Tracks Disintegrated Under Intercity Train At 115 mph | Plainly Difficult
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2024
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On 17 October 2000, at Hatfield, Hertfordshire a High speed Intercity Train Crashed at 115 MPH. It was caused by a track metal fatigue-induced derailment, killing four people and injuring 70.
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Keywords: Railway Disaster, Hatfield Train, British Railways, Train History, Disaster Management, Potters Bar
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www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/HSE_Hatf_IntRep001.pdf
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Hertfordshire is pronounced Hartfordshire & Balfour Beatty is pronounced as Balfour Bee-tea not Balfour Betty.
Cheese
I would love an episode on the Viareggio train accident ❤. Please, it is amazing your job
Seriously, f*ck off with this bullsh*t!!!
@@petarnovakovich240it’s so annoying that the creator of this content cannot be bothered to talk properly. Especially the mispronunciation of TH!!
I was working for rail enquiries at this point. About 6 months after the crash, the government ran adverts about how safe the rail network was.
A good friend got a complaint call about this, where the complainant read the coroners report explaining the exact mechanism of death his brother suffered at Hatfield.
And then the management wanted him to finish his shift.
The bastards.
This was while the rail network melted down over gauge corner cracking. It wasn't a good time to work for the railways, and a worse one to work for an employer like NRES.
The legacy of this was basically the end of railtrack, as a private company, they had contacts with the train operating companies. The fines for causing effectively a meltdown of the timetable destroyed the company.
I understand the anger on the part of the victims family, but calling up a people facing worker (i.e. someone on the bottom of the totem pole and with no power whatsoever) and doing this is a massively fucked up thing to do and accomplishes nothing.
@@tisvana18 Yeah, if you're going to traumatise anyone, go for the bosses who had some responsibility for the crash, not the poor customer service people who get enough sh*t thrown at them every day already!
@@thing_under_the_stairs Is there even a process for that? Companies usually structure themselves so management is as insulated from the general public (and the consequences of their actions) as possible. That's, like, 90% of the function of customer service. Being a human shield is damn near the entire job.
Maybe agitating for re-nationalization would be a potential solution? Follow up with direct action when inevitably ignored? It's a tough road to go down but it's practically the only way to get these ossified structures to change. Hearing story after story of shit like this where nobody with any responsibility ever sees any jail time makes it fairly clear that the "justice system" hasn't exactly fixed the problem.
@@thing_under_the_stairs Yes but by definition the bosses will literally not care. Read out the traumatic details and get laughed at. No thanks.
I’m a bit confused by the wording. The coroner’s report was about whose brother? Was it your friend’s brother, the friend who worked for the line? If so, that’s horrible they expected him to work.
Or was it about the complaining party’s brother and your friend was just the poor soul who had to read about 1 of the 4 essential strangers who died? If so… that’s hard, but I can see it from both sides. He would’ve known how the person died, so reading it in graphic detail is hard but I honestly don’t think it’d shake most people up to where they can’t work their shift. But if it’s about the worker’s own brother then wtf.
Also, I’m not sure what your friend did. If it was something closely related to safety (in charge of track switches, scheduling, etc) pull him immediately. If his job was just reading complaints and filing them where they needed to go… I can see them wanting him to finish his shift. I don’t think it’s right, because not everyone can just shake it off. I think I could only because I’m 33 and when I was 10, was finding sites with these pictures in graphic detail so I am numb to people who I’m not related to. But not everyone had this experience, and frankly it’s not a great mindset to have so it isn’t something someone should want.
A serious problem was the cut backs on rail tappers. Some git in an office found out that they paid people to walk the lines and hit the rails and decided that was a waste of money and got rid of many of them. They could tell from the sound the rails made if there was an issue and would report the it. Still, if your job is in an office and have no idea what you're doing it might seem reasonable; even if railways have done this for 100+ years. Thank you John Major.
Great point. For a supposedly “nice guy” major did some truly sh1tty stuff.
There's always a way to do things cheaper, especially when you don't understand why it's done the way you want to get rid of.
@@markh.6687letting people who've never done the work tell those that are doing it that they're not needed because there's been no disaster. Could be because they've been quietly doing their job 😕
Like why keep changing the oil in my old vehicle? She's been running all these years 🤔
Middle management is bloated just about everywhere. Since they're paid more than the grunts doing the work, they're convinced they're smarter. It's an insane system that's going to take us all down.
@@katiekane5247yep.
Those responsible for the dismissals should be imprisoned.
Again not true, people used to tap wheels not rails, and it was a rail management issue not a wheel fault that caused this.
When you mentioned the dates I jokingly thought "Oh what did they do, outsource all their inspectors who then outsourced to subcontractors"? Turns out that wasn't far from the truth 🤦♂
it gets even more fun when you have a federal and state government. i wanna say something but it will literally end in a text wall but im self employed and paid by federal government. state government.... now telling people in my industry in my state 'you have to register with us and pay us' ... no. a state doesnt get a cut out of a federal fund. theyre not entitled to it up front or apo piso. end result, the scheme set up to get people from the community looking after disabled, is now going to government funded agencies who take the $65 an hour i make on my own, take $45, and give $20 to the drone in the agency.
