Sounds good. Especially if you can find a railway disaster that also involves a radiation incident! But seriously, railroad accidents will keep your channel busy for years, there are so many. This one reminds me of the Amtrak disaster in Philadelphia a few years ago where the engineer apparently got distracted, ran the train around a curve too fast and laid the coach cars out on the side of the tracks for a yard sale, passengers included.
this makes me so sad. i really think the driver was developing absence seizures, considering he had almost done this two times before but came to again quickly enough to stop. he probably didn’t even know he had had an absence seizure those two times, because if he had, he might have taken time off. i just don’t think it could be suicide from all we know about him, nor microsleeps. he didn’t protect his face before the impact, which humans do instinctively, even during a suicide. i just feel so bad that he likely had a medical issue that could be so easily missed. he and everyone on that train deserved better.
the reason i say absence seizure instead of something like a mini stroke is that in absence seizures you often freeze in place. i feel like a mini stroke would have made him slacken his grip on the dead mans switch
Saw a similar video on here a few years back that said the driver had suffered a head injury in WWII which was possibly exasperated by a fight he got into when he was a guard trying to catch a purse thief I think. And I was messaging back and forth with a retired tube man who said he spoke with colleagues who had known the driver at the time and he was known to have weird "freezing" episodes including once freezing in place for several minutes while eating his porridge in the staff canteen! Which they all treated as a joke as they where all young lads at the time and it was the 70's
@@abloogywoogywoo In the 1991 Union Sq wreck here in New York the intoxicated train operator overshot 3 stations in the Bronx, but the conductor did not report them and allowed him to speed down Lexington Ave at 45mph into a switch with a 5mph speed limit. Others must feel safe to be proactive in these situations, damn the consequences for your colleague.
literally just saw wonder's documentary on this yesterday. and gotta say, without all the overdramatization, your video comes off a lot more informative in half the time
Other channels concentrate on the human drama, which is fine, but I always come here for the facts-like the history of the line, which no other channel delivered.
Had a lecture about this accident at med school, unfortunately the last man to be rescued had been trapped for so long (they couldn't get him out before the girl next to him was amputated out) that he eventually died about a month after the accident from Crush syndrome.
@@patrickkparrker413 well I mean since it caused by being crushed it does kind of matter lol. I'm pretty sure it causes deterioration to the muscle tissue and can eventually cause renal failure if left untreated. I had actually never heard of it untill I researched it just then. I believe its caused by the nerve damage you received from the crushing and even the muscle swellings afterwards. Sometimes it can be caused by myoglobin, formed by the deterioration of muscle tissue due to being cut off from oxygen. Apparently your kidney really don't like to process the stuff that's released into the blood when your muscle becomes necrotic
According to the report, he still had his hands on the controls, so wouldn’t have raised his hands on impact, therefore making the reason even more confusing that on impact he was still in the driving position
If my husband was holding something when a seizure started, there was no way you could get it out. He was using a paring knife once, and managed to stab himself in the opposite hand during the seizure.
Yeah if head had lifted his hands before the collision, wouldn't that have triggered the dead man's switch? And they said there was no evidence that any brake systems had been activated. So I would think he still had his hand on that dead man switch at minimum.
@@fmulder6564 yeah exactly, and if it was a suicidal act or something, or if he was distracted, he'd have taken his hands off the controls instinctively just before impact.
The report detailed that the deadman’s handle was down and power applied. The control gear was affected by the loss of contact on the crossover then ran up to full power. One of the drivers colleagues noted he used a lot of sugar in his tea, and there a was a query regarding undiagnosed diabetes. With modern forensic science I’m still not sure we’d be certain.
As a train driver myself, i feel this may be from a microsleep or just falling asleep all together. Back then we really did not test for sleep apona so this could have been the cause. Daydreaming would be my other pick as it something you can easily drift into. Daydreaming/autopiloting can be very dangerous as you can easily slip into it without knowing. You need to train your mind to snap out of it the moment you start falling into it. The reason why is you can easily drive pass a signal at caution in plain view and not see it. Some people find it hard to understand why this happens to train drivers given our level of responsibility. After a while the act of driving a train loaded with people becomes normalized. It feels no different than driving my kids to school in the car. Train driving can also be boring so your mind can wander and this autopilot state occurs. This autopilot state is really dangerous because you will miss obvious things like the fact you are running out of track.
@@PlainlyDifficult our rolling stock does try to combat this with a vigilance system. If the drivers does not make an input into the controls within 30 seconds (accelerating doesn't count) a blue light will flash. You must acknowledge this light by either pressing the vigilance button or making an input into the controls. If you fail to acknowledge this light in 10 seconds a loud audio alarm will sound and if you fail to acknowledge that an emergency break application occurs. This vigilance system may have helped prevent this accident. You are 100% right it such a dangerous state to be in. I do my best to avoid it as I really do not wish to be in your next video :P (no offence lol)
I can only repeat that, I'm a light rail Tram operator in Germany. IT happened to me once that I approached much too quickly at the station. I had to brake harder, but I simply forgot that this station existed, I just didn't react to it that the stop is there, even though I saw it, I was wide awake.
I have had nowhere near that level of responsibility, but I know all about autopiloting. I used to be a retail manager. I usually worked the closing shift, and my store was 25.6 miles from home, nearly all on major highways, which were pretty empty at night. After a year or so of driving that route, I began to realize that I wasn't really recalling my drive home. I could remember everything I heard on the radio or what I was thinking about, but not really the drive itself. I had a few landmarks that I always was aware of (going from one interstate highway to the other, the airport, a major curve in the road, and my exit). I could never recall anything else about my drives. It probably didn't help that I hated being transferred out to that store, I hated my job, and I really hated that drive. It's amazing that I made it home, without incident, for 3.5 years.
Jago I'd add your excellent video on how Automated Train protection can go wrong too would be a useful reminder that automated train protection can still inherit the flaws of the designers (the human in the loop). Whilst modern TPS is a world away from the 1980's there's always the potential, and thankfully there's usually a large number of people trying to spot the holes in the design before we the public use them. ua-cam.com/video/y5mP72l4AXs/v-deo.html
I've heard about this before and always figured absent seizure. No idea if they can be triggered by light but the few times I've been on the underground you always have a bunch of fluorescent lights leading up to a platform that would cause a strobe effect on approach.
That's always been my "preferred" explanation but mostly because I had two whilst driving, two days apart at the same spot at almost the same time of day and they are seriously weird. Never had one before or since and the nearest I can get to an explanation is a low sun reflecting off something and something, something, something traffic light something. Coasting to a gentle halt in a Ford Sierra and ploughing into a wall in a train at 40mph having totally different consequences of course but if I had been driving a tube train at the time... Makes sense even if it's completely wrong.
@@daviddavidson2357 Thanks. I did go to see my GP and he basically said he was happy to refer me for tests but by far the most likely diagnosis would be "Buggered if I know" so I didn't bother. As driving was part of my work he signed me off for a week just to be on the safe side, told me it was probably best if I didn't drive at all for a week and that was the end of it. Apparently having one or two "wobblies" like that in an otherwise wobbly free life is pretty common and in an adult not worth worrying about. Could be anything from very minor TIA to a bad crisp.
Not sure how they could determine anything from the conductor's body considering he became a human pancake, but judging from his driving up to that point, he was either really distracted by a personal matter or was having a series of mini strokes. My judgy opinion of course. Either way, we know it wasn't radiation!☢
@@medler2110 What about the possible hypnotic effect of watching tunnel, station, tunnel, station, go by? I'll admit that I've lost track of where I was on the tube before because of that effect, and I doubt I'm the only one...
