arrows and stuff but when they were knocked off their horses on a muddy day in in a in a field in France they that they couldn't get up so it was the armor that killed them a nun foreseeable consequence of an excellent defense in many different kinds of systems you get this blinkered pursuit of excellence we can see a goal straight ahead of us but what we can't foresee are the side effects the ripples the consequences that happen to the other parts of the system failure is unavoidable but when it does occur another part of the system can benefit in the remaining five seconds at Southall five more people would lose their lives I think if you expect life to be fair than your own for disappointment and if you're involved in a catastrophe you've got to be lucky because fairness it seems to me doesn't actually come into it on the day fairness is a bit of a man-made invention to try and manage all the real world is like early in the crash the engine and front coach had borne the brunt of the impact but in the coming seconds those in the carriages further back would become increasingly more involved it was immediately obvious to us that something had gone badly wrong and everyone stopped talking and everyone looked really alarmed and somebody said within a few seconds I could crash earlier while Michael and Clyde were boarding the Train david revolta was also taking his seat traveling on business he followed his colleague into the third carriage with two coaches and the engine in front of him David would be 70 meters from the first point of impact as we were flying down the track tremendous speed and you could tell it was fast because on the line and meet early to the right of us there was a row of yellow trucks which in fact was part of the train that we hit and those trucks were flicking past at fantastic speed we all knew that we were in deep trouble but there was absolutely nothing we could do about it you can't lift a finger you just have to sit there and let it happen in the opening seconds of the crash the front coach had been in most danger until its derailment fermented avoided the head-on collision but what was of benefit to most people in that coach had terrible consequences for those behind the second coach was now exposed to the oncoming hoppers back in the third carriage the risk to David had also increased the situation now is that the power car is still moving but he's completely derailed the first coach has turned over on his side become uncoupled from the second coach and is sliding along an adjacent track and it means the second coach is approaching the line of wagons which are stationary the second coach is still coupled to the third and fourth and fifth coaches and this is beginning to involve them much more directly in the accident this is going to be a very considerable collision the impact between the hopper and the coach in front of David would not happen at once the hopper was now stationary waiting for the oncoming train the coach seemed to fill up with it seemed like smoke but I think it was dust a horrible sort of acrid smelling dust and after that to be honest I can't be sure what really happened because certainly for me the cops a point where the brain says you really don't want to know about this because although the conscious mind was busy taking information and tried to reach decisions I've no doubt really the subconscious knew that death was in the offing and it was time to switch off while the gap closed no other impacts took place here in the midst of the collision two seconds had opened up in crash terms this is a considerable length of time for the rest of the world these seconds went unnoticed in this collision four seconds into the crash lives were almost certainly lost in the front of the second coach yet more was to come the hopper had been lifted into the air directly towards a structure at the side of the track the lion had recently been electrified and as part of this electrification along either side of the track there had been erected steel stanchions which are there to support the overhead line equipment which we call the Knitting Sondheim's which provides the power to the the electric trains but the part that astonished and played in this accident I don't think could ever have been foreseen the hopper jackknifes with Coach H lifts into the air but can only get round as far as the overhead line stanchion which is there and stops there and at that stage the second coach which is being propelled by the others pushes its way underneath it and the hopper falls onto the leading end of the second coach pinning the coach beneath the hopper it can't go anywhere but there's no doubt there's an awful lot of energy still left in that train which has got to go somewhere this pinning meant that even those who'd escaped the crushing of the front end were now under direct threat the end of the second coach on the front of the third were being forced together by the rest of the Train absorbing this amount of energy would have caused them both to buckle or concertina but in the next two seconds the two coaches would suffer very different fates one of the most shocking things in the minutes after the crash was when I leaned out of the broken window to look at what was outside the second carriage which had been in front of us when we left Swindon was no longer there and it was just daylight through the gap at the end of the coach and that second coach was lying off to the side and i sat there I stood there I stood there wondering why is this coach only half the length it was what would cause such devastation to the second coach had already been decided by an event that took place two seconds into the crash the hopper wagon that impacted with Michaels window had continued to tear down the length of the second coach and it was that localized damage which occurred during those impacts that would later decide the fate of dozens of people as strong as the troops are there is a potential problem should a local impact caused a depression in the relatively thin sidewall which will cause the truth to collapse by exert the second coat carried this weakness through the crash on its own it would have meant little but the toppling of the first coach that led to the head-on impact that led to the stanchion and the pinning of the front of the Train all conspired to produce a fait previously unimaginable the coach bent in half this was a catastrophe for those inside yet for David and those sat near him this was purely in collision terms the ideal crash scenario as the carriage bent it absorbed the energy that would otherwise have threatened the third coach the second carriage had taken most of the weight of the impact and had it not done so then the coach the dog was in and possibly other coaches behind would have