Youtor
Trains In Japan PART TWO Seconds From Disaster Runaway Commuter Train HD
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=laZ0b6tSYQo
The Amagasaki rail crash was a fatal railway derailment which occurred on 25 April 2005 at 09:19 local time, just after the local rush hour. • A seven-car commuter train came off the tracks on the JR West Fukuchiyama Line in Amagasaki, Hyogo prefecture (near Osaka), just before Amagasaki Station on its way to Dōshisha-mae via the JR Tōzai Line and the Gakkentoshi Line. • The front two carriages rammed into an apartment building. The first carriage slid under the first floor parking garage and as a result took days to remove, while the second slammed into the corner of the building, being crushed by the weight of the remaining carriages. • Of the roