When British Railways deliberately crashed a train | Hacker News Reader

When British Railways deliberately crashed a train

therailwayhub.co.uk

130 pointstimthorn65 comments

I went to an engineering school, and one of the stories the old boys told was that at some point the city had built a new bridge, and tendered the destruction of the old bridge, and we'd put in the winning bid.

The scheduled day came, but only an hour or two after the scheduled time an urgent messenger came from the city: the neighbours were complaining, could they please just destroy the bridge all at once with the next explosion?

It turns out the civil engineers had been enjoying themselves in the interval, checking their modelling by seeing how many parts of the bridge they could blow off of it, while leaving the majority of the structure still standing...

Important civil defence work, no doubt.

No. Just look at the postmortem engineering reports on bridges which have collapsed (due to crappy inspections and maintenance, or being hit by a vehicle, or fire, or ...). Understanding which parts of rusted & crumbling old bridges are critical (to keeping them standing) is extremely important. Because the real world has many, many such bridges. And even fresh "Rescue workers are still pulling bodies from the collapsed bridge!" headlines seldom motivate the politicians to provide enough resources for inspections & maintenance & protection.

[flagged]

Ha, I have a good engineer friend who often plays devil's advocate and he sometimes seems to reflexively respond with a disagreeing statement even if he is agreeing with the majority of what is being discussed.

Perhaps the root cause here is due to conventional current being opposite the actual, literal flow. GP likely wanted to deny the implied sarcasm of parent comment, and I could see how it might be read either way. Tone in text is hard.

"polarity wrong?"

Depends on the meaning of "civil defense" in the top-level comment. If that means "protecting civilians & civilian infrastructure from military or paramilitary attack", then "No" is correct.

If "civil defense" is so broadly defined that it includes "protecting from normal aging, weathering, and neglected maintenance", then "Yes".

(Admission: My sense of such usages may be kinda old. Dad was a Civil Defense Officer in WWII, specializing in poison gas attacks.)

You make bridge building sound just like it is in video games.

Computer simulations of this crash were pioneering and done by peers in the engineering consulting world [0]. I don't remember the details but I suspect the cost of those back then were on a par with the cost of the actual full-scale physical test. How things have changed.

A few years later and beyond, I got deeply involved in developing similar and new simulation algorithms and techniques for impact, explosions and safety which we and customers applied in the defence, space and other industries [1].

[0] https://resources.inmm.org/system/files/patram_proceedings/1...

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XYplI1kAAAAJ&hl=en...

As soon as I read the headline, I knew exactly what this was about!

I'm not sure if it's still there (I left the area in 1988), but you used to be able to see the flask as it was placed next to the train track running to Heysham 2 power station. Just off the road to the ferry terminal and power station, there was a small bridge over the railway line on a road leading to a caravan site, and you could get a great view of it from the bridge. The most amazing thing was apart from a few scratches on the side, it looked like nothing had even happened to it!

EDIT: looking at google maps, it seems that you can't see it any more. The road was Moneyclose Lane, Heysham where it joins Princess Alexandra Way.

EDIT 2: apparently it's been moved to the visitor's centre: https://www.railscot.co.uk/locations/H/Heysham_Power_Station...

Yes, me too. I remember this very well. It was especially important in the context of the time.

Why do they use trains to move the rods around?

Are there actually places in Britain where it is not possible to move them by shipping.

It seems like a high cost to introduce a new way of transportation when one (safe-ish) method is already available.

I guess it'd be harder to retrieve it from the seabed if there was an accident than from a train line, as you can always drive / build cranes to places on land. I doubt it'd rust through any time soon in the sea, but I'd imagine it would have been even more likely to draw environmental protest.

I would also think the "locating" aspect plays a role. Things can easily be lost at the bottom of the sea, isn't there a history of nuclear bombs that were accidentally lost at sea and never found?

The US lost an atom bomb in the swamps of North Carolina and never recovered it.

A lot of UK nuclear plants (all?) are on the coast but they certainly don't all have docks handy with the kind of equipment necessary to move such items. Rail actually seems a pretty good choice to me.

Yeah, my question was mostly out of curiosity.

At some point someone must have approved this project and the costs coming with it. One answer could be the military with endlessly deep pockets.

