The Amagasaki Derailment [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Amagasaki Derailment [video]

youtube.com

37 pointsguerrilla12 comments

There is no video of the wreck.

No, this channel is dedicated to documenting tragedies/accidents, their impacts and repercussions, and the safety improvement those events bring about; it’s not about all the gore of the actual events.

It’s a quite interesting channel, worth following IMO.

The video seems to be based on the Wikipedia article almost point-for-point.

This is quite common. The sort of channels specializing in 10-15 minute videos about incidents, accidents, etc mostly all seem to be professional wikipedia paraphrasers.

There are some gems in the rough though. If this genre of video interests you, definitely check out the USCSB (U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board) channel.

The Brick Immortar channel is one of those gems.

It's unfortunate that you've mentioned this - now whenever I see a youtube doco along these lines I'm going to check and be put off by this fact :/.

Youtube is definitely developing a subculture of channels that essentially copy existing work and put them in video form. I guess they are generating bespoke content - There's a fair bit of effort that goes into creating an engaging and cohesive video. But the fact that most of them do not properly acknowledge sources leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

On the bright side, these sort of channels can still be good for topic discovery.

> It's unfortunate that you've mentioned this - now whenever I see a youtube doco along these lines I'm going to check and be put off by this fact :/.

Don't be, there's a lot of art in the presentation style. This particular channel puts a lot of effort into being very respectful and presenting a certain tone and speech register which I find rather charming. Of course not all channels do add this kind of value, but just ignore the ones that don't! :)

This is a tragic event, which we should learn from, so that we are less likely to make analogous mistakes.

Besides whatever causal chains contributed to the derailment, there were already multiple signs of some kind of immediate problem, when they were stopped at a station.

At that point, someone (including the driver) could've said a few things went wrong on the trip, and something isn't right, so, "out of an abundance of caution", held the train at the station. Then, whatever checklist of mechanicals after what had just happened, while swapping out the crew (to get their report, and to remove them as an immediate risk just in case they were somehow impaired).

It could be treated as commendable professionalism, to hand over the controls after any small incident, as a matter of standard practice, more important than hitting the on-time metric window. (Towards the end of the video, they go into how this didn't seem to be the culture.)

Then the impact would've been (guessing) a couple hours of cascading significant commuter delays, due to the stopped train -- rather than 106/107 dead, and 562 injured.

Doubly tragic, that they could see something was urgently wrong, and all they needed was one person to say to hold the train.

Note that major cause for the derailment was how the worker was terrified of being sent into punishing "re-education" process in the company p, for the crime of being late

> forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, "dayshift education"), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of the crash.

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