Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Japan calamity
The death toll from Monday's train derailment in Amagasaki, Japan (about 250 miles west of Tokyo) has now reached 102, with another 450 people injured. The crash sent the two front carriages slamming into an apartment building just 20 feet from the track. Speculation was that the train was traveling at more than 100 kilometers per hour, going around a curve with a speed limit of 70 kph. The train had just overrun a stop at the previous station by about 10 feet and had to back up, and it was thought that perhaps the driver was trying to recover the roughly one-minute delay. The accident was the worst in Japan since 1963, and also the worst since the Japan Railway group firms were created from the privatization of the state-run Japanese National Railways in 1987.
The disaster has me both sad and shocked. Two things didn't surprise me though: First, the railway is a mere 20 feet from a residential building -- in Japan, it sometimes feels like you can stretch your arm out and touch houses as you pass them by. I wonder how people living there tolerate the noise and vibration, not to mention the loss of privacy as they have train passengers staring into their homes all day long. The second thing is that the train driver was even trying to make up for the one minute delay. Here in the US, I consider the San Francisco BART system to be pretty reliable, but we think nothing when the train is 5 or 10 minutes late; in Japan, you count on the train arriving and leaving the station at the precise minute.
When I was over there, I liked to ride in the first car where I could look through a glass window into the driver cabin, and see what he was looking at and doing. What I found most amazing was that regardless of the rail lines, the drivers always seemed to follow a very exact, regimented procedure in everything they do: they acknowledged the railway signs and signals with both hand gestures and verbal comments as if they were reading from a script. I never knew if they were being recorded, but they certainly did a lot of talking to themselves if no one else was listening. That's why it baffles me that the train in this case had overshot a station in the first place, and now was traveling faster than the speed limit to get back on schedule. It's all very tragic.
Click on the above picture to get a larger view.
- posted by Woofwoof @ 9:42 PM
