Stop Press - Trains Collide in Switzerland

Good to know nobody was hurt...looks like a solid hit.

17 people hurt.

Sorry...meant killed Prayers...

Looks like one didn't off the others line in time. How does this happen with modern railway dispatching and controls?

Good question. That is the reason for the original posting. It will be interesting to see what the investigators find. Rail accidents are rare, though they always make headline news and there's always something to be learned from them.

Manual override controls can be risky?

I have seen a number of near misses and people in the event of a potentially dangerous situation: they panic, hesitate and even fail to depress the emergency stop button !!.

Having this on mind, many years ago I automated a servo controlled press and programmed the logic to make every push button of the machine act as an emergency stop if depressed during the automatic cycle, I was going to pretentiously call it "All-Stop" system.

I didn't get any kind of feedback for this and abandoned the practice thereafter, leaving only the red palm button that kills power .

It looks like both trains were entering the station, so they couldn't have been going too fast. Not going fast, probably saved the passengers from serious injury.

Even so, the signalling system and the training of the drivers should have prevented a "conflicting move". The loco looks like it was travelling towards the camera. If so, it has derailed to the left and the front left corner of the loco has sustained the impact damage. However the curved track of the junction would have steered it away from the path of the other train, and a side-swipe collision would have derailed it to the other side; inelastic collisions and all that.

Hmmmmm....................