[SystemSafety] [EXTERNAL] The Carmont/Stonehaven rail accident

[Ewing, John]

My understanding is that the driving locomotive lies in the badly burnt area between coach E and the north end of the bridge.  It appears that the locomotive, having derailed at speed at the (fresh) landslip on the down line within the cutting just south of the bridge, continued onto the bridge, then fell from the bridge at speed in such a way as to violently (nearly perpendicularly) strike the hillside west of the north abutment, after which the locomotive rolled or rebounded further down the hillside, to the west.  It appears the locomotive came to rest upside down, against a stand of trees that prevented it from rolling further down the hillside.  Subsequently, the remains of the locomotive were consumed by fire.  The locomotive is not readily visible in any news photographs I have seen, including aerial ones, but it can be discerned in one photograph on the RAIB website.  https://www.gov.uk/government/news/passenger-train-derailment-near-carmont-aberdeenshire

Please accept my apologies if this is redundant information to those on this list, who perhaps have reached the same (or other) conclusions independently.

JOHN H. EWING, P.E.
Office: (215) 641-8863

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety <systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> On Behalf Of Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2020 02:45
To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [SystemSafety] The Carmont/Stonehaven rail accident

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