Nothing against the U.K. here, but let's not forget that the autopsy was a 1976 autopsy in the U.K... for better and/or worse. There is a limit even today about what we could ascertain from a post-mortem on a "human pancake"... AND fitting his WHOLE CAB into a 6-inch space is pretty well "pancake territory"... "Overshoots" needs a little more context. Is it "technically" overshot when the train is a few inches "off" or do we have to "miss by at least a foot to "score an overshoot"??? I'd say "medical" every time based on the evidence at hand... meaning something physically stopped him doing the job, and in the last moments he could do no more than raise his arms.. I ride a motorcycle, and always wear the gear... which has me intimately familiar with dehydration. Gear gets hot in fair weather... and foul weather just ain't good for riding.... SO yeah, I can see a bad case of dehydration contributing... BUT I'm not sure that would constitute the sum and total of "what went wrong"... I'm thinking more on the order of stroke or a cardiac event... even though they didn't find any such evidence... SOMETHING kept his hand off the brake handle. That's probably all we ever WILL know with any precision... Something made him raise his arms defensively instead of reaching for the brakes... ;o)
"Transfers all the train's momentum to the occupants" No, it transfers it to the thing it hit ... the passengers have their own momentum, which they keep, until they can brake (eg friction on the floor) or they hit something themselves (like the front of the carriage)
I think thats what he meant judging by the way the sentence was worded and what came before it, I just think it was a brain fart moment while writing the script that went unoticed
my mother was in a relationship with one of the victims of this disaster. Kinda weird to think I probably wouldnt have been born if it never happened. Still a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to the surviving family of all the people who lost their lives.
I remember this on the news when I was a teenager, and it was plastered over the newspapers for the rest of the week as well. Such a brave job by the rescue workers under extreme conditions, hats off to them all.
I remember it because I used to travel this train to work every day from Essex Rd to Moorgate. Fortunately for me we had moved away from the area of Essex Rd by the time it happened. Sure gave me the shivers!
My sisters school friend lost her brother in this crash. Jeff Benton. Lived just around the corner from us in Potters Bar. The father sadly never really got over it. Very sad.
There was a similar case in 2011 by Hordorf, Germany where a freight train driver did not stop Infront of a red signal and collided with a passanger train. Germany already had a system to stop trains from going past red Signals for decades, but it wasn't installed on that particular section yet.
I can still remember this as though it just happened yesterday. At the time I was a 15 year old doing my Duke of Edinburgh Award at my local fire station near to the Latimer school in Edmonton. I chose to do my bit of D of E with LFB . I happened to be there when they got to the motor man at Moorgate . There was a huge sense of emotion within the station at the time , it certainly left a very deep impression on me as well as it did on all LFB station crew there . Too such an extent I never choose a seat on the first or last carriage of any train even now some 47 years later .
Another one I knew you'd cover eventually. Accidents like these fill me with immense levels of respect and admiration for the emergency/rescue workers who respond to them, I simply can't imagine working in such horrendous conditions. As for the cause of Motorman Newson's failure to stop, it's likely we will never get a definitive answer, although some have cited transient global amnesia (or TGA) as a likely cause; it's at least in the realm of 'plausible' given the 2 platform overshoots in the days leading up to the crash as you mentioned. But like I say, we'll likely never get a definitive answer. On a much lighter note, it's nice to see a certain Mr. Hazzard getting a plug. ;)
i've had transient global amnesia! honestly, unless its onset was like, when he was in the middle of his day at work i don't think that could be it. usually it only lasts for less than a day, otherwise it isn't really transient anymore. he wouldn't have been able to even remember he had a daughter, let alone that he was gonna buy a car for her, had it hit him before he left for work.
As mundane and depressing as it is, I think by far the most likely answer is that he simply got distracted or just wasn't paying enough attention. There being something on his mind in general would more than adequately explain the repeat incidents. Yes, there are a whole boatload of other potentially plausible medical conditions, of varying probability, but realistically distraction is the most likely scenario.
I have already watched another video about this accident from one of those "horror" youtubers. Althought it wasn´t a bad video, it lacked many, if not the majority, of details in this video and was clearly more focused on the shock than the accident itself. It feels like he was talking about a different accident altogether! Thank you! This was a lesson i needed to remember: always listen to more than one source!
I was 10 years old in 1975 and living East London - the tube always gave me the creeps and this awful crash didn't help, a very informative and well-put-together video.
This was a featured article on Wikipedia just the other day; I had never heard of it before. The idea of it getting too hot in the tunnel to remove the bodies from the train is the almost the worst part, I can't imagine how horrible that would have been.
"an accident like Moorgate shouldn't happen again" then cutting to the picture of the Kirkby Merseyrail crash seems a bit unfair considering how different the two situations are. 1) everybody survived with minor injuries at worst 2) the train is above ground with no wall to hit in front of it, though the train did derail and hit the platform edge 3) the train was slowing down before the crash happened with the emergency brake applied before it hit the buffers. If the emergency brake wasn't applied like in the Moorgate crash, then it could well have turned into something much worse like Moorgate, but using it as a direct comparison just seems wrong to me. Otherwise, a great video, thank you.
Before moving away, back in Lancashire, I'd often use the trains from Colne to Nelson, Burnley, Blackburn and beyond, and I'd always sit in the rear of the DMUs (usually the now retired Class 142 Pacers), as having seen enough train disaster documentaries plus news on rail accidents (E.G. Potters Bar) over the years, being in the rear seemed that in the event of an accident, the rear carriage(s) would be more likely to survive, assuming they weren't rear-ended of course by a stray train...
Well, the average DMU train (Diesel Multiple Unit) here in the UK is usually two carriages, so, the "middle" is pretty much non-existent, and I prefer to not sit on the onboard toilet (which resides at the middle of the train) for my journey thanks... :P
Heh, as a knee-high kid I rode the very same trains, usually to Preston so we could go on towards exotic places like Blackpool [which is exotic when compared to Accy]. I recall I used to stand in the gangway as I was always amazed at how much bounce there was between the 2 pacer cars. Parents used to sit in the rear cars when they could and I never really knew why until I got older. Although, to be fair, if you were in an accident in a pacer I doubt seating position would matter all that much.
@@madcat_UK Yeah, there were days I'd be on a Pacer watching the joints between carriages stretching about and clattering away, sometimes the whole train bouncing so hard I thought it was about to de-rail, I certainly don't miss them, though I do miss having Colne station on my doorstep... :P
It's interesting that he was previously known to be careful, it might be that he knew that he had difficulty confusing and for that reason was careful. When you have a disability, you tend to get used to finding alternatives to manage symptoms- even when you're not aware of the name for the disability. But it looks like we'll never know for certain.
I remember sleeping on the wheel on motorway when i was having very bad sleeping problems and severe work-related stress. After 3rd time in 2 weeks, i went on 4 week vacation... Maybe Newson was just too tired?
Why not protect his head as people do instinctively why raise his hands above head during pancake phase? Or did hands go up as result of impact? Get out the crash test dummies
Driving a subway train is way harder psychologically than most people think it is. You are doing the exact same thing every day for years. A subway tunnel is a dark, eery, and inhospitable place with no natural light whatsoever. The driver is constantly looking at the vanishing point down the tunnel. I am absolutely convinced that this poor train driver got hypnotized and lost all his senses. For several seconds he must have been in a trans-like state. Unable to react to the terrible fate that awaited him.
As a former trainee train driver in Melbourne Australia, this is the clearest and most logical explanation of the Westinghouse Brake System I have seen. Thank you!
I used to work with a retired fireman who'd been stationed in the Liverpool Street / Farringdon / Old Street area of London during the 60's, 70's and early 80's. He was a tough guy, and would talk about his time in the brigade all day, and the stories were truly great and very interesting. He attended Moorgate on the day of the disaster and in the days afterwards, he rarely talked about it and never in any detail other than to say how hot it was and how unpleasant the work was. His personality changed on the very rare occasions he recalled it. I think it's fair to say he was scarred by Moorgate above and beyond any other job he attended, Very sad for each and every person involved.
Geez, two platform overshoots in the preceding week? I've been a train driver for 13 years, and I've had two platform overshoots in that entire time. Two in a week is a LOT! Also, it's always nice to see how we've learned from previous accidents to improve safety. Thankfully the trains I operate are all far safer than this one.
i wonder why nobody thought about filling the overshoot tunnel with a compressible barrier designed to brake a full train instead of having a solid wall at the end that stops it instantly
I mean, under most circumstances, that's the purpose of the sand drag. The drag is both effective and nearly error-proof once installed, as there is no interaction that heeds to take place at all, it simply works by physics. Unfortuantely, there's a limit to *how much* you can slow down that enormous kind of mass in that amount of distance. A longer drag might well have done the job, but it was obviously intended to catch an over-run, not a complete, full-speed train just going at operating speed square into the end wall.