My point is that it should have been easy to just continue with shipping, as it seems to me that it has to be the default. But maybe I am wrong?

Either way there has to be pros and cons of course. But risking a train accident at 100 mph relative speed and fuel laying open without means for cooling seems like a very high risk.

I don't think the UK military has ever operated on the basis of "endlessly deep pockets" e.g. At one point the PM relied on using AA phone boxes and reverse charges calls to launch the V bombers:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/08/britains-bizarre...

Edit: Mind you, the hand written "letters of last resort" and regarding not being able to receive Radio 4 as indicating the end of civilisation as we know it do have a certain charm.

I can not read the article, but maybe this was by design. They expected the telephone boxes to be more resilient than building a custom system.

Either way - what did the V bomber program cost?

It wasn't the AA phone boxes but their radio network. From the article:

> Whitehall arranged for the prime minister’s car to have a radio link – with which the AA used to communicate with its mechanics – that would tell the driver that he needed to reach a public phone box, from which Macmillan would call Whitehall. It was suggested that government drivers carried four pennies, as that was the minimum sum needed in a GPO phone box.

I once heard a Radio 4 programme about the letters of last resort, where a senior military figure described the responsibility on a PM's shoulders whilst writing them as "Awesome, with a capital F"

How very British to use a system like this. I think it's just in our bones from a lifetime of scrappy existence. I always think of this: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/make-do-and-mend-0

Thats's a great site, thanks for the link! I'm chuffed to learn from it about IncSoc:

> The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (IncSoc) was founded in 1942 to represent the collective interests of the fashion industry in Britain, promote exports and develop standards of design.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-clothes-rationing-affecte...

Not to be confused with IngSoc, coined in 1949:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Ninetee...

> My point is that it should have been easy to just continue with shipping, as it seems to me that it has to be the default. But maybe I am wrong?

... Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. What made you think that they used ships? Most or all British nuclear plants are coastal, but they mostly don't have port facilities, I don't think. And nuclear plants in _other_ countries often aren't coastal, so it's not like ships could be a global standard practice or anything.

This project was an attempt to increase safety and improve public confidence (the train crash bit was the latter), but I'm fairly sure they were already using trains.

> What made you think that they used ships?

Probably because Sweden use ships and most - if not all? - nuclear plants have access to waterways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Sigyn

And I had some idea that they are used for intercontinental transportation of fuel. But maybe that is not so common?

But I am here for the discussion. I don't need to be right.

> "My point is that it should have been easy to just continue with shipping, as it seems to me that it has to be the default. But maybe I am wrong?"

I don't think it was ever the default for domestic nuclear fuel shipments.

Despite being on the coast, many of the UK nuclear sites do not have easy access to harbours, and the processing facility at Sellafield itself does not have a harbour either: ships carrying foreign nuclear fuel would dock further up the coast at Workington [1].

Since the fuel would be transferred to rail for the final leg to Sellafield anyway, presumably it just made more sense to transport domestic fuel flasks directly via the rail network rather than have a longer, slower, and more complex journey with multiple mode transfers.

It was also likely considered the lower-risk option: train collisions in the UK are very rare (much more rare than shipwrecks!) and the flasks were proven to be able to withstand even the worst-case collision scenario.

In some cases, like at Dungeness for example, old rail infrastructure already existed nearby that could be re-used for a nuclear rail terminal pretty cheaply [2].

[1] https://cumbriashipphotos.weebly.com/nuclear-carriers.html

[2] https://kentrail.org.uk/dungeness_nuclear_terminal.htm

Also it depends what's are the other end: do they have railways or docks?

I imagine that, at the time of this test, it would have been the place formerly known as Windscale, and renamed as Sellafield at some point after the eponymous Windscale fire/disaster/WTFWTT/cover-up. It is on the coast, but does not appear to have any sort of harbor. I see it stopped reprocessing fuel in 2022, so if Britain's spent fuel is going anywhere these days, it probably spends some time on a ship.

The harbour was destroyed.

It's other way round.

Although nuclear sites tend to have access to water many of them in the UK do not have ready access to suitable large harbours (these places by definition tend to be out of the way). In the UK building and maintaining these harbours would be way more expensive than sticking it on the road for a relatively short hop (even in the remote areas) to the nearest local railhead.