State outsources to save money to spend on grifts like green energy. Federal government steps in and pays for a disabled service. State goes 'gimme gimme gimme' fed goes f off. state comes to us directly 'gimme gimme gimme' aaaaaand it slowly gets reabsorbed directly into state government.
only semi related but my point is you think the uk got it bad.... we literally have chinese gangsters running our non chinese state.
Passing the buck is typical of those who “don’t want to get their hands dirty”! Railtrack subcontract work to others; they then subcontract it to someone else who then pay DelBoy and Rodney to do it!
@@nigelkthomas9501 It's sad when lives are at stake. Same sorts of thing happened here in Canada when they outsourced drinking water inspections and long term care for seniors
A really dark period in UK railways.
Lack if investment in the infrastructure but plenty money for the companies and their people.
Last I looked Victorians had a better rail network than us, there's hst in impoverished countries in Africa and we have to put up with buses on wheels
@@Jabarri74 it is particularly sad and just wholly crazy that our railway network has ended up the way it was.
From the Beeching Cuts in the 60s that stripped out rail lines across the country to the privatisation that led to no investment.
Now, we are seeing calls to reopen lines closed by Beeching and are also seeing extremely expensive repairs being needed because the lack of investment in preventative maintenance as well as proper repairs always seen patch jobs for stuff.
We really should have a better railway since we invented it but that's Britain for you, give the world something great and then screw it up for ourselves by looking at money going in pockets and not back into the actual job.
@@Stirlinggorilla Couldn't agree more. I remember seeing the APT always parked up at Derby because they found 1 later fault with the way it tilted. So it was iterated on and now the trains are Pendolino built in Italy
@@StirlinggorillaJust like Jay Foreman said, we were the first, now we’re the last
Where did they think they were, America?!? Profits before people. Always. (I'm American, so I can say that.)
There is more to this than you have been informed/reported. Someone I know used to work at British Steel in the metallurgy labs, said that the steel used was inappropriate for the application and would fracture. She recommended at much stronger (but more expensive) type of steel, but was overruled. This was many years before the accident...
It is always about the money. Even Balfour Beatty never had the budget to properly replace the rails, because Railtrack never got the money from the government. Everybody knew the rails needed to be replaced. The consequences of worn-out rails weren't a new problem. The government just didn't want to pay for it. There is always so much more to find when you realize it's always about the money...
I seen the fractured bits of rail and was like "shits wayyy too hard"
Welded steel rails, in order to eliminate joins, requires specific steel alloys.
Steel that doesn't expand or contract with changes in temperature is something of a compromise...you give up durability for stability.
They say they dont have money, but then they go around locking in deals with partner freight companies where they’re allowed to operate for free. Its mismanagement , not lack of funds.
@@lu5445they say lack of funds belie we assist Israel and Ukraine with billions but can’t help ourselves it would seem
Wait... Balfour Beatty? Someone should probably tell Angry Cops. He's got a whole rant about Balfour Beatty falsifying military barrack repairs.
Or TFE... we can add to his list of things to rant about.
@leechowning2712 dude yes! That'd be great too. Lol
Balfour beatty is the biggest crap show that I have ever dealt with! Luckily I never lived in their housing during my 20 year career. I had troops that did and it was a nightmare to deal with. One of my troops was in a house that the smoke alarms kept going off at odd times for no reason. Their fix was to disable the entire system and then remove the batteries. His family to include his 3 little kids lived there for 6 weeks before we found out what they did. Found out due to the attached unit having a small kitchen fire and the alarms didn't go off. Needless to say Balfour Beatty wound up having to put his family in a hotel for 2 weeks while they replaced the entire system. One of the worst companies I have ever dealt with.
As soon as I heard that, I thought shitty, moldy, substandard privatized housing on military installations. Never knew they had their hands in other crap around the world.
Balfour Beatty have been a go to for the UK Government directly and indirectly for at least 80 years, their hands have been all over a lot of problems.
I could imagine if they actually started to prosecute and jail these executives and managers and hold them accountable when people get killed in these preventable accidents that they would likely take more care and attention to what they are supposed to be doing with their big high paying jobs. The UK and the US seem to never really punish these guys
Naa. They'd just make sure to cover their asses with a lackey that they pay well to sit and do nothing but whom they put all the blame on when something goes wrong.
@@Leafsdudeyeah, they've usually planned ahead. Too big to jail 😕
Yeah, I saw a picture of the Thames recently (Specifically of where HMS Belfast is moored) and my first thought was "My god the Thames is disgusting" and snarkily asked if Brits were shitting directly into the Thames like they did in the medieval era.
Same in Canada. Execs really should be held accountable when their decisions cause injury or death.
@@ZaydinTTVLondon only got its sewer system, back in Victorian times, when the stench from the Thames became noticeable in Parliament. So, as ever, if it doesn't personally affect MPs, it's considered not worth bothering about...
Hatfield 2000, Selby 2001 and Potters Bar 2002.