@@RCAvhstape It won't work in so short a tunnel... That said, we DO have things designed to stop some very heavy things, not exclusive to 18-wheelers... SO I'm only estimating here, but it would have to work something like a "Runaway Ramp" only designed around trains instead of trucks... AND you COULD make it damn effective, but it's going to take more space to stop a loaded train WITHOUT killing most of the passengers. I mean... the wall and sand drag DID effectively stop that train, too... The hard part is making that stop "survivable"... which it largely was. Technically, we could say "It did its job"... but only "technically". AND no, I don't know how much more tunnel should've been or would've been used for the sake of safely stopping the train. They went "the technical route" on that problem with more brakes and trip-cock devices. The only real "benefit" to filling a tunnel about half full of sand mounds for a quarter mile is that there is NO technology to rely upon, no human factor to f*** it up, and it WILL work every time exactly as it's designed... The "Runaway Ramps" also have a cost. I'm not sure how high, but a trucker who hits one tends to start paying $40 K... in fines just for the incident... last I was told, anyway. ;o)
Hello John, This is one of your many fans here in the US (Atlanta, GA). I always enjoy your videos and look forward to new releases! Your style is straightforward and exact. Keep up the excellent work! We in the US appreciate you.
My 5 year old is obsessed with disasters. When he's a little older I'll introduce him to your videos. I've been to Moorgate countless times but don't remember seeing any mention of the accident in the station. Also bizarre you could just buy morphine in Boots in the 70s
It's probably for the better that there isn't any mention, or just very little. That would scare off so many customers even though trains are much safer now.
@@Sanas_Shy_Language I still enter trains from the back or middle. The 7/7 bombing scares me about the underground. There's barely any police at these stations too.
I used to use Moorgate from time to time as well and I couldn't work out what had happened until I realised that it was on the British Rail section of the station, not the normal Tube lines. There's a line that comes down from Hertford to Moorgate. The tunnels for it are sized for overground rolling stock and so are larger than standard deep level tube lines. This is one of the reasons that the accident was so bad, as the oversized tunnels allowed room for the tube sized carriages to ride over each other. These days only overground stock is used on those lines.
@@Sanas_Shy_Language There are actually two memorials; one up the road on the SW corner of a nearby park, plus another unveiled in 2014 at the Moorgate station building.
i think the common belief is that it could have been caused by newson having ministrokes, causing him to lose control of his body and hence not react until right at the end. ministrokes (or transient ischemic attack) are the result of loss of blood flow to parts of the brain. they can last a few hours or only a few minutes, so it's plausible that he may have only had a very short ministroke that caused him to be unable to see or even think clearly. it's also more common in people 55 and over, and can be induced by any manner of things from high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, diabetes and even a type of heart condition called atrial fibrillation. it's a shame that we'll never really know but it is certainly fun to speculate :P (edited to add extra info)
I'd say that's plausible, if only from having witnessed a family friend who suffered from ministrokes. Seeing a concert pianist suddenly freeze while rehearsing, with her usually warm, expressive face blank, and having to toss your flute so you can run and prop her up before she falls off the piano bench is unnerving to put it mildly, even when you know what's happening; having that happen to the guy driving your train is a terrifying idea!
Also, it could have sadly been as mild as a sudden migraine. I’ve had them, and when they hit they can momentarily leave you so floored you can’t see or think properly, even if it’s only for a second or two, in the situation of Moorgate, it would have been a second or two too long of a blackout
@@dancingcarapace i'm sorry you've had to deal with them, they suck ass honestly. my partner gets bad migraines all the time and it can make it so hard to do normal tasks. it definitely could've been the case here too, although as far as i'm aware he didn't show any sort of history with having them. sometimes these things come at the worst possible time though so who knows.
@@dancingcarapace Oh yes, sudden migraines are excruciating! Like an ice pick going in the eye socket, and coming out the back of your head... And with that pain he'd likely have squeezed the dead-man lever until they hit the wall, because you just tense up everywhere, at least until you either throw up or pass out. Migraines are the worst!
As someone who suffers from OCD and is a fan of yours, my respect for you has risen highly. Thank you for your help trying to bring awareness to the disease and breaking the stigma. OCD Affects many many lives and in significant ways, and with your help hopefully we can get more treatments. Thank you
Wow the level of research here is incredible! Not a single other UA-camr in the world would possibly go so deep into researching a rail related topic, without being into rail transport already, you sir are a madlad.
There's hundreds of ways they could design is so this couldn't happen. I don't understand why in the hell they relied on a single person for everything.
It was the 70’s . Cheep automation wasn’t a thing. Notice that even today Crossrail is running about two years late mainly because of the testing and refinement of its automated control systems. If a system , such as the 1930s tube stock, has worked for about half a century without a major accident what would motivate a cash strapped organisation to invest more in safety ?
I was a med. student back then at one of the hospitals involved. It was the first time any of the London hospitals had used their 'Major Disaster' plans for real. It was chaos, basically and the medical response was slow and badly organised - although obviously lives were saved. Missing and/or broken equipment, no facilities for proper anaesthetics in the tunnel, shortages of morphine, plasma, oxygen and Entonox and above all, the medical staff winging it because they'd never done it before. "Lessons were Learned" as they say. The disaster plans of every British hospital now include some lessons from Moorgate.
I remember seeing a short segment on this accident on a DVD of Extreme Machines: Super Trains as a Kid. It was quite vague about the location and year of the disaster but featured an interview with a passenger that survived the accident. Apparently she regularly rode in the front carriage and chose that day to hop in a different car, saving her life.
A very well produced take on the tragedy that I have read about elsewhere, the conditions must have been horrendous for both victims and rescuers. Moorgate Protection is the legacy, let's hope it prevents similar incidents in future. Excellent video Mr Plainly.
I believe Jago Hazzard has made a video about this as well, but always happy to see an alternative take on it. And I'm certainly always happy to see more railway disasters from you, of course.
Qxir's video about this disaster popped up my feed this morning and it was first I'd ever heard of it, now your video is on my feed this afternoon. the universe really wants me to know about this tragedy 😳
My dad passed through Moorgate tube station just a few minutes after the crash and, I think, before the emergency services had arrived. He worked near to the station and had come down on the Northern line from Euston (so there was no chance he would have been on this train). I'll have to get more details from him next time I see him.
On submarines ... sorry subways or metros .... there was an incident in Stockholm, Sweden, when the the T-bana (subways) was expanded north. Workers that were digging the tunnel were trapped when the ground behind them collapsed. After some rescue attempts they were eventually freed from their underground prison. All workers survived but Sweden were in a tight grip while rescuers were working their way to the trapped men. As always a great video with loads of into!👍👍👍👍👍
Sweet new PD video..my lucky day...not so much for the people in this story... Love your stuff!! Been constantly watching them all. Keep it up Thanks for the quality entertainment and education
*I WAS ONLY 5* when this happened - but I can still remember the news reports and the public enquiry afterwards... I remember the endless discussion about did he do it on purpose / but he had the money for his daughter's car with him.
17:30 - no fault by anyone else. A finding that will kill others later. My findings: Insufficient speed control on approach to that station. Insufficient excess tunnel length beyond the track. Insufficient excess track. Insufficient safety systems on the railway & trains. NEWSON WAS NOT TO BLAME. He was merely the final (only?) safety feature on the system. So many other actions could have happened to prevent this.
15:13 I like how this is worded in such a way that there was consideration given to the possibility that the train driver had left the cab via the windshield-direct route, before settling on the boring, old "when the tube you're standing in becomes suddenly volume-less, you become toothpaste, but not a moment before that" explanation.
I would think road hypnosis or some sort of mini stroke would be very likely. Although even something as seemingly minor as a drop in blood sugar could have caused him to gray out without taking his hands off the controls. With the amount of time it took to reach his body, there would not have been much evidence left of several possible medical issues.
I think that I saw a documentary where it was theorized that the shape of the tunnel could have had a psychedelic effect on the driver who could have been more susceptible to it.
There is a thing called a silent heart attack. I’m not sure if it leaves any signs of happening or not, but I believe there are some types of seizures that don’t leave any traces either.
I've watched many videos about this terrible tragedy and you managed to find a different angle, with some interesting facts and figures about the trains. Thank you. Sadly, we'll never know why Leslie Newsom's train crashed. 😓
One thing I thought of when looking at this crash - if Newson wanted to commit suicide how could he have known that Harris wasn't just going to apply the emergency brake in the guard's van when he saw how fast they were going? Newson had no idea that Harris was reading a paper in the carriage.....
