[HN Gopher] When British Railways deliberately crashed a train
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When British Railways deliberately crashed a train
Author : timthorn
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-07-22 16:27 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.therailwayhub.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.therailwayhub.co.uk)
| Symbiote wrote:
| News report of the test train crashing into the nuclear flask:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc
| pjc50 wrote:
| This was the idea of the CEGB press officer, a certain Terry
| Pratchett. (see his autobiography for source)
| piltdownman wrote:
| GNU Terry Pratchett.
|
| Still surprising me with his insight and intellect years after
| he joined the Clacks overhead.
| 8A51C wrote:
| 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!
| chha wrote:
| Reminded me of Crash at Crush [1]; another deliberate train
| crash.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_at_Crush
| lars_francke wrote:
| Well there's your problem did a "podcast" episode on this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn4W9LT1cI4
| ForOldHack wrote:
| The crash at Crush? No this was the de-sledder at Cheddar.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| The crash at Crush..."resulting in a shower of flying debris
| that killed two people." They are not the same.
| ralferoo wrote:
| 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...
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yes, me too. I remember this very well. It was especially
| important in the context of the time.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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.
| ralferoo wrote:
| 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.
| teqsun wrote:
| 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?
| dwighttk wrote:
| The US lost an atom bomb in the swamps of North Carolina
| and never recovered it.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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?
| timthorn wrote:
| 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"
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| > 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.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" 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
| HPsquared wrote:
| Also it depends what's are the other end: do they have
| railways or docks?
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway211 wrote:
| The harbour was destroyed.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| 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.
| timthorn wrote:
| Many also have/had their own railhead, so the road part
| wasn't always needed.
| youngtaff wrote:
| 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
| arethuza wrote:
| 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.
| FLHerne wrote:
| There's a dedicated transfer facility with a siding and
| crane on the ECML about 1.5km west of the power station.
| chickenbig wrote:
| 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.
| acchow wrote:
| I'd rather nuclear material be kept away from water...
| chickenbig wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I suppose salt water can leech ions from anything, but
| how soluble are the rods?
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| Nuclear power needs massive amounts of cooling so they are
| most often built close to the sea, or at least a major
| river.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Shipping is incredibly efficient, so it is not an
| outrageous assumption.
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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.
| mttch wrote:
| https://www.sheffieldforgemasters.com/capabilities/forge
| sam_goody wrote:
| 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
| philshem wrote:
| fixed link --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_at_Crush
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| 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...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Important civil defence work, no doubt.
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Yes*
|
| Do you so love the self-satisfied HN
|
| > "No. [...]"
|
| that you got the polarity wrong?
| fourteenfour wrote:
| 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.
| kevindamm wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| "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.)
| Stevvo wrote:
| You make bridge building sound just like it is in video games.
| blibble wrote:
| there was this one too:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue61c6MZNQw
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| 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...
| akhenakh wrote:
| What's up with the black and white pictures, we had colors in
| 1984!
|
| Gimmick to make me feel old?
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| I'm guessing they are scans from the magazine, which probably
| didn't have all pages in colour.
| DrBazza wrote:
| "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)
| radiowave wrote:
| 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.
| this_steve_j wrote:
| 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."
| Someone wrote:
| BBC news footage:
| https://youtu.be/ZY446h4pZdc?si=Y0DHmeYI8cbFd8wk
| walthamstow wrote:
| All this talk of flasks, Cheddar and Melton Mowbray is making me
| peckish
| nickdothutton wrote:
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| 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...
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