I remember them well. I'd applied for a job with GNER just before Hatfield. I got the job and was going to Train Evacuation Training, implemented after Hatfield, on the day that Selby Happened. Imagine going in to the class room for that training and being greeted by those TV pictures from Selby. Potters Bar I wasn't working that day but it caused horrendous problems for several days after.
Please spare a moment to think about all those killed, injured and involved in all these incidents. 🙏
Did you work with beryl cross then?
She was the lead Gner staff training officer at the time. You might have also met my dad then
No! Won’t share a moment because shit happens, if I shared a moment for everyone who died tragically I wouldn’t be able to function, where exactly do I draw the line?
@@geocachingwomble the name rings a bell. I was based at Leeds.
@@The_Yokshireman_In_The_Hatmy dad was graham Murray the rail safety assistant based at Doncaster (he had been based at King’s Cross at the time)for the southern region section ofthe ecml rail safety team until 2003 when he retired due to health reasons. You may have heard of him as he was the rail safety assistant that got deep vein thrombosis from train travel and had it burst in a&e in his left lung whilst being the assigned person to write the report to prevent it.
@@The_Yokshireman_In_The_Hatyou would have definitely met my dad then those white rose Eurostar sets had awful issues with inappropriate retractable wheelchairs ramps during transit resulting in hazards for oncoming traffic and a regular safety team member having to sign them off. So they could run the whole nextwork again as safe.
One thing I really appreciate about your videos is how you list the names of those who are lost in the tragedies.
They may have been lost, but you’re helping to ensure their memory lives on forever.
Not only that, but you do so in such a way as to raise awareness to all the nasty little problems that lead to their tragic deaths.
I’m sure lots of your viewers are engineers (or at least engineer brained types) who can make an impact with this knowledge.
This channel was juat recommended to me by a customer. Im a PSV Coach driver. I have to say well done the delivery was excellent.
Thank you!!
Seeing a Plainly Difficult upload a minute after it's uploaded.
This really is like Saturday morning cartoon watching as a kid.
Scoobie doo ?
Except real people die each week. So conflicting lol
It really is, between this and Techmoan, is my Saturday morning wakeup!
@@TuneStunnaMusic Same, only my other morning habit is the NYT crossword! Puzzles with breakfast, and then disasters with tea.
@@PlumBob In both of them, once you take the mask off the "monster" it's often some creepy old guy trying to make a bunch of money and breaking rules and cutting corners to do it...
One good thing from this sad event was that Railtrack came back into public ownership where it, as any key public infrastructure, belongs. Be thankful that rail was not privatised like UK water was - with the crumbling, shitty (actually not metaphorically) situation now pervading.
I was going to say the first mistake was PRIVATIZATION!! WE have this problem a lot in the U.S.A.
For those that don't know, since the UK left the EU the government allowed the water companies to dump sewerage in our rivers and sea. We can now no longer go for a swim in the outdoors without risking illness.
@@rf159a (cough cough) healthcare... (cough cough)
@@thing_under_the_stairs
😂😂😂
yeah, as if health care is any better in UK than US.
😂😂😂😂
See a doctor about that cough, skippy! 😂
@@soakupthesunman Uh, I'm Canadian. And the cough is from a sinus infection, which is being treated for free. Got in to see my GP in under 24 hrs, and she's got me lined up for more testing in the next few weeks, also for free. You really drank that Kool Aid, huh?
There was a lady at work was on that train, all she says she can remember is she came too about 50 metres from the train having been thrown out. She has scars on her legs from the accident
Balfour Beatty is one of the major contractors who build/manage privatized military housing in the US (on base housing for military members is no longer built/owned/managed by the US government) and seeing their contribution to this incident does not surprise me in the slightest!
The have (had) their fingers in many pies in the UK to..... all they are concerned with is making profit for a few select human looking creatures
Full of woke,ESG,DEI bull S
I came to say the same thing! They built and maintained absolute trash!
@@anthonyberry9132 The video never mentioned any of this. How is it even relevant, apart from something you want to complain about? Also, this incident happened over 20 yrs ago, before anyone cared about things being "woke". And what does "woke" even mean, anyway?
It's Britain's revenge for the revolutionary war.
Seriously, I've seen the state of the places, the mold, etc.. It's disgusting.
Seeing PD post a UK train disaster is like the gold at the end of the rainbow
Lucky (the nickname for the involved loco that also crashed at high heck) was a total nightmare 7 accidents before becoming a spares donor. That class 91 was truly cursed. I find it quite ironic that the thing that finally got her written off was a low speed collision with an azuma in the yard during driver training
I think the only British engine more cursed than this 91, was 40126.
@@abloogywoogywooactually there was one more loco more cursed than that one the loco involved in the great train robbery 59 incidents in 5 years it was one of the first diesels ever scrapped by British rail
@@geocachingwombleThat was 40126.
@@ChrisCooper312the British transport commission hated that loco. My bad I was unsure since it was renumbered after the incident with the great train robbers
@@geocachingwomble hardly the loco's fault
Profits over safety again.
Balfour Beatty's motto
Babe wake up! PD is doing a train disaster!
Everyone knows you live alone
@@samholdsworth420 wife, kids, dog, guinea pigs, cats, and chickens. Well, the chickens do live outside.