My grandad was ambulance service incident officer at the moorgate disaster. I remember as a kid him describing working his way through those crushed carriges with the firebrigade. Poor sods
This video played randomly after a vid by Fascinating Horror. And I seen where you were running a fundraiser for OCD. As someone with OCD,I definitely donated. OCD is terrible,I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Not even someone I think I hate,like the first person to use autotune. Thank you for setting up a fundraiser and bringing some light to this terrible mental illness. Great vid,I also subbed.
Northern City Line always seems to have bad luck. Remember the time a construction company managed to drill through the tunnel ceiling a few years back? Good a driver noticed something was happening, could have been much worse.
every 27 days , the energy of the eruption of the krakatoa volcano is emitted , in just heat , from plain oil consumption (according to world oil consumption and machine efficiency to convert it to other forms of energy ) .
Interesting you are covering this now. Here in NYC we are noting the 30th anniversary of a similar accident on our system near Union Sq. station. Only now are we putting in a communication based control system, though most of the system is still controlled like this.
A few points. 1. Motormen were trained NEVER to use the Westinghouse as the stopping brake at a terminal station as “hitting the mark” is important to ensure the train is fully in the platform signalling section (train berth) in order to get a release of the road behind to set for departures, the inability to get a partial release of the westy was one reason we were drilled to ALWAYS use the EP brake at this point. So theories about difficulties with the Westinghouse are likely to be misleading, besides which, having got it wrong myself as many others have at some point especially in training,it’s a trivial thing to stop and blowdown/recharge, Or even throw off the Westinghouse and use the ep instead, it would still stop the train. 2. I have doubts about the signalmans’ estimate of the speed, the train in fact traversed a crossover to enter the right hand platform (having travelled via the left hand tunnel bore), from experience as both guard and driver this traversing at that sort of speed would have been violent enough to alert the guard that there was something wrong, additionally it would have “unsettled” the driver who was seated, this “seat” was actually a narrow fold down device with zero side support, further I seem to recall reports that the Master Controller was found jammed by the impact in the “Series” position, - until the 82 tube stock all LU trains had the same 3 positions regardless of Controller type being “Shunt” (very low speed depot operation) “Series” used for reduced speed working eg when running behind clearing signals from a train ahead, and Parallel, which provides full voltage for maximum (line) speed. If reports are correct a 38 in series wouldn’t do the sort of speeds the signalman reported. A couple of other things, “ Moorgate controls”? Never heard the term in 3 training courses at White City Training Centre, or out on the road, they were called by their Rule Book terminology, Approach Control Signalling, although some drivers referred to them as “platform policemen”. The brake reservoir that provides the “application air” (my term for clarity) on the Westinghouse brake is the Auxiliary Reservoir, when learning the flows of air we referred to the air used to charge the brake cylinders as auxiliary air. Platforms also have a fixed trainstop now so that going too far past the stopping mark will trip the train I’ve driven 38s when they returned to the Northern line during the mid 80s plus the 56/59/62 stocks that were derived from the design. They were capable sturdy machines (some of which only finished service on the Isle of Man early this year!!) we will never know what happened, that was the conclusion of the report and is an opinion voiced by the instructors that ran the training courses I took in my time there. I feel for M/M Newsomes family who had to face the fallout from the events of that morning. I don’t for one minute buy that he was just confused about where he was, the crossovers alone would have reminded him. It was, and remains a tragedy.
Realistically, it wouldn't be hard at all to completely automate a railway line. It would just cost a lot, hence why few do it. But sure let's play with self driving cars that move one or two occupants.
Id love to see more content like this, it shows that even something we take as simple and easy like a subway has had disasters all in the same with dams and powerplants. Love the way you structure your videos, it removes a portion of the morbidity while keeping all the educational parts in!
my theory personally is to do with the brake systems. As stated previously in the video if you overcharged the system you had to release the brakes to clear it, what if driver Newsom was in the middle of trying to purge the extra pressure right up to the end? That would explain why the brake handle would be in 'release' or 'off' in the wreckage.
if he had "overcharged" the system then the train would have been braking already. Upon releasing the train wouldnt just pick speed back up again but would maintain the speed it had. So assuming he locked the brakes its unlikely that he would still be going 35-40 after releasing them and he would have no reason to release them going that speed that close to the end. Also it doesnt take long to purge the air even if you do overcharge them. So while its a theory its just got too many problems to really hold much merit.... Also i may have misunderstood but i believe the train had two forms of brakes. One allows for multiple brakes so its safe to assume it would be the main braking system where as the system your referring to would be more of a back up.
Please more train crash content it's amazing to watch and really interesting lessons learnt and what was put into place to prevent reoccurrence (normally)
My grandad was one of the firemen who went in to this incident. He never said much about his experience , being old school Englishman , it wasn’t the done thing to talk about things like this openly. He just said in a typical British manner “it was bloody awful” RIP Grandad you legend! I wish we could talk again I miss you loads mate
I just wanted to let you know that your videos are amazing and more informative than anything I have ever seen on TV, and that you are probably one of only 3 channels I have the notification bell turned on for because I just dont want to miss any of your videos :) Thank you for creating such amazing content so regularly
I hope you enjoy the video!!
Want to see more Railway Disasters let me know in the comments!!
All disasters are good.
Er...
Edit: Bangquiao dam disaster! It's a big 'un.
Any disasters that require your engineering expertise to explain to us ignorant plebs is welcome ❤
Sounds good. Especially if you can find a railway disaster that also involves a radiation incident! But seriously, railroad accidents will keep your channel busy for years, there are so many. This one reminds me of the Amtrak disaster in Philadelphia a few years ago where the engineer apparently got distracted, ran the train around a curve too fast and laid the coach cars out on the side of the tracks for a yard sale, passengers included.
Also, the Washington DC Metro collision in 2009 comes to mind, where one train telescoped into another and turned it into a charnel house.
I live in London when this happens
this makes me so sad. i really think the driver was developing absence seizures, considering he had almost done this two times before but came to again quickly enough to stop. he probably didn’t even know he had had an absence seizure those two times, because if he had, he might have taken time off. i just don’t think it could be suicide from all we know about him, nor microsleeps. he didn’t protect his face before the impact, which humans do instinctively, even during a suicide. i just feel so bad that he likely had a medical issue that could be so easily missed. he and everyone on that train deserved better.
the reason i say absence seizure instead of something like a mini stroke is that in absence seizures you often freeze in place. i feel like a mini stroke would have made him slacken his grip on the dead mans switch
@@ExperimentIV also... If was suicide he probably would have accelerated.
The moment they realized he was overshooting platforms on previous runs was the moment he should've been checked in for a full medical examination.
Saw a similar video on here a few years back that said the driver had suffered a head injury in WWII which was possibly exasperated by a fight he got into when he was a guard trying to catch a purse thief I think. And I was messaging back and forth with a retired tube man who said he spoke with colleagues who had known the driver at the time and he was known to have weird "freezing" episodes including once freezing in place for several minutes while eating his porridge in the staff canteen! Which they all treated as a joke as they where all young lads at the time and it was the 70's
@@abloogywoogywoo In the 1991 Union Sq wreck here in New York the intoxicated train operator overshot 3 stations in the Bronx, but the conductor did not report them and allowed him to speed down Lexington Ave at 45mph into a switch with a 5mph speed limit.
Others must feel safe to be proactive in these situations, damn the consequences for your colleague.
honestly the most disturbing and morbid part for me is hearing the 3 foot cab got crushed to 6 inches, i cant even imagine seeing that
Rest in pieces am I right
@@planespottingpro I think they are more in 1 piece, a 6 inch wide piece
literally just saw wonder's documentary on this yesterday.
and gotta say, without all the overdramatization, your video comes off a lot more informative in half the time
Thank you!
Wonder, IIRC, has a lot of people screaming.
Kinda like the Turbo potato 3000!! Lol love the name
Other channels concentrate on the human drama, which is fine, but I always come here for the facts-like the history of the line, which no other channel delivered.
wait, wonder had an upload about this? do you have a link?
Had a lecture about this accident at med school, unfortunately the last man to be rescued had been trapped for so long (they couldn't get him out before the girl next to him was amputated out) that he eventually died about a month after the accident from Crush syndrome.
Damn, that really sucks, but at least he hopefully got to say goodbye to his family and friends that way :(
Crash syndrome, sake what next .
@@patrickkparrker413 crush not crash
@@tadcox6345 Same difference.
