WATER RELATED RAILWAY DISASTERS WATER OVER THE LINE IS A GREAT DANGER TO RAILWAYS BECAUSE WE . CAN NOT SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING UNDERNEATH THE TRACK Despite those impressive pictures of yesterday's steam engines puffing through waist-deep floods, water over the line is a source of great danger to the railway and more so today than ever, even though traction motors on our modern diesel-electrics will short out if water is much deeper than 150mm. The reason is not the water over the rails but the unknown situation beneath them, especially if the water is flowing across the track and quietly washing out ballast and subgrade material. This problem is not of course new, but compare today's railway with the labour intensive railway of the past. With far-ranging track-repair gangs, signalmen on duty whenever any train was running, and local stationmasters and local passenger trains serving a more densely-populated farming countryside, the railway had a better intelligence network on the ground to detect trouble There was also more contact between these locals than there is today. Even though the old-style railway may have been more vulnerable to flood damage and its electrical communications poorer, that railway was the regional lifeline. Awareness of the need to protect it and its trains extended far beyond the many local railway employees paid to do this. There are many stories from the last century of farm people who risked their lives to report flood damage to the line In contrast, let us imagine that it is 2.30am on a stormy night and city-dwellers John and Jill Citizen spot, in flashes of lightning, that water has topped the railway. What are John and Jill likely to do? Wait by the track in the rain on the off chance that a train will come? They may wait in vain all night. If they feel concerned enough to find a phone, whom do they ring? The unattended local station listed where? Is it somewhere in the State Government entries or under R for Railways? , Is the District 0ffice's switchboard closed?. What about the local police station ,whose cars' radio frequency is different from the railway's radio net?. Do John and Jill dial 0007 But is the railway's control office several hundred kilometers away on every 000 operator's emergency list?. And how is the remote Train Controller to relate to such a call, relayed via a third party from people who probably have no precise idea where they are on the road network, to identify a threatened point on the Railways Network . Modern passengers rolling stock, built of mild steel and Stainless steel, can withstand heavy impacts to reduce the Danger of njuries in an accident. FLOOD WRECK. Many of these problems were highlighted in a recent American passenger train wreck,when on14 July 1982 the westbound California Zephyr, Amtrak's famous transcontinental train, ran into shallow water concealing a washed- out formation on the Burlington Northern Railroad west of Amerson, in the flat prairie country of Nebraska. With 315 people aboard, the Zephyr comprised 12 stainless steel cars: two baggage cars at the front and 10 of Amtrak's new high-level superliners. It was pulled by two 3000 bhp F40-PH diesels, Amtrak 371 and 322. The train was running on BN's near-level, double-track, CTC-equipped main line at the line limit of 127km/h. East of Emerson the Zephyr crossed Indian Creek, where the river had risen 7m. But the rails were still dry as the Zephyr roared through the flooded town of Emerson, where the sheriff's car was block ing the highway bridge, a signal that aroused some interest in the locomotive cab. The train then curved left on to a long straight. And 1.2km later, there was water over the rails. In a welter of spray, the speeding Zephyr's cowcatcher ploughed at over 120km/h into water of increasing depth, water up to 200mm deep, water concealing BN's superb long welded track. This had been displaced a full metre laterally, and the ballast washed out to up to 500mm below rail level. Needless to say, the whole train came off at near-maximum speed. Both diesels capsized and the two baggage vans were wrecked. Fortunately, the high-level cars stayed coupled, and more or less upright and in line. Only one passenger was killed: he was very unlucky to be caught on the gangway unlucky to be caught on the gangway between the derailed cars The material damage bill was $US3.4 million. It is important to note that the track circuits of the signal system did not detect the flood. Thus neither modern CTC nor automatic train protection saved the Zephyr. This brings us back to the humans and their organisation. The line had been patrolled, but in a rather perfunctory way and only by inspecting it in the small hours from road bridges and level crossings (the road system in this flat country is a chequerboard pattern for hundreds of kilometres). Until the Zephyr wreck, it seems that no employee got his gumboots wet. Nobody in Emerson citizens, police, rail customers - gave a thought to protecting their railroad. That was BN's problem. And the Train