Specifically another train disaster.
@@samholdsworth420Projected
@@_Beamish gaslighting
Thanks to your rail vids, I started paying attention to signalling and similar stuff now, too.
Greetings from cool and inconsistent weather Hamburg, John, and have a great weekend!
I rode that train route from London to Edinburgh in 1995. As a Texan, I spent most of the time looking out of the window.
I hope you got to see the great view of Durham Cathedral and Castle. You can get quite a good view of York Minster too.
I don't blame you - as a Brit, I've done exactly the same thing on that route. There's a lot of lovely views in the UK, but the East Coast Main Line is truly spectacular. And I say this as a West Coast girl.
@@CharityAngelSpectrum I have driven from Edinburgh, through the Lake District, and down the West coast twice. That is a fun drive. Both times, I spent a night at Lake Windmere.
@@glennzanotti3346Windermere, and the rest of the Lake District is definitely worth it. Unfortunately, the West Coast Main Line skirts the eastern edge, so it doesn't really get the views. I went to university in Glasgow, and my family lived in Lancashire, so I used that line a lot while I was studying. Occasionally, the line would be closed (maintenance, Grayrigg etc), and I'd have to divert via the East Coast instead. It certainly took longer, but I was never upset about having to do it. In fact, I chose it over a more "direct" diversion when I had the option.
These were dark days in the post-Thatcher British rail system. It was widely covered in AU.
Good night from a -3c Canberra!
- National company gets privatised.
- Everything seems hunky dory for a few years.
- Turns out private company works for profit, so they cut corners, neglect infrastructure maintenance, and pocket the profit.
- Things inevitably fall apart.
- Company says they have no money to carry out maintenance and upgrades they've always been paid to do, and increase customer bills to make up for their greed.
I can name at least 3 UK companies in charge of major public infrastructure that followed this pattern in the past few years, and I'm afraid of knowing what else has been neglected.
What got me on your channel years ago is the depth of information and humorous animations despite the subject matter. Then there's your friendly and honest outro, the way you pause to look out the window to mention the weather always makes me smile. And the shot of what I can only assume is thee window is what prompted this comment. Thanks for all you do.
Going from 125 to 225 is definitely better for marketing than going from 125 to 140.
And much better than admitting that the new "140 mph" trains will be limited to 125 anyway.
In a horrible coincidence, the same locomotive was destined to be involved in the Selby Rail crash, which happened the following February. In each case, it was undamaged, in Hatfield by pulling the first part of the train over the broken rail before it broke completely, and in the case of Selby, located at the rear, it pushed the front of the train in to the land rover stuck on the track.
"Hey Bill, so whats that train parked in the corner there you havent shown me?"
"Oh that there be satan. you dont go near 'er"
Geez... I had no idea rails could splinter into so many pieces like that.
I knew rails could break across the cross-section of the rail, but never knew they could literally break apart/crumble like that!
That was the problem, the rail industry (Globally) didn't realise it either. This accident was caused by rolling contact fatigue. So things not recognised or managed effectively until this happened.
I really like how you lay the foundation of what the procedures and regulations are in the beginning. That way it is easier to understand how bad it is when you describe how the disaster happened. 👌
Betty….unreal
Interesting facts about 91023. Not only was it involved in both Hatfield and Great Heck derailments it was the only vehicle in the Mk4 sets to survive both derailments without damage, since it was the lead vehicle in this derailment, and the trailing vehicle in Great Heck. The concerns got so bad that when the Class 91 overhaul program happened, and all locomotives in the class had 100 added to their numbers, 91023 was the only exception, being renumbered to 91132 instead of 91123. This locomotive was also the first of the class to be scrapped in March 2021. So I guess the rail companies involved really did just want to see the end of it.
It got scrapped because it crashed in the yard into a brand new iet class 800 azuma train. Hitachi weren’t happy as they had to replace several of the coaches and install a new loco area for the new azuma. It spent its last 5 years as a spares donor after it got written off before being officially scrapped. It never got updates since it wasn’t in traffic at the time. The staff eventually refused to travel on lucky because of what happened.
I worked in a peeway track maintenance gang for 20 years from 1985 to 2005, and i can tell you the railways for over 150 years worked on the princible of preventive maintenance, but once it was in private hands that changed to fix when it breaks, and this shift in over a century old practice was one of the many shits that were at the heart of most of these horrible accidents, with profits over safety, and as we have seen with the private sector, the latest of which it the destruction of over 40 years of the England clean waters act, ruined today by private owned water companies.
Similarly, I always laugh when there is delays due to “leaves on the line”, my father worked for British Rail before the sell off, he took redundancy but kept in touch with those who remained.
One of the first things the new management did is reduce point maintenance teams. There use to be at least one team on standby, but several men sitting around doing nothing upsets the shareholders apparently. This meant that if there was an emergency, a team had to be switched from preventative maintenance, delaying point maintenance (like cleaning leaf mulch from points preventing point jamming incidents) typically to the point of becoming emergency issues themselves. At one point, there was no maintenance being conducted since all teams were handling emergency call-outs. Given the tricks the management and government conducted to justify the privatisation in the first place, self inflicted damage was like delayed karma.
