Can news be random facts?
A railroad accident took place in Oslo yesterday. A set of 16 empty cargo cars was parked at a cargo terminal on the high lands North of Oslo. The brakes somehow failed and the train (that was not attached to a locomotive) began to roll.
The cars was empty and they are basically just a chassis frame with wheels. Each car weighs 32-35 metric tons and the total weight of the 16 car train was 512 - 560 tons (1,128,766 - 1,234,588 pounds lmao).
The runaway train picked up speed in the steep slopes and screeched through our capital suburbs towards downtown Central Station :blink: and harbor area.
Several attempts was made to shift the train into side tracks and make it crash safely into safety barriers. They also manually fastened solid iron plates with bolts to the track at three places to make the train derail if they could not lead it to one of the side tracks. All these measures failed because of the train's high speed. The heavy iron plates that are designed to derail also loaded trains broke in pieces and was thrown 90 meters away.
The distance between that cargo terminal and the harbor is 8.2 kilometers (5 US miles), and the difference in elevation is 100 meters (328 feet).
Luckily the train did not head into the Oslo Central Station where it could have destroyed the main station building and a shopping center. The accident happened early on the afternoon when things are busy.
The speed is calculated to have been 100-130 KMH (62-80 MPH) when it was near the harbor. Just before the tracks ends at the harbor, some cars derailed and the last couple of cars got airborne. The derailed train barely missed a depot for airplane fuel and a tanker truck loaded with fuel. Some rail cars hit normal road cars and some trucks and ploughed through a warehouse and other structures, which collapsed. Some of the train cars stopped on the bottom of the sea.
Three people was killed and four was injured. Three fatalities is three too many, but it is almost unbelievable that not many more people was killed and injured.
How much energy is 500 tons x 100 kmh? :wacko:
There are some sharp bends downtown and despite the high speed the train did not derail there because the cars was empty and the center of gravity is very very low for empty cars.
Often the trains are loaded with aviation petrol and other sorts of explosive things... A heavy train would have derailed before the harbor and caused a destruction no one wants to think about.
It has now leaked out that a similar accident almost happened in 2006. A locomotive parked a train and the train's brakes failed moments after the locomotive left the parked train behind. But the locomotive had to stop and wait because of a red light and the runaway train bumped into the waiting locomotive and slightly injured the locomotove operator.