Controllers, successors to the alert station Agent of yesteryear, were in Cicero, Illinois, 724km away. No railway employee, it appears, was particularly sensitive to the danger and nobody seems to have used imagination or intelligence. It could even be said of the few key railway staff who might have saved the Zephyr that some came out of the inquiry report as second- rate employees. Perhaps none of us is at his best in a warm motor car, or a Ioco cab, or a CTC office, at 3.15am on a wet night. But the trains were still running and the dangers were still there. The weather and flood reporting system gave Control no guidance, for it was nowhere near Localized enough. Yet up to 300mm of rain had fallen in western Nebraska, where a town was flooded. And just four hours earlier a weather satellite had pinpointed the storm centre. It was directly over Emerson, Nebraska. BRIDGE WASHOUTS Across a river valley or flood plain, you have probably noticed that the nearby rail line not only seems to cross at a higher level, but uses a greater number of spans or culverts. The reason for this and, incidentally, the reason for the always high cost of railway earthworks has been the determination of the railway engineer to carry his line above flood level and To provide enough openings beneath it to clear floodwater A sensible low-cost alternative, once widely used in Queensland, was to lower the track level into the river bed below the flood. This meant that debris would float over it without damaging the bridge. Of course it also meant accepting a "fair weather only" rail link. Townsville - Cairns is such a line. Floods have caused some of the worst railway accidents and most of these accidents have two things in common. One is the collapse of an otherwise adequate railway bridge just in front of the train or right under it. The other is that the collapse was not due to a defect in the bridge design but was a result of the impact of debris from the collapse of another structure upstream. Today most bridges are built with openings large enough to pass this debris and their costs are much higher. In New South Wales, the classic washout accident is the Salt Clay Creek disaster of over a century ago. On 25 January 1885, the 14.25 up Albury Mail was wrecked on a washed-out culvert bridge between Bethungra and Cootamundra on the Great Southern line of the old NSW Railways. The line was cut in three places, and Mr Campthorne, the vigilant patrolling ganger who found the breaks, was on the wrong side of the flood. The telegraph wires were also down, and the Mail could not be stopped. At 19.45 in the summer night, the little Beyer Peacock engine 81 clumped along the line into trouble. It almost got across the 50m gap, but all four wooden cars of the Mail fell into the flood and on to each other, broke up, and dumped 50 people into broken wood,wheelsets, and dark swirling water, It is a tribute to the fitness of our pioneers that only eight were lost and that the 40 who were hurt somehow managed to reach dry ground. Queensland's worst flood wreck was at Bogantungan, in the Drummond Range 365km inland from Rockhampton and 100km west of Emerald. On 26 February 1960 the air-conditioned Midlander was westbound for Winton behind two AC16 class steam engines when a timber trestle weakened by flood damage collapsed beneath the train. One car fell 10m and a second hung on the brink. As usual, modern steel construction and interlocking couplers mitigated the damage and safety glass saved lives. Despite the scale of the Bogantungan wreck only seven lives were lost. Britain's washout disaster was on the romantic Highland Railway's main line. It happened on 18 June 1914 in the last summer of peace, when one of the old road bridges dating from after the war of 1745 collapsed upstream of the viaduct carrying the Highland Railway's Carr Bridge cutoff over the Baddengorm Burn. The bridge, built with the cutoff in 1898,sagged under the six-car 10.00 am Glasgow /Inverness train toiling up a 1-in-60 gradient at slow speed and derailed the train without injuring anyone. Then, as the Driver walked back, the viaduct suddenly collapsed under three of the cars. One car was swept away and smashed to matchwood,and the other two were up-ended. But the train was almost empty and only four lives were lost. One of America's worst accidents happened on 7 August 1904 at Eden, Colorado, in totally different country (a normally dry arroyo) but in circumstances similar to Baddengorm Burn. A wagon bridge 300m upstream of the Denver and Rio Grande Western RR's bridge collapsed just after the cautious Driver of Train No 8, the Missouri Pacific/D and RG's joint stock express, the Pacific Limited, had checked the high water levels. Satisfied that all seemed well with his bridge, he carefully drove his train on to it. The debris then slammed into the bridge, droppng it and three wooden cars into the flood. Some 88 lives were lost. India, too, has had some exceptionally senous bridge accidents in flood some due to washouts, some to derailments on approaches to the bridge collapsing