@@patrickkparrker413 well I mean since it caused by being crushed it does kind of matter lol. I'm pretty sure it causes deterioration to the muscle tissue and can eventually cause renal failure if left untreated. I had actually never heard of it untill I researched it just then. I believe its caused by the nerve damage you received from the crushing and even the muscle swellings afterwards. Sometimes it can be caused by myoglobin, formed by the deterioration of muscle tissue due to being cut off from oxygen. Apparently your kidney really don't like to process the stuff that's released into the blood when your muscle becomes necrotic
According to the report, he still had his hands on the controls, so wouldn’t have raised his hands on impact, therefore making the reason even more confusing that on impact he was still in the driving position
maybe an absence seizure
If my husband was holding something when a seizure started, there was no way you could get it out. He was using a paring knife once, and managed to stab himself in the opposite hand during the seizure.
Yeah if head had lifted his hands before the collision, wouldn't that have triggered the dead man's switch? And they said there was no evidence that any brake systems had been activated. So I would think he still had his hand on that dead man switch at minimum.
@@fmulder6564 yeah exactly, and if it was a suicidal act or something, or if he was distracted, he'd have taken his hands off the controls instinctively just before impact.
The report detailed that the deadman’s handle was down and power applied. The control gear was affected by the loss of contact on the crossover then ran up to full power. One of the drivers colleagues noted he used a lot of sugar in his tea, and there a
was a query regarding undiagnosed diabetes. With modern forensic science I’m still not sure we’d be certain.
As a train driver myself, i feel this may be from a microsleep or just falling asleep all together. Back then we really did not test for sleep apona so this could have been the cause. Daydreaming would be my other pick as it something you can easily drift into. Daydreaming/autopiloting can be very dangerous as you can easily slip into it without knowing. You need to train your mind to snap out of it the moment you start falling into it. The reason why is you can easily drive pass a signal at caution in plain view and not see it. Some people find it hard to understand why this happens to train drivers given our level of responsibility. After a while the act of driving a train loaded with people becomes normalized. It feels no different than driving my kids to school in the car. Train driving can also be boring so your mind can wander and this autopilot state occurs. This autopilot state is really dangerous because you will miss obvious things like the fact you are running out of track.
Something we were always taught was about unconscious competence dangerous state to be in
@@PlainlyDifficult our rolling stock does try to combat this with a vigilance system. If the drivers does not make an input into the controls within 30 seconds (accelerating doesn't count) a blue light will flash. You must acknowledge this light by either pressing the vigilance button or making an input into the controls. If you fail to acknowledge this light in 10 seconds a loud audio alarm will sound and if you fail to acknowledge that an emergency break application occurs. This vigilance system may have helped prevent this accident. You are 100% right it such a dangerous state to be in. I do my best to avoid it as I really do not wish to be in your next video :P (no offence lol)
I can only repeat that, I'm a light rail Tram operator in Germany. IT happened to me once that I approached much too quickly at the station. I had to brake harder, but I simply forgot that this station existed, I just didn't react to it that the stop is there, even though I saw it, I was wide awake.
I have had nowhere near that level of responsibility, but I know all about autopiloting. I used to be a retail manager. I usually worked the closing shift, and my store was 25.6 miles from home, nearly all on major highways, which were pretty empty at night. After a year or so of driving that route, I began to realize that I wasn't really recalling my drive home. I could remember everything I heard on the radio or what I was thinking about, but not really the drive itself. I had a few landmarks that I always was aware of (going from one interstate highway to the other, the airport, a major curve in the road, and my exit). I could never recall anything else about my drives. It probably didn't help that I hated being transferred out to that store, I hated my job, and I really hated that drive. It's amazing that I made it home, without incident, for 3.5 years.
Cheers for the shout!
Just watched your analysis of this last week actually.
Love your videos dude, bringing a niche topic to wider audiences, and actually making it very interesting!
Thought I was re watching your video on it lol
Jago I'd add your excellent video on how Automated Train protection can go wrong too would be a useful reminder that automated train protection can still inherit the flaws of the designers (the human in the loop). Whilst modern TPS is a world away from the 1980's there's always the potential, and thankfully there's usually a large number of people trying to spot the holes in the design before we the public use them. ua-cam.com/video/y5mP72l4AXs/v-deo.html
I was thinking I had seen a video about this recently.
I've heard about this before and always figured absent seizure.
No idea if they can be triggered by light but the few times I've been on the underground you always have a bunch of fluorescent lights leading up to a platform that would cause a strobe effect on approach.
Absence seizures that are triggered by photosensitivity are rare but it is possible.
That's always been my "preferred" explanation but mostly because I had two whilst driving, two days apart at the same spot at almost the same time of day and they are seriously weird. Never had one before or since and the nearest I can get to an explanation is a low sun reflecting off something and something, something, something traffic light something.
Coasting to a gentle halt in a Ford Sierra and ploughing into a wall in a train at 40mph having totally different consequences of course but if I had been driving a tube train at the time... Makes sense even if it's completely wrong.
@@AnthonyHandcock Good to hear you're okay.
@@daviddavidson2357 Thanks. I did go to see my GP and he basically said he was happy to refer me for tests but by far the most likely diagnosis would be "Buggered if I know" so I didn't bother. As driving was part of my work he signed me off for a week just to be on the safe side, told me it was probably best if I didn't drive at all for a week and that was the end of it. Apparently having one or two "wobblies" like that in an otherwise wobbly free life is pretty common and in an adult not worth worrying about. Could be anything from very minor TIA to a bad crisp.
I have absence seizures yes they can be caused from over exposure to light
Not sure how they could determine anything from the conductor's body considering he became a human pancake, but judging from his driving up to that point, he was either really distracted by a personal matter or was having a series of mini strokes. My judgy opinion of course. Either way, we know it wasn't radiation!☢
Moorgate was a vital point of evolution for investigators, but it still left a lot to be desired
could have been absence seizures as well
@@medler2110 What about the possible hypnotic effect of watching tunnel, station, tunnel, station, go by? I'll admit that I've lost track of where I was on the tube before because of that effect, and I doubt I'm the only one...
Nothing against the U.K. here, but let's not forget that the autopsy was a 1976 autopsy in the U.K... for better and/or worse. There is a limit even today about what we could ascertain from a post-mortem on a "human pancake"... AND fitting his WHOLE CAB into a 6-inch space is pretty well "pancake territory"...
"Overshoots" needs a little more context. Is it "technically" overshot when the train is a few inches "off" or do we have to "miss by at least a foot to "score an overshoot"???
I'd say "medical" every time based on the evidence at hand... meaning something physically stopped him doing the job, and in the last moments he could do no more than raise his arms..
I ride a motorcycle, and always wear the gear... which has me intimately familiar with dehydration. Gear gets hot in fair weather... and foul weather just ain't good for riding....
SO yeah, I can see a bad case of dehydration contributing... BUT I'm not sure that would constitute the sum and total of "what went wrong"... I'm thinking more on the order of stroke or a cardiac event... even though they didn't find any such evidence... SOMETHING kept his hand off the brake handle. That's probably all we ever WILL know with any precision... Something made him raise his arms defensively instead of reaching for the brakes... ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 The other issue is the body had been sitting in 40C heat for four days. That does rather increase decomposition rates.
"Transfers all the train's momentum to the occupants" No, it transfers it to the thing it hit ... the passengers have their own momentum, which they keep, until they can brake (eg friction on the floor) or they hit something themselves (like the front of the carriage)
Thanks I was wondering about that
Technically correct, the best kind of correct 👌
So it’s inertia
I think thats what he meant judging by the way the sentence was worded and what came before it, I just think it was a brain fart moment while writing the script that went unoticed
@@ilcubo32 inertia describes an object's resistance to change in motion (or lack of motion), and momentum describes how much motion it has
@15:05 When mentioned that the front cab went from three feet down to six inches, I actually winced.
And his head was through the window which means that it was splattered like a waterballon full of clay
Yeah...
So literally doing an autopsy on mincemeat .......
my mother was in a relationship with one of the victims of this disaster. Kinda weird to think I probably wouldnt have been born if it never happened. Still a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to the surviving family of all the people who lost their lives.
.. why would you not have been born if it didn’t happen? If it didn’t happen then nobody dies
@@kenhammscousin4716 She didnt meet my father until afterwards
I remember this on the news when I was a teenager, and it was plastered over the newspapers for the rest of the week as well. Such a brave job by the rescue workers under extreme conditions, hats off to them all.