A few years ago I ran a welding course at a college in North London. We had a guy who worked for Jarvis one of the sub contractors. He was in the equipment supply from their stores. He said that they used to have small teams that would regularly inspect one section of track and knew that section inside out. They then made lots of staff redundant and would just drop a team off at any section to get them to inspect it. Hence a great reduction in quality of inspection, with extended timeframe. He also said that after that crash, British Steel were working 24/7 to produce railstock and could not make it fast enough to keep up with the sudden influx of demand. Goes to show how lax it all became in the name of shareholder profit!
@@paulhutchins6019 Yeap, we worked many a shift with the track wielders repairing broken rails, or catching rails with cracks in them before they broke, or as would have happened here, replaced the track that would have been found by either the gang or ultrasonic inspection team, hell we still had plated track back in 1985 on local lines, and all the gangs from whole section covering 30 miles of track knew everyone, it was how the railway had run since it begain, and the people in charge when i joined were themselves in the railway since the late 40/50 and 60s, all time served and experienced to such a level that i am sure they could sense when a a bit of track might need some work, and your section was walked every day by the road walkers who checked it visually, and also ultra sonics would do entire sections of tracks a few times s year........and then private hands came in, and they payed them off, broke up thousands of maintenace gangs across the whole railway network, and brought in people who had no idea about the jobs that were doing.
Seems like every year from 96-97 to the early to mid 2000s you had some sort of massive rail crash or incidents, given the way the rail network was at that time it was not a shock we had so many incidents
Sadly very true
@@PlainlyDifficultI always remember that when my dad found out about this as the Gner safety assistant. After being informed about it he said and at I quote “at least railtrack now has to admit that I had a point the track was faulty at Hatfield “
Yes there were far too many crashes in this period in from Paddington to great heck.
Then there was a brief kill before greyrigg and then over a decade with nothing significant until Stonehaven
@@dasy2k1basically after receiving a very large cup of tea my dad basically responded by effectively saying I told you so. Then went to help go and sort it out. Railtrack locked themselves in their offices at King’s Cross, unplugged their phones and computers, they even took the batteries out of their pagers and radios and turned off the lights and basically sat in the dark for the next 72 hours after Hatfield occurred and didn’t emerge until the initial cleanup had finished. They were cost cutting idiots. Believe me. I was glad when the Jarvis guys were bought out by the government and given effective control of network rail because at least they were competent enough to do the job properly. Unlike railtrack
OH WOW!!! A rail vid on Plainly Difficult! that's a rarity! :D
Thank you
The only cure to my Saturday morning insomnia!❤
Thank you
I feel for you brother or sister. Insomnia is hard and people are unsympathetic. Not I, a fellow sufferer. I hope you get some rest and I'm glad this excellent video offers some diversion.
Glad something non-chemical can help you sleep! Insomnia is truly brutal.
Glad to see you back on "the rails"!
I really liked your trains in this one! Just lots of neat details.
Still one of the best parts of the weekend!
Should be accustomed to it at this point, but it still baffles me that to save a few pennies people are ready to put innocents in danger. All for Railtrack's to declare bankruptcy a couple years later as a result
If managers were found guilty in these cases, I expect we'd see different behaviour.
@@sylviaelse5086 AND if their sentences were appropriate to the damage caused by their actions. As in personal fines equal to the amount of property damaged, the number of people injured, and prison time for 4 cases of negligent vehicular manslaughter, in this case.
Bosses often get bonuses for saving money regardless of the organization's "safety culture."
Declaring bankruptcy isn't what it sounds like to most laypeople. At the very least, I'd bet the managers and other higher up execs still hand their pockets well-lined even after the business went under.
I really appreciate all of your uploads. Be good, be kind, be safe
Thanks, you too!
I always appreciate your animations and diagrams! They really help demonstrate the problem
Unbelievable. Thanks as always for such a detailed review of this tragic event!
There should have been 20 Gner staff members that day but the safety team members disembarked before departure as the meeting To discuss the track conditions at Hatfield had been cancelled by railtrack 5 minutes before departure
Sounds like a good story, but I can't find anything confirming this.
@@Leafsdudemy dad was one of the actual safety team. I assure you that it’s entirely true. After working a 17 hour shift from 8am until 3am that day and having read his calendar that day. I knew he was supposed to be on that on train when it crashed. When I found out he was safe the first thing he said to my stepmother was I wasn’t on the train they cancelled my meeting about the track conditions at Hatfield 5 minutes before departure. Since he had that conversation with my stepmother less than 20 minutes after the crash occurred I don’t really think he made it up. Plus my dad was one of the people that helped write the crash report for Gner as a safety assistant for gner at the time. Most things about that crash were not made common knowledge to the public.
He finally got home at 3am sorting out the mess. It deeply traumatised my dad and he had to have years of therapy and counselling because of how close he was to actually being on the train. I don’t think he would have had to have therapy for getting off the train 5 minutes before departure because railtrack cancelled his meeting 5 minutes before departure if it hadn’t happened.