it. Given the long and crowded trains in that populous country, the casualty tolls have inevitably been high. MUD AND FLOOD Most washout accidents contain an element of bad luck . One of the unluckiest washout disasters is also among the worst and is perhaps the saddest.It took pace in the high country of New ZeaJand, at one of the many places where the North Island Main Trunk crosses streams falling from the western slopes of the great volcano Mount Ruapehu into the Tasman. Some of these streams run in deep gorges spanned by high bridges (the biggest,at Makatote is 80m high). The Whangaehu River is a relatively modest affair: it first tumbles east from Ruapehu. then south. then south- west down a wide. shallow bed of deep shingle. Since 1906, the Main Trunk had crossed the Whangaehu in a flat, sloping valley near Tangiwai via a 60m bridge comprising seven modest undertrack plate girder spans set on tapenng concrete piers. The Whangaehu Riven however, was fed not directly from Ruapehu's snow- covered slopes but from a glacier bordering a 74ha crater lake said to be 300m deep. An infrequent characteristic of this topography is the partial draining of the crater lake from collapse of the volcanic mud wall between lake and stream, causing a lahar, a sudden torrential outflow of mud and water , Small lahars were common and the Main Trunk's bridges had resisted them for 47 years. But at 10.15pm on Christmas Eve of 1953 a lahar of precedented fury, 32m wide and nearly 7m high, swept down the Whangaehu Valley. It hit the Tangiwai railway bridge just seven minutes before Train No 626, the Welington / Auckland Express. was due. The lahar contained mud, ice, boulders and sand and it completely overwhelmed the little bridge, sweeping five spans away. But despite the late houn there were people about. Two motorists stopped by the flood kept their cool about the railway checked, and saw two piers and five spans of the bridge down. Up the track and back along it they ran to flag down the express . It is known that on the Ka class steam locomotives either Mr Charles Parker, the Driven or Mr Lance Redman the Fireman, must have seen them and the crew was vigilant, for engine 949 was found with the throttle closed, the brake} valve in emergency and the oil fuel feed valve shut .. New Zealanders have always ran their intercity trains fast and hard despite 1067mm gauge. Mr Parker was probably running at 85 90klm/hr and could not stop his all car express in time , and his Ka plunged into the torrent with the first five cars most of which were smashed to pieces as they were swept away . Four coaches the brake and mail van were saved But the train had been crowded with people travellUng to Aukland for christmas holidays and the 1953 Royal tour ,in her christmas message les than 24 hours later the young Queen spoke of "The terrible Railway Disaster that has shocked all the people here in New Zealand" Mr Parker, Mr Redman and 151 of their 285 passengers were lost. The replacement bridge at Tangiwai is a "Truss Type' higher and with longer spans, Its piers are stronger, deeper and founded upon that aid so valuable to engineers: hindsight. The bridge is also protected with fail- safe flood-detector equipment some 13km upstream and connected to the CTC system. But after Tangiwai , NZ Railways also quietly implemented a far reaching and expensive programme that strengthened the piers of many other bridges on key lines. FLASH FLOOD. On 7 July 1984, a flash flood caused the wreck of Amtrak 60, the Washington / Montreal express at Essex Junction on the Central Vermont Railway near Burlington, Vermont. Vermont is probably the greenest, wettest and most wooded eastern state of the United States. Very heavy rain had been falling for several hours when at 10.40pm on 6 July, Driver George Gay and Fireman Geoff Howard took the southbound Montrealer, Amtrak 61. across an unobstructed stone culvert over a small stream called Redman Creek. Five hours earlier, Amtrak's northbound train,No 60, had left Washington on its 1082km run. It made a fast 110km/h average speed under the wires and the Hudson River into New York's Penn Station. It then dived under the East River to Brooklyn and out to the north-east, over the mighty Hell Gate Bridge and along the Shore Line of the former New Haven Railroad, to reach the end of the wires at New Haven, Connecut. At this same time of 10.40pm, on the northbound Montrealer the AEM-7 electric was being exchanged for two 3000 hp General Motors F40-PH diesels, Amtrak engines 202 and 211, to take the express 601km through the wet summer night into Canada. Near Springfield, Massachusetts, the two trains crossed in the rain, and after Springfield,the Amtrak train-operating crew (but not the on-train crew on northbound Train No 60 were replaced by the Central Vermont operating staff who had just brought the southbound No 61 down. When Driver Gay slammed the window shut and notched up the two big diesels for his return trip north, the rain was still pelting down in the cone of number 60's headlight beam. There were 13 