I remember it because I used to travel this train to work every day from Essex Rd to Moorgate. Fortunately for me we had moved away from the area of Essex Rd by the time it happened. Sure gave me the shivers!
My sisters school friend lost her brother in this crash. Jeff Benton. Lived just around the corner from us in Potters Bar. The father sadly never really got over it. Very sad.
Very sad
There was a similar case in 2011 by Hordorf, Germany where a freight train driver did not stop Infront of a red signal and collided with a passanger train. Germany already had a system to stop trains from going past red Signals for decades, but it wasn't installed on that particular section yet.
I can still remember this as though it just happened yesterday.
At the time I was a 15 year old doing my Duke of Edinburgh Award at my local fire station near to the Latimer school in Edmonton. I chose to do my bit of D of E with LFB . I happened to be there when they got to the motor man at Moorgate .
There was a huge sense of emotion within the station at the time , it certainly left a very deep impression on me as well as it did on all LFB station crew there . Too such an extent I never choose a seat on the first or last carriage of any train even now some 47 years later .
Another one I knew you'd cover eventually. Accidents like these fill me with immense levels of respect and admiration for the emergency/rescue workers who respond to them, I simply can't imagine working in such horrendous conditions. As for the cause of Motorman Newson's failure to stop, it's likely we will never get a definitive answer, although some have cited transient global amnesia (or TGA) as a likely cause; it's at least in the realm of 'plausible' given the 2 platform overshoots in the days leading up to the crash as you mentioned. But like I say, we'll likely never get a definitive answer.
On a much lighter note, it's nice to see a certain Mr. Hazzard getting a plug. ;)
i've had transient global amnesia! honestly, unless its onset was like, when he was in the middle of his day at work i don't think that could be it. usually it only lasts for less than a day, otherwise it isn't really transient anymore. he wouldn't have been able to even remember he had a daughter, let alone that he was gonna buy a car for her, had it hit him before he left for work.
As mundane and depressing as it is, I think by far the most likely answer is that he simply got distracted or just wasn't paying enough attention. There being something on his mind in general would more than adequately explain the repeat incidents. Yes, there are a whole boatload of other potentially plausible medical conditions, of varying probability, but realistically distraction is the most likely scenario.
I have already watched another video about this accident from one of those "horror" youtubers.
Althought it wasn´t a bad video, it lacked many, if not the majority, of details in this video and was clearly more focused on the shock than the accident itself. It feels like he was talking about a different accident altogether!
Thank you! This was a lesson i needed to remember: always listen to more than one source!
Thank you!
I was 10 years old in 1975 and living East London - the tube always gave me the creeps and this awful crash didn't help, a very informative and well-put-together video.
This was a featured article on Wikipedia just the other day; I had never heard of it before. The idea of it getting too hot in the tunnel to remove the bodies from the train is the almost the worst part, I can't imagine how horrible that would have been.
"an accident like Moorgate shouldn't happen again" then cutting to the picture of the Kirkby Merseyrail crash seems a bit unfair considering how different the two situations are.
1) everybody survived with minor injuries at worst
2) the train is above ground with no wall to hit in front of it, though the train did derail and hit the platform edge
3) the train was slowing down before the crash happened with the emergency brake applied before it hit the buffers.
If the emergency brake wasn't applied like in the Moorgate crash, then it could well have turned into something much worse like Moorgate, but using it as a direct comparison just seems wrong to me. Otherwise, a great video, thank you.
Before moving away, back in Lancashire, I'd often use the trains from Colne to Nelson, Burnley, Blackburn and beyond, and I'd always sit in the rear of the DMUs (usually the now retired Class 142 Pacers), as having seen enough train disaster documentaries plus news on rail accidents (E.G. Potters Bar) over the years, being in the rear seemed that in the event of an accident, the rear carriage(s) would be more likely to survive, assuming they weren't rear-ended of course by a stray train...
So maybe it might be better to stay in the middle section somewhere... :)
Well, the average DMU train (Diesel Multiple Unit) here in the UK is usually two carriages, so, the "middle" is pretty much non-existent, and I prefer to not sit on the onboard toilet (which resides at the middle of the train) for my journey thanks... :P
@@twocvbloke That's really wise! :)
Heh, as a knee-high kid I rode the very same trains, usually to Preston so we could go on towards exotic places like Blackpool [which is exotic when compared to Accy]. I recall I used to stand in the gangway as I was always amazed at how much bounce there was between the 2 pacer cars. Parents used to sit in the rear cars when they could and I never really knew why until I got older.
Although, to be fair, if you were in an accident in a pacer I doubt seating position would matter all that much.
@@madcat_UK Yeah, there were days I'd be on a Pacer watching the joints between carriages stretching about and clattering away, sometimes the whole train bouncing so hard I thought it was about to de-rail, I certainly don't miss them, though I do miss having Colne station on my doorstep... :P
It's interesting that he was previously known to be careful, it might be that he knew that he had difficulty confusing and for that reason was careful. When you have a disability, you tend to get used to finding alternatives to manage symptoms- even when you're not aware of the name for the disability. But it looks like we'll never know for certain.
I remember sleeping on the wheel on motorway when i was having very bad sleeping problems and severe work-related stress. After 3rd time in 2 weeks, i went on 4 week vacation...
Maybe Newson was just too tired?
Why not protect his head as people do instinctively why raise his hands above head during pancake phase? Or did hands go up as result of impact? Get out the crash test dummies
@@WindTurbineSyndrome maybe he was sleeping standing up...
@@xponen no, they are saying he moved his hands above his head before the impact(or maybe after ig) which most people wouldnt do while sleeping
Driving a subway train is way harder psychologically than most people think it is. You are doing the exact same thing every day for years. A subway tunnel is a dark, eery, and inhospitable place with no natural light whatsoever. The driver is constantly looking at the vanishing point down the tunnel. I am absolutely convinced that this poor train driver got hypnotized and lost all his senses. For several seconds he must have been in a trans-like state. Unable to react to the terrible fate that awaited him.
I love the technical breakdown of the brake systems, incorporating some classic PD diagrams
Thank you!
As a former trainee train driver in Melbourne Australia, this is the clearest and most logical explanation of the Westinghouse Brake System I have seen. Thank you!
I used to work with a retired fireman who'd been stationed in the Liverpool Street / Farringdon / Old Street area of London during the 60's, 70's and early 80's. He was a tough guy, and would talk about his time in the brigade all day, and the stories were truly great and very interesting. He attended Moorgate on the day of the disaster and in the days afterwards, he rarely talked about it and never in any detail other than to say how hot it was and how unpleasant the work was. His personality changed on the very rare occasions he recalled it. I think it's fair to say he was scarred by Moorgate above and beyond any other job he attended, Very sad for each and every person involved.
Yes please with more technical details on train and equipment working.
Thank you
Geez, two platform overshoots in the preceding week? I've been a train driver for 13 years, and I've had two platform overshoots in that entire time. Two in a week is a LOT!
Also, it's always nice to see how we've learned from previous accidents to improve safety. Thankfully the trains I operate are all far safer than this one.
i wonder why nobody thought about filling the overshoot tunnel with a compressible barrier designed to brake a full train instead of having a solid wall at the end that stops it instantly
We develop better safety systems only when we notice we need them.
That tends to be when something really bad happens.
I'd like to see what that would look like and how it would work in such a short stretch of tunnel.
@@RCAvhstape just guesing here but maybe a hydraulic 'catch' of some sort ?
I mean, under most circumstances, that's the purpose of the sand drag. The drag is both effective and nearly error-proof once installed, as there is no interaction that heeds to take place at all, it simply works by physics. Unfortuantely, there's a limit to *how much* you can slow down that enormous kind of mass in that amount of distance. A longer drag might well have done the job, but it was obviously intended to catch an over-run, not a complete, full-speed train just going at operating speed square into the end wall.
@@RCAvhstape It won't work in so short a tunnel...
That said, we DO have things designed to stop some very heavy things, not exclusive to 18-wheelers... SO I'm only estimating here, but it would have to work something like a "Runaway Ramp" only designed around trains instead of trucks... AND you COULD make it damn effective, but it's going to take more space to stop a loaded train WITHOUT killing most of the passengers.