@@Leafsdudefor the record my statement is from a first hand experience of people that actually had to fix it. My dad. I saw what happened to him afterwards. He wouldn’t have been so affected if he hadn’t had such a near miss, he was the duty booking office clerk the night of the kingcross fire in 1989 too. He was also the gner safety assistant that got deep vein thrombosis from train travel. I assure you that although it was not common knowledge it does not mean that my statement remains accurate. My dad was there he was on the safety team. I don’t think he would have made that up especially within 15 minutes after the train crashing. He called my stepmother to tell her he wasn’t on the train because railtrack had cancelled his meeting to discuss the track conditions at hayfield 5 minutes before departure.He had to have 7 years of therapy to get over that near miss. He wasn’t faking by any means I assure you. My statement is accurate it just wasn’t ever made common knowledge. It’s not a story, it actually happened. The entire gner rail safety team that were supposed to be on that on train had to have 12 months mandatory counselling due to how close they came to getting involved in that crash. It’s not a story it’s a fact. My dad was on the Gner safety team. In his case he was ended up having 7 years therapy as a result of his near miss. Plus I read the initial report from the accident prior to publication because my dad actually wrote the preliminary report for the Gner rail safety team at the time.
@@LeafsdudeI assure you it happened my dad was on the safety team that had disembarked 5 minutes before departure. He was deeply traumatised by what how close his near miss was. I assure you it actually happened it just wasn’t common knowledge. My dad had to have years of therapy due to how close his near miss as Gner safety staff that should have been on that train was. I assure it’s a first hand account from someone that was actually on the Gner safety team at the time being my dad
@@Leafsdudemy dad was deeply traumatised for years because of this crash. He always remembers that if railtrack hadn’t cancelled his meeting that day to discuss the track conditions at Hatfield he would have been on that train. He lives with the guilt of that every single day wondering why he was spared. So please don’t tell me I am making it up. I saw how much it truly broke my dad as a member of the Gner safety team at the time. He ended up having years of counselling because of the fact he disembarked 5 minutes prior to departure from this train because his meeting about the track conditions at Hatfield was cancelled for the 34th time in 6 months. He truly tried to prevent this incident from ever occurring. It really hit him quite hard that no one took him seriously until after the event. A lot of the background information about Hatfield was never made public. There was far more to it than what ended up in the final reports believe me.
Nicely done mate :) I'm always weary when it comes to railway (or aviation) accident videos as they are usually very "clickbaity" however yours are always well done and packed with facts. British Rail may have had their issues but they kept a lot of things "in-house" particularly maintenance, as soon as it became a private affair it was all down to the lowest bidder and of course, "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys". It could have been considerably worse had a carriage further forward tipped over and dragged more of the train with it, as it was the MkIV stock whilst able to hold up pretty well under the circumstances it didn't stand a chance on it's side with it's roof ripped off. One thing to consider is how well the crashworthiness of BR era rolling stock has improved from MkI through to MkIII & MkIV, while this and Selby, Southall, Ladbroke Grove and Ufton Nervet were not pretty just imagine how bad things could have been had Mark 1 and 2 stock been involved.
Seeing the reassambled rail is alarming.
Gauge corner cracking and cyclic top were two buzz words previously unheard of but put around the rail industry for a few months before being conveniently forgotten about.
Another prime example of why privatisation does not work, because a private enterprise that champions profit over product will never want to proactively do their job, only doing the work after something has happened, because it's cheaper (for them) to do it that way, until people's lives are lost, and even then they still make a profit, I've not been on the ECML since the mid 90s (Leeds or York to Durham & back) as a child, and even back then, the speed was quite uncomfortable for me, never really enjoyed the experience of going that fast on rails... :\
Yup. Public companies will always prioritize safety over profits (or even convenience). When it comes to extremely dangerous services, government always need to be in charge.
Well privatization doesn’t work when it wasn’t actually privatized, why they rails and the actual train companies were sold separately is a complete mystery, if the new private rail companies had own the track as well this wouldn’t have happened (as they are the ones who actually want the rails to work). Then again with the desperate way the uk government tried to force these companies to keep under utilized and loss making routes these rail companies may not have had the money to repair all the old track (that the uk government hadn’t been repairing for years by that point). Plenty of of countries have privatized there rail network (hell the uk is generally considered one of them considering it was looking like the uk rail was going the way of the dodo before privizition saved it) its gust the uk did it in the worst way possible.
@@LeafsdudeNo, they won’t. Do not put “always” in that sentence. That’s just ridiculous.
@@orppranator5230 Touche. Within democracies, they do tend towards it, however.
At least you guys have regular high speed routes. Yes, the US is much larger... which is why high speed rail between hubs (kinda like how airports used to be set up... the hub and spoke model) is so greatly needed.
Same in Canada. We're bigger than the States, with MASSIVE distance between major cities. We've got decent light commuter rail in the Toronto area and around Montreal, and semi-functional slow rail between cities, but the distances make high speed make so much more sense!
Private Company Equals Max Profit, Min Outlay. Just to keep Share Holders Happy.
We have the same S*IT in the U.S.A. Have to keep those stock prices high for PROFITS!!
At last!... I've been waiting for this one! thank you!