been much more severely damaged and there might have been an even higher death toll and those are very hard facts come to terms with those of us who would in the third coach survived largely because the second coach in front of us was destroyed and the evidence of that was in front of our eyes eight and a half seconds after first impact from the second coach forward already dead and a fifth or died later in hospital two had died in the first coach 139 passengers were injured but alive I saw light again and I thought oh that I can see the ceiling there's a light in the ceiling but actually was the windows from the other side of the carriage and then the noise started it was like a cacophony really because there was a Japanese lady behind me and she was screaming and there was this guy saying do you know how lucky we are there was somebody else saying mind the overhead wires they may still be live and there was me saying oh my god help me help me what's my face like help me help me which I I found trivial but you know that was my space that was where I was what I was in at that time you know I knew I was alive and I thought thank you God I'm out and I'm alive and I'm free had she not change seats during the journey Janice would have been sitting in the second coach if I'm absolutely honest and I'd like to be I sunk god I'd moved I always have thank God I'd move because I'm pretty sure I would have had it definitely but who can say what if before the crash if if one an analyzed it one might think one would be safer in the second coach than the first but who knows one doesn't know these things and I am extremely sorry I was particularly sorry after meeting some of the bereaved relatives of the people who had died on the second coach and had been left a little boy of two left without a father this sort of thing that really really upset me I think everybody who survives a catastrophe where people are killed feels guilt and you spend days or weeks or months or in some cases much longer wondering why some people lives and other people died you pick up whatever pieces you're left with but it has been a very rocky road indeed I lost my job when I was going to work I would sit on the platform let's train after train after train go past because I simply couldn't face the normal working day and other times I would find myself sitting out in the park with my hands over my face when I was supposed to be in my desk and it's not good it's not supposed to be like that the ripples of a catastrophe spread outwards for a very long time and that is I has been I'm sure for everybody who was on that train Michael heylia broke six ribs when he hit the edge of the table but these injuries saved his life and because he was wearing glasses during the early part of the crash his right eye was protected and he eventually regained his sight every day I would think that would be fair to every day I'm conscious of the great fortune in surviving that accident that's the overwhelming feeling and and is this I said is this feeling tinged with sadness oh that I survived and others didn't I was contacted by the wife of mr. Hollyer and she sent me this card and she said do mrs. brain I was so desperately sorry to hear about your husband's death in the train crash on Friday I read about it in the evening advertiser I felt so dreadful because opposite the story of your agony was a story about my husband who survived you must have been thinking why Clive why not him your husband was obviously a wonderful man and one really does question the fairness of life one says goodbye in the morning was no doubt that we will meet again in the evening and suddenly they're gone I'm delighted that so many people did survive I've never felt any sense of in the same way as in this letter why my husband and not somebody else's husband or somebody else's wife or somebody else's child and I feel that those people who survived should celebrate their survival but that everything came together in such a way that they did survive and that for them is wonderful and they should they should glory in that that they are still alive the Southall crash was a complex violent and truly unpredictable series of events it undid safety planning and the best of design yet unless it is prevented from happening it is very probable that the next crash will also do the same however much it had planned for it is impossible to plan or predict for what is going to happen in the future if there is another collision which we hope there won't be but chances are there will be a some stage in the future the nobody can tell whereabouts it's going to be what type of rolling starts going to be involved what speeds eager to be involved and what the outcome is likely to be the only certainty is that it won't be like a previous collision what is predicted is that a major rail crash will occur in Britain every two years when that happens another moment in time and another collection of decisions will gain huge significance but only for those involved the Southall crash was an absolute tragedy and it was a tragedy for the people who were directly involved and for all the families and friends the repercussions ripple outwards but in other ways it wasn't actually such a different day well we had taken all these various tiny decisions that led to what happened to us in the crash everybody else in London everybody else worldwide was taking lots and lots of tiny decisions of their own in the course of their normal lives and that's the way life is that's the way it's designed and actually when you think about it it's comfortable that way just so long as you don't get on the wrong train many of those who survived train collisions are unable to travel passively again unwilling to expose themselves to such random forces they seek instead what they believe to be controlled I will never again ever again trust any body who is in charge of transporting me from A to B there is no logic to this I understand that I understand that I could get on a train for example again hundreds of times and nothing would happen to me but if you had been through the south or a rail crash I would suggest that logic played no part in it whatsoever the terror was so great that you are you are quite happy to risk getting in a car as long as you control it but the fact is the combined to cause a crash are even more complex than the crash itself the next episode of collision course reveals why decisions you've made tonight could mean you die or kill someone tomorrow collision course returns next week at the same time 9 o'clock more on that in just a moment

Channel: Nick Hotson

Views: 158,762

Rating: 4.6100178 out of 5

Keywords: Train (Transit Vehicle Type)

Id: zdOiPvVAFek

Length: 49min 43sec (2983 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2015