I mean... the wall and sand drag DID effectively stop that train, too... The hard part is making that stop "survivable"... which it largely was. Technically, we could say "It did its job"... but only "technically".
AND no, I don't know how much more tunnel should've been or would've been used for the sake of safely stopping the train. They went "the technical route" on that problem with more brakes and trip-cock devices. The only real "benefit" to filling a tunnel about half full of sand mounds for a quarter mile is that there is NO technology to rely upon, no human factor to f*** it up, and it WILL work every time exactly as it's designed...
The "Runaway Ramps" also have a cost. I'm not sure how high, but a trucker who hits one tends to start paying $40 K... in fines just for the incident... last I was told, anyway. ;o)
Hello John, This is one of your many fans here in the US (Atlanta, GA). I always enjoy your videos and look forward to new releases! Your style is straightforward and exact. Keep up the excellent work! We in the US appreciate you.
Awesome, thank you!
But he didn't straightforward assign blame for the incident! Why would ANYONE one here like him???
/s
My 5 year old is obsessed with disasters. When he's a little older I'll introduce him to your videos.
I've been to Moorgate countless times but don't remember seeing any mention of the accident in the station.
Also bizarre you could just buy morphine in Boots in the 70s
It's probably for the better that there isn't any mention, or just very little. That would scare off so many customers even though trains are much safer now.
@@Sanas_Shy_Language I still enter trains from the back or middle. The 7/7 bombing scares me about the underground. There's barely any police at these stations too.
I used to use Moorgate from time to time as well and I couldn't work out what had happened until I realised that it was on the British Rail section of the station, not the normal Tube lines. There's a line that comes down from Hertford to Moorgate. The tunnels for it are sized for overground rolling stock and so are larger than standard deep level tube lines. This is one of the reasons that the accident was so bad, as the oversized tunnels allowed room for the tube sized carriages to ride over each other. These days only overground stock is used on those lines.
@@Sanas_Shy_Language There are actually two memorials; one up the road on the SW corner of a nearby park, plus another unveiled in 2014 at the Moorgate station building.
There’s a plaque outside the station although it’s quite tucked away
i think the common belief is that it could have been caused by newson having ministrokes, causing him to lose control of his body and hence not react until right at the end. ministrokes (or transient ischemic attack) are the result of loss of blood flow to parts of the brain. they can last a few hours or only a few minutes, so it's plausible that he may have only had a very short ministroke that caused him to be unable to see or even think clearly. it's also more common in people 55 and over, and can be induced by any manner of things from high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, diabetes and even a type of heart condition called atrial fibrillation. it's a shame that we'll never really know but it is certainly fun to speculate :P
(edited to add extra info)
I'd say that's plausible, if only from having witnessed a family friend who suffered from ministrokes. Seeing a concert pianist suddenly freeze while rehearsing, with her usually warm, expressive face blank, and having to toss your flute so you can run and prop her up before she falls off the piano bench is unnerving to put it mildly, even when you know what's happening; having that happen to the guy driving your train is a terrifying idea!
What is a mini strokerryyuiop?
Also, it could have sadly been as mild as a sudden migraine. I’ve had them, and when they hit they can momentarily leave you so floored you can’t see or think properly, even if it’s only for a second or two, in the situation of Moorgate, it would have been a second or two too long of a blackout
@@dancingcarapace i'm sorry you've had to deal with them, they suck ass honestly. my partner gets bad migraines all the time and it can make it so hard to do normal tasks. it definitely could've been the case here too, although as far as i'm aware he didn't show any sort of history with having them. sometimes these things come at the worst possible time though so who knows.
@@dancingcarapace Oh yes, sudden migraines are excruciating! Like an ice pick going in the eye socket, and coming out the back of your head... And with that pain he'd likely have squeezed the dead-man lever until they hit the wall, because you just tense up everywhere, at least until you either throw up or pass out. Migraines are the worst!
As someone who suffers from OCD and is a fan of yours, my respect for you has risen highly. Thank you for your help trying to bring awareness to the disease and breaking the stigma. OCD Affects many many lives and in significant ways, and with your help hopefully we can get more treatments. Thank you
Wow the level of research here is incredible! Not a single other UA-camr in the world would possibly go so deep into researching a rail related topic, without being into rail transport already, you sir are a madlad.
There's hundreds of ways they could design is so this couldn't happen. I don't understand why in the hell they relied on a single person for everything.
It was the 70’s . Cheep automation wasn’t a thing. Notice that even today Crossrail is running about two years late mainly because of the testing and refinement of its automated control systems. If a system , such as the 1930s tube stock, has worked for about half a century without a major accident what would motivate a cash strapped organisation to invest more in safety ?
The establishment always have to do it on the cheap . It was ever thus .
I was a med. student back then at one of the hospitals involved. It was the first time any of the London hospitals had used their 'Major Disaster' plans for real. It was chaos, basically and the medical response was slow and badly organised - although obviously lives were saved. Missing and/or broken equipment, no facilities for proper anaesthetics in the tunnel, shortages of morphine, plasma, oxygen and Entonox and above all, the medical staff winging it because they'd never done it before. "Lessons were Learned" as they say. The disaster plans of every British hospital now include some lessons from Moorgate.
One of the classic mysteries in rail accidents. Well covered!
Thank you!
I remember seeing a short segment on this accident on a DVD of Extreme Machines: Super Trains as a Kid. It was quite vague about the location and year of the disaster but featured an interview with a passenger that survived the accident. Apparently she regularly rode in the front carriage and chose that day to hop in a different car, saving her life.
A very well produced take on the tragedy that I have read about elsewhere, the conditions must have been horrendous for both victims and rescuers. Moorgate Protection is the legacy, let's hope it prevents similar incidents in future. Excellent video Mr Plainly.
I believe Jago Hazzard has made a video about this as well, but always happy to see an alternative take on it. And I'm certainly always happy to see more railway disasters from you, of course.
He did, it's linked in the description of this one of you want a rewatch
My God. History of just this line is so weird I wish where was more about rest of them. Cheers, you legend
You definitely want to go check out Jago Hazzard's channel then. He's done loads of videos on the histories of the various underground lines.
Qxir's video about this disaster popped up my feed this morning and it was first I'd ever heard of it, now your video is on my feed this afternoon. the universe really wants me to know about this tragedy 😳
My dad passed through Moorgate tube station just a few minutes after the crash and, I think, before the emergency services had arrived. He worked near to the station and had come down on the Northern line from Euston (so there was no chance he would have been on this train). I'll have to get more details from him next time I see him.
What an incredible amount of information! Very interesting. Tragic situation and, as always, safety systems and regs written in blood.
thanks for the upload!
No problem!
By the picture you shared during the week, I knew it had something to do with the tube. One thing I got wrong is that there is no radiation envolved 😂
Theres plenty of asbestos down there tho, not radioactive, but pretty nasty all the same!
@@PlainlyDifficult
Yikes.
@@PlainlyDifficult fair enough, guess I'll be riding my bike more often then 😐
On submarines ... sorry subways or metros .... there was an incident in Stockholm, Sweden, when the the T-bana (subways) was expanded north. Workers that were digging the tunnel were trapped when the ground behind them collapsed. After some rescue attempts they were eventually freed from their underground prison.
All workers survived but Sweden were in a tight grip while rescuers were working their way to the trapped men.
As always a great video with loads of into!👍👍👍👍👍
Sweet new PD video..my lucky day...not so much for the people in this story... Love your stuff!! Been constantly watching them all. Keep it up Thanks for the quality entertainment and education
*I WAS ONLY 5* when this happened - but I can still remember the news reports and the public enquiry afterwards...
I remember the endless discussion about did he do it on purpose / but he had the money for his daughter's car with him.
LOVE your videos!!! Lifetime subscriber!!
Yay! Thank you!
17:30 - no fault by anyone else. A finding that will kill others later. My findings:
Insufficient speed control on approach to that station.
Insufficient excess tunnel length beyond the track.
Insufficient excess track.
Insufficient safety systems on the railway & trains.
NEWSON WAS NOT TO BLAME. He was merely the final (only?) safety feature on the system. So many other actions could have happened to prevent this.
15:13 I like how this is worded in such a way that there was consideration given to the possibility that the train driver had left the cab via the windshield-direct route, before settling on the boring, old "when the tube you're standing in becomes suddenly volume-less, you become toothpaste, but not a moment before that" explanation.