Thank you for sharing this information and being consistent!!
Me, waking up in the morning: Ooooh, a Plainy Difficult video... OOOH, A TRAIN DISASTER! Good way to start a Saturday
almost at 1M!, Congrats and keep going!
Hurtfordshire? Balfour Betty?
Please tell me this is on purpose. I’ve never heard anyone from here mispronounce those.
I've definitely heard Herts pronounced like it before, but Balfour is a new one 😅
Balfor Betty is a somewhat derogatory nickname for a company that did a lot of railway civil construction and maintenance work.
And Hurt-fordshire is how many of the locals say "Hertfordshire".
I was on my first high-speed train last week, and Mr PD you crossed my mind a couple of times on the way! 👍
Jan 85-Dec 87 I rode the East Coast Mainline on IC 125s between Huntingdon and Kings Cross a LOT...mainly for onward trips to LHR or LGW. I do remember riding a stopping service too once or twice. The electrification scheme was in work and I still have a BR booklet about about it. I never ran into any issues while travelling. I do remember the very tragic Kings Cross fire. RIP.
PlainlyDifficult & Rail Disasters is by far the best combination.
Is that all? The CEO should have been charged and gaoled for 5-10 years. Very light consequences with fines.
I absolutely love your videos. On the topic of UK train crashes, I was a passenger on the Selby train crash in February 2001.
My best friends Dad was the initial Police Superintendent on site and randomly my (to be) father in law was working for GNER as the incident operations leader.
Happy to help you in case you are planning to do a video on it. Although I haven’t seen ‘sleep deprived narcissist crashes Land Rover onto train line’ on your bingo sheet.
I'm from hatfield, I'm too young to remember the crash but my grandad was a cop and responded to the crash and often would tell my storys about the crash. My school was also next to the crash site and the school field became a triarge area for paramedics and many of my teachers told me their story of them running to help the crash victims. Very scary!
Balfour Beatty was one of the main contractors for a huge biosolids reactor at my job, and immediately after the project was done we had to start fixing everything that wasn't completed properly. It's been three years since the project finished and the reactor still isn't up to full proper operation.
One consequence of the scale of the slowdowns was an increase in road transport volumes and associated collisions. I've heard it said that the excess road deaths were far higher than would have been expected from further incidents on the railways.
Plainly fascinating! I love the london weather report at the end of your videos
Thank you
Oh dear, that bingo card was nearly a black out. 😬
Just noticed your subs, nearly a million!!! Well done John👍
Thank you!!
You'll need to come north of Edinburgh and check out the Tay Rail Bridge and its history.
When I was a kid I sometimes heard the phrase "Ein alter Mann/Eine alte Frau ist doch kein D-Zug" ("An old man/ woman is not a D-train") with D-train allegedly meaning fast train, but I have never actually seen or heard that (or how) D designates a fast train - UNTIL NOW!!! You just solved a roughly three and a half decade old mystery for me.
Thanks John, as always.
I love engineering flaws and your beautiful renditions thank you for ur service!!
Thank you very much!
You should do a Sodor episode for April Fools next year.
Just a suggestion.
There's not many truly spectacular ones - not in the original books at least. James and the Trucks is probably the most deserving that I can think of off the top of my head.
(Hmm, I wonder where our collective love of trains came from?...)
@@CharityAngelSpectrum I was talking about the show. Which I didn't really watch.
Given the inspection equipment available today to inspect rail for fatigue cracks, there really is no excuse for this sort of failure.
I remember subcontracting for Nuttalls who had a contract for repairs through Railtrack Plc in the Northwest. It took 8 months in 1990-91 to get paid after having to threaten them with legal action. A few weeks later the Government took over administration.
Thanks, also for the extra info about the railsystem.
1:50 did you just call it hurtfordshire haha
Yes he did.
He did.
and Balfor BETTY (whoever she is)
More than once.
It's not an uncommon regional pronunciation. At least I've heard it several times before, and I don't even live in England!
My parents were among those travelling on that train which 'fell off the track' that day. I also remember the panic they had the day of the Great Heck incident as I may have been travelling south to London that day, a journey I made frequently then. They were very nervous about train travel for some time afterwards.
The saying railtrack did the job as quickly and as cheaply as possible and network rail does the job properly springs to mind
Love getting a Plainly Difficult notification
Thank you!!
An interesting unexpected consequence of this accident was an increase in road deaths. The significant disruption due to the speed restrictions caused many people to drive instead of catching the train, and the increase in road traffic lead to more fatal crashes on the roads.
I was in the UK for a month during 1999. I did ride a few trains. The more of these videos I watch, the more I realize how lucky I was to make it home.
Privatization is so tricky. In some cases you end up with much better results than government-owned facilities. A few local DMV offices are now operated privately, with the state contracting work to them. It seems like the wait times have been shorter and the experience is better overall.
But sometimes you end up with situations like this. You need the right combination of a company that's thorough and reliable, and a government oversight board that actually knows how the infrastructure should be taken care of.
If there's one thing that I've learned from this channel, it's that privitisation isn't tricky - it just shouldn't be allowed. As soon as you do, the service gets treated like a business. A _competitive_ business. And competition means undercutting and subcontracting. And that's where the disasters happen.
