[SystemSafety] The Carmont/Stonehaven rail accident

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

I have just looked at the video footage on The Guardian's WWW site of the Carmont derailment.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/12/reports-of-serious-injuries-after-train-derails-scotland-stonehaven
(Libby Brooks and Gwyn Topham).

Carmont is about 5km down the track from Stonehaven, but people seem to be saying the accident was
"at Stonehaven". The rail line from the outskirts of Stonehaven largely follows the line of Carron
Water, which flows through Carmont and collects a few more tributary streams on its way to the sea
at the beach in Stonehaven. It is hard to tell from the Google satellite view, but Carmont seems to
consist of two farms. The track appears to pass through hilly woodland at Carmont, but east of there
looks flattish and farmed. Between Stonehaven and Carmont there are a couple of places which might
have embankments, but it looks to me as though the curve around Carmont is the tricky spot.

Three people out of 12 souls on board are said to have died, and six are in hospital, which means
that three are luckily quite well.

Four coaches and a locomotive are visible. The locomotive A is still on the track, but the coach B
to which is is attached is derailed and skew. B is lying across another coach C, which is upturned,
and lying square across the track. There is another upturned coach D lying roughly parallel to B,
more or less along the line of the track. And a coach E lying square on to the track, down the
embankment, on its side.

The driver is said to have died. Locomotive A is intact, showing no broken anything around the cab,
and still sitting on the track, so I presume this is the tail end of the train and the driving
locomotive is somewhere else.

The initial videos, taken some ways away, show woodland with a pall of smoke. Something was
obviously burning strongly. I take it that would be the driving locomotive, since that is where the
hot stuff and the fuel sit. Where would that be? I don't see it on the overhead video of the site.

The embankment down which coach E fell is denuded, but this is not necessarily the site of the
derailment, since trains don't stop on a dime, even when derailed, unless there is something
concrete and heavy in the way. The denudation could have been caused by coach E sliding down.

Does anyone have a pointer to videos of the possible point of derailment? There must be a good idea
already of where this was, and why. Network Rail Scotland tweeted a video of a landslip and flooded
track at Carmont around the time of the accident (included on the TheG page). Brooks and Topham
quote unnamed industry sources as saying that the train had passed through Stonehaven and stopped
ahead of a landslide in Carmont, and was "returning north", that is, on its way back to Stonehaven,
when it hit a second landslip. So it may well have been travelling relatively slowly, and it could
indeed be that the pile-up is where the obstruction lay.

That all sounds like an extraordinary bit of bad luck. Someone had surveyed the line and knew about
the landslip at Carmont, informed the driver, who stopped, and meanwhile a point just passed endured
a landslip after passage, which caused the accident upon return. Put that in a novel and it would
seem completely unrealistic.

Can anyone make a good guess at reconstructing the dynamics?
Can anyone make a good guess at point of derailment?
Can anyone say where the burnt structure is?

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
Styelfy Bleibgsnd
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





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