cars, 712 tonnes, 17 railwaymen and 277 passengers behind it and the responsibility for safe working was taken very, very seriously. Like Amtrak and the Central Vermont's parent company, the Canadian National, the CV and its General Manager,Mr Phillip Larson, were exceptionally safety conscious. The CV and the authorities through whose jurisdictions it passed had made meticulous joint plans for coping with a passenger train disasten And, after reading an accident report on another railway, Mr Larson had arranged for all the CV people involved in working trains 60 and 61 to be specially trained on the safety and rescue gear of Amtrak's passenger equipment. It is hard to imagine better people to travel with, or a better road line to travel over,for the CV was well built and it had stood firm for 130 years since 1854. In the area of Redman Creek, it was on a 7m gravel embankment 80m from the riven The stone culvert had coped with a rainfall of 114mm in eight hours , back in 1927: It was kept clear of rubbish. Thus there was nothing to suggest any problems when at 6.50am, with the passengers and on-train crews at breakfast,Geoff Howard at the throttle, and the rain still driving down, Amtrak 60 swept into the gentle left hand curve on to the Redman Creek embankment at the regulation 100km/h. Suddenly Mr Howard saw a dark patch where there should have been stone ballast. He immediately made an emergency brake application. Their brakes firmly applied, the two 118t diesels rocked perilously on taut but still unbroken rails over a 24m gap. Both got across, but the track parted on the firm ground beyond, the diesels derailed and capsized,and the first seven cars of the express dug into the broken embankment. Behind the capsized diesels an empty baggage van and a capsized sleeper stood on firm ground. But the third car, a split-level slumbercoach, was down in the gap, and the diner was filled with trapped passengers on top of it. Beside them lay another coach. The scene was one of driving rain, mud and slush, with water pouring past the wreck. The Budd-built stainless steel Heritage cars stood up superbly. But all of Mr Larson's carefully-trained crew and most of their Amtrak on-train colleagues were in the front of the train, incapacitated and trapped inside the wrecked cars. Like their leader, Conductor Church, some were dead. Although himself badly hurt, Fireman Howard got help and the trained and practised Vermont emerency services swung into action. They worked miracles in the half-flooded countryside getting the people out. Nobody was drowned in the mud. But it took hours to cut the last people from the tangle of fallen interior partitions in the over-partitioned slumbercoach. Four lives were lost and the damage bill exceeded $US6.2 million. EXPERTS PUZZLED. clealy,Redman Creek was yet another classic culvert- collapse accident. But why had the culvert collapsed? The water opening had been unobstructed, estimates indicated that only 96mm of rain had fallen, and the steep fast flowing creek was only 1200m long, tumbling 50m down from a small catchment area of only 151 ha. The perplexed NTSB investigators called in the hydrologists who, after careful examinations and surveys, ran the water flow balances -- complex variations of the tap and bath plug sums of high school mathematics. The experts found that nearly 18,000 cubic metres of water must have "ponded" behind the Redman Creek culvert, and this was nearly 6000 cubic metres more than the rainfall / runoff, culvert outflow and seepage calculations suggested. It was the high hydraulic head of this pondage that had softened, "piped", and finally washed out the embankment. But where could the unexplained water -- 6000 tonnes of it come from in a heavily forested virgin catchment area? Recall, please, that it had not come with the 96mm of rain. The dense forest was checked by aerial photography and on foot. It was virgin but by no means uninhabited. And it was certainly not undeveloped. For several colonies of beavers had built a series of 12 log and earth dams, the biggest of them 50m long and almost 2m high -- a formidable construction task for an animal smaller than a kelpie dog. The steady rain meant the dams had been full, the extra storm runoff had topped them, and the beavers' dams had burst. This released a flash flood that defeated the humans' 1854 embankment and its culvert. Five days later, by 12 July 1984, the beavers had already repaired their dams. In fact, they beat the CV, which was still busy repairing its embankment over its new, super-capacity, burst beaver dam-sized culvert. Montrealers 60 and 61 were running again on another route. And in New York the lawyers were considering who best to sue. It still rains hard in Vermont and the beavers are still in Redman Creek. Amtrak 60 and 61 now run on a different route through upper New York State. Mr Phillip Larson is still listed as the General Manager of the Central Vermont. And the beavers are still a protected species. END OF DOCUMENT Extract from : Railways of Australia "Network" Magazine dec 1989