@@DeathInTheSnow to be fair, sometimes even government-owned "service" is treated like a competitive business.
@@DeathInTheSnow I take your point and agree in many situations There are many instances of nationalised failures. Remember when it took up to three months to get a telephone line? Private contractors build better and cheaper clinics for the N.H.S. that specialise in heart and cancer issues. Privatisation means profit, nationalisation means protecting jobs; so you pays your money and takes your pick. It's interesting that Margret Thatcher always opposed privatisation of the railways and it was John "Grey Entity" Major that initiated the string of failures we've had since.
@@DeathInTheSnow I wouldn't draw that conclusion from my local train system, which has had several long deferred-maintenance-related shutdowns over the past several years. Private freight rail manages to inspect its tracks. Regulations and liability can help make them do that.
My experience with WA's privatized vehicle licensing offices was that the wait was about the same, but to save money they didn't provide chairs to sit on.
Ahh, Mr. Music... bringing us the resolution in melancholy cheerfulness
Good morning John, and happy Saturday❤.
Who's Balfour Betty? 😂😂 She's a naughty girl isn't she😂😂... Beatty "Bee Tee" 😂👍
Great vid, as always John.. your pronunciation made me chuckle 😂
Thanks John. I learned rails can fracture tonight.
Yay the helping pointing hand is back!
It always impresses me to see the pieces reassembled. It's a real-life puzzle that matters.
Thank you for this video!
Every time you announce the weather and briefly pause, I imagine you looking out the window to check what the weather is this minute!
@PlainlyDifficult
Balfour Beatty also operates in the US. Their current huge scandal in the States is their mismanagement of Military on base housing. You may want to dive into that issue for a future episode.
thank you for your series..
The buffet car is how i want to go out. I wonder if there are magnetic particles in the rails that can accelerate fatigue. In firearms the bolt is typically magnetic particle inspected because the particles cause cracks.
They don't cause the cracks, they just show up already existing nearly invisible cracks.
No. Magnetic particle inspections uses magnetic particles to detect crack, and is very good at it. Great for small objects, but for testing miles of track it would take far too long (a few minutes per yard of track) so one of the techniques used is ultra-sonic crack detection, pulses of ultra-sonic "sound" are fed into the rail, and the resulting "echos" are detected and analysed - this can be done at fairly high speed in "real time" from a specially equipped moving train. The downside of using ultra sonic testing is, or at rather at the time of this crash was, the analysis of the resulting wiggly lines on paper had to be don manually, particularly where there were lots of very, very, very small cracks that can be ground off, these tin cracks hide large cracks.
I grew up in Morpeth and would very much be interested in a video about the Morpeth curve!
Disaster breakdown did one about a year ago. Funny seeing that they had already suggested altering the route all the way back in 1877.
I wonder what is coming. There is severe oscillation in trains on stretches of the GW main line between Paddington and Reading. Is this due to the design of the Hitachi 800 series trains?, They have 26 metre vehicles with bogies at 17 metre centres, unusually close for such long vehicles.
Ride quality on the Hitachi trains on HS1 is also quite rough. These trains would not pass the old threepenny bit test.
I knew of this disaster but I was too young to get the behind the scenes situation and this one hit hard. I can understand the ones that had some need for a piece of safety equipment but a "meh" attitude to CURRENTLY ACTIVE known dangers? Evil.
Congrats on a sponsor!!
Thanks John 👍
I know I am one nobody, in many many comments.
I wanted to say, John. You have a great narrator voice 🙏👌
Keep up the great work 👍 👏
You omit the problem with gauge corner cracking/ rolling contact fatigue cracking: The crack runs parallel to the surface of the rail, but then suddenly changes direction and starts going steeply down into the body of the rail. With the ultrasonic inspection configurations used at the time, this kind of crack could not be found, as the shallow cracks running along the surface prevented the ultrasound reaching the more dangerous cracks going steeply into rail. Of course, once the morphology of the crack was known, then an ultrasonic configuration could be designed to find it.
Ultrasonic testing is still poor to measure the severity of rcf because of crack shielding. This is where the ut picks up the cracks parallel to the surface but cannot see the crack that has turned downward and will result in a rail break. Lots of work was done to determine the relationship between surface crack length and crack depth, there was a guide created and rules written on how to deal with it in future.
@@danp3653 You sound exactly like someone who worked at STC! Shame it is just another housing estate now.
@OldMan-mj9vt yes I spent 6 years there before moving to RSC.
Something I heard or read many years ago: in the days of British Rail, the steel for making track could only be sourced from the UK, Canada and the USA. Steel from the Eastern Bloc was cheaper, so a pilot programme was begun to test it in use in sidings and shunting yards. The rails were closely monitored for signs of deterioration, which soon appeared. The idea was abandoned and the UK, Canada and USA remained the sole suppliers.
Post-privatisation, the restriction on steel suppliers was removed.
Not true. Us and Canada steel wasn't used in the uk. French Italian Spanish German and Austrian was though.
Just a side note, Balfour Beatty is pronounced like the vegetable beets, not like the name Betty.