I would think road hypnosis or some sort of mini stroke would be very likely. Although even something as seemingly minor as a drop in blood sugar could have caused him to gray out without taking his hands off the controls. With the amount of time it took to reach his body, there would not have been much evidence left of several possible medical issues.
I love how you have a break before and after the ads to ensure nothing is skipped!😁😁
Nice work on your animation with the break system, just an extra little touch that keeps me coming back for more quality content :)
The Mt Erebus disaster is worth exploring
Me pretending I understand how those train breaks work as he’s explaining it
I think that I saw a documentary where it was theorized that the shape of the tunnel could have had a psychedelic effect on the driver who could have been more susceptible to it.
There is a thing called a silent heart attack. I’m not sure if it leaves any signs of happening or not, but I believe there are some types of seizures that don’t leave any traces either.
I've watched many videos about this terrible tragedy and you managed to find a different angle, with some interesting facts and figures about the trains. Thank you. Sadly, we'll never know why Leslie Newsom's train crashed. 😓
One thing I thought of when looking at this crash - if Newson wanted to commit suicide how could he have known that Harris wasn't just going to apply the emergency brake in the guard's van when he saw how fast they were going? Newson had no idea that Harris was reading a paper in the carriage.....
My grandad was ambulance service incident officer at the moorgate disaster. I remember as a kid him describing working his way through those crushed carriges with the firebrigade. Poor sods
Last time I was this early, I was standing at Old Street still stirring my morning cuppa.
We need to have a disaster where Mr. Clipboard gets it!
This video is very well made and researched. Great job with this one!
Thank you
@@PlainlyDifficult you’re welcome!
Was working in Eastbourne at that time a real tragic accident l remember a police woman lost her foot and many others injured.
Far more technical than I expected and all the better for it.
Welp, I'm never sitting at the front of a tube train again!
One of the best channels on UA-cam.
I work on the underground and used to work with the last person to actually speak to the driver before the crash and said he seemed fine.
Love your content, keep it coming!
Hands down the most complicated and over informative 20min youtube video of all time never to be out done.
Well done, this was a very informative and entertaining presentation.
Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Love your videos, always very interesting
Thank you!
This video played randomly after a vid by Fascinating Horror. And I seen where you were running a fundraiser for OCD. As someone with OCD,I definitely donated. OCD is terrible,I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Not even someone I think I hate,like the first person to use autotune. Thank you for setting up a fundraiser and bringing some light to this terrible mental illness.
Great vid,I also subbed.
"Not on the London underground"
Cuts so my local train services.
Me: "Oh no"
But really I would love to hear more about that one in-depth!
Glad to see another channel doing a video on moorgate, I find it interesting
Northern City Line always seems to have bad luck. Remember the time a construction company managed to drill through the tunnel ceiling a few years back? Good a driver noticed something was happening, could have been much worse.
every 27 days , the energy of the eruption of the krakatoa volcano is emitted , in just heat , from plain oil consumption (according to world oil consumption and machine efficiency to convert it to other forms of energy ) .
I really enjoy your content, man.
Excellent video, keep the good work! More railroad themed ones please!
Interesting you are covering this now. Here in NYC we are noting the 30th anniversary of a similar accident on our system near Union Sq.
station. Only now are we putting in a communication based control system, though most of the system is still controlled like this.
A few points.
1. Motormen were trained NEVER to use the Westinghouse as the stopping brake at a terminal station as “hitting the mark” is important to ensure the train is fully in the platform signalling section (train berth) in order to get a release of the road behind to set for departures, the inability to get a partial release of the westy was one reason we were drilled to ALWAYS use the EP brake at this point. So theories about difficulties with the Westinghouse are likely to be misleading, besides which, having got it wrong myself as many others have at some point especially in training,it’s a trivial thing to stop and blowdown/recharge, Or even throw off the Westinghouse and use the ep instead, it would still stop the train.
2. I have doubts about the signalmans’ estimate of the speed, the train in fact traversed a crossover to enter the right hand platform (having travelled via the left hand tunnel bore), from experience as both guard and driver this traversing at that sort of speed would have been violent enough to alert the guard that there was something wrong, additionally it would have “unsettled” the driver who was seated, this “seat” was actually a narrow fold down device with zero side support, further I seem to recall reports that the Master Controller was found jammed by the impact in the “Series” position, - until the 82 tube stock all LU trains had the same 3 positions regardless of Controller type being “Shunt” (very low speed depot operation) “Series” used for reduced speed working eg when running behind clearing signals from a train ahead, and Parallel, which provides full voltage for maximum (line) speed. If reports are correct a 38 in series wouldn’t do the sort of speeds the signalman reported.
A couple of other things, “ Moorgate controls”? Never heard the term in 3 training courses at White City Training Centre, or out on the road, they were called by their Rule Book terminology, Approach Control Signalling, although some drivers referred to them as “platform policemen”. The brake reservoir that provides the “application air” (my term for clarity) on the Westinghouse brake is the Auxiliary Reservoir, when learning the flows of air we referred to the air used to charge the brake cylinders as auxiliary air.
Platforms also have a fixed trainstop now so that going too far past the stopping mark will trip the train
I’ve driven 38s when they returned to the Northern line during the mid 80s plus the 56/59/62 stocks that were derived from the design. They were capable sturdy machines (some of which only finished service on the Isle of Man early this year!!) we will never know what happened, that was the conclusion of the report and is an opinion voiced by the instructors that ran the training courses I took in my time there. I feel for M/M Newsomes family who had to face the fallout from the events of that morning. I don’t for one minute buy that he was just confused about where he was, the crossovers alone would have reminded him. It was, and remains a tragedy.
I just realized subways are almost ideal for automatic operation and yet humanitys out here trying to make self driving cars work instead.
As well. Sydney’s new metro for instance is driverless.
Realistically, it wouldn't be hard at all to completely automate a railway line. It would just cost a lot, hence why few do it. But sure let's play with self driving cars that move one or two occupants.
The dlr in east London is automatic
I mostly watch your nuclear incident videos but with this one, I really got the sense that you have experience of LUT and how the systems work.
Thank you! Railways are my day job
@@PlainlyDifficult - I thought so! It really comes across in the video. Well done on all the videos and the music BTW!
Id love to see more content like this, it shows that even something we take as simple and easy like a subway has had disasters all in the same with dams and powerplants. Love the way you structure your videos, it removes a portion of the morbidity while keeping all the educational parts in!
Excellent video on the subject
my theory personally is to do with the brake systems. As stated previously in the video if you overcharged the system you had to release the brakes to clear it, what if driver Newsom was in the middle of trying to purge the extra pressure right up to the end? That would explain why the brake handle would be in 'release' or 'off' in the wreckage.
if he had "overcharged" the system then the train would have been braking already. Upon releasing the train wouldnt just pick speed back up again but would maintain the speed it had. So assuming he locked the brakes its unlikely that he would still be going 35-40 after releasing them and he would have no reason to release them going that speed that close to the end. Also it doesnt take long to purge the air even if you do overcharge them. So while its a theory its just got too many problems to really hold much merit....
Also i may have misunderstood but i believe the train had two forms of brakes. One allows for multiple brakes so its safe to assume it would be the main braking system where as the system your referring to would be more of a back up.
Thanks for being so consistent. Love you
Deadman switch reminded me of that train derailment in Japan, when driver was going too fast into a curve and crashed into an apartment complex.
Please more train crash content it's amazing to watch and really interesting lessons learnt and what was put into place to prevent reoccurrence (normally)
Good morning/ afternoon plainly difficult
Good night
Thank you for the video. A sobering accident that affected so many families so horribly.
Very interesting analysis. Thank you!
My grandad was one of the firemen who went in to this incident. He never said much about his experience , being old school Englishman , it wasn’t the done thing to talk about things like this openly. He just said in a typical British manner “it was bloody awful”
RIP Grandad you legend! I wish we could talk again I miss you loads mate
I once had a co-worker who was a surviving passenger in this crash, but he never talked about it. Must have been shocking for the passengers.
I just wanted to let you know that your videos are amazing and more informative than anything I have ever seen on TV, and that you are probably one of only 3 channels I have the notification bell turned on for because I just dont want to miss any of your videos :)
Thank you for creating such amazing content so regularly
Thank you!!
Great video! I've been very familiar with this tragedy, but this was a nicer insight into the other questions raised into it all, bravo.