Many also have/had their own railhead, so the road part wasn't always needed.

There are a few without their own rail head e.g. Oldbury on Severn and think the fuel for there was sent somewhere near Berkley and then by road

I lived in Berkley about 25 years ago and my next door neighbour was part of the team that managed fuel shipments around the UK

As far as I can tell, the Torness AGR plant doesn't have a rail link even though it is pretty close (less than 1km) from the east coast main line.

There's a dedicated transfer facility with a siding and crane on the ECML about 1.5km west of the power station.

Thanks - once I knew it was there it was easy to spot.

See https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/torness-power-station-r... ; it is perhaps a mile and a bit west of the power station, crane and all.

I’d rather nuclear material be kept away from water…

Spent nuclear fuel has to cool down in water for a few years. Being spent it is not very prone to partaking in chain reactions; no many neutron poisons, too few fissionable atoms.

To be fair, I expect the water around the spent nuclear fuel is also borated as an added precaution.

I suppose salt water can leech ions from anything, but how soluble are the rods?

This seems to start from the weird premise that moving things by ship is the default? Not really the case in the UK since the invention of the railways started to obsolete the canal network.

Nuclear power needs massive amounts of cooling so they are most often built close to the sea, or at least a major river.

Shipping is incredibly efficient, so it is not an outrageous assumption.

they also move them by trucks.

Ok, but how one make a 2.2m x 2.2m x 2.5m "single-piece steel forging" so the inside cavity can be machined out of the solid. That sounds a great metallurgical achievement in this size, allowing the huge piece of metal not only cooling without breaking itself apart from temperature differences of inside and outside but preserving a great deal of streangth too.

https://www.sheffieldforgemasters.com/capabilities/forge

This was the idea of the CEGB press officer, a certain Terry Pratchett. (see his autobiography for source)

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Still surprising me with his insight and intellect years after he joined the Clacks overhead.

I feel like I was shown the event in a public service broadcast type documentary at school. Sticks in the memory. Along with the nuke Sheffield film, which didn't seem too much off a loss to us southerners at the time!

OT: In the States we had a guy [named "Crush"] going around doing full head-on collisions between trains for ~50 years, just for the show.

For his first and most famous performance, Crash at Crush[1], he pretty much built a whole town, drilled two wells, and wound up having to pay huge amounts.

But after that it was all fun and games till the great depression "crushed" him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_at_CrushHis first and most famous

fixed link —> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_at_Crush

Reminded me of Crash at Crush [1]; another deliberate train crash.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_at_Crush

Well there's your problem did a "podcast" episode on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4W9LT1cI4

The crash at Crush? No this was the de-sledder at Cheddar.

The crash at Crush..."resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people." They are not the same.

News report of the test train crashing into the nuclear flask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc

BBC news footage: https://youtu.be/ZY446h4pZdc?si=Y0DHmeYI8cbFd8wk

Who else saw the headline and thought about this Top Gear BBC episode with a PSA for level train crossings?

https://youtu.be/ue61c6MZNQw?si=OhYXjbW_9MaPHj5k

Clarkson: “…and they weren’t even wearing any high visibility safety clothing.”

Reminds me of a similar story where 5 military men were on ground zero underneath an aerial nuclear detonation to prove its safety.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/07/16/156851175/f...

What's up with the black and white pictures, we had colors in 1984!

Gimmick to make me feel old?

I'm guessing they are scans from the magazine, which probably didn't have all pages in colour.

"Today" newspaper launched in 1986 - it was the first newspaper that was printed in colour in the UK.

Many press photographers used B&W film since there was little point using (and paying more) for colour. Also, they likely bought their cameras and worked as media photographers for several decades beforehand when B&W was even more prevalent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today_(UK_newspaper)

Right. And also, the photographer likely wants high ISO film, to be able to take a very short, crisp exposure of the moment of impact, without needing to gamble on the amount of cloud cover, and hence available light.

ISO 1600 colour film will have been available at the time, but was probably pretty poor compared to B&W.

If I wasn’t on a mobile I’d post a link to a YouTube video of the intro to the original edge of darkness.

All this talk of flasks, Cheddar and Melton Mowbray is making me peckish

there was this one too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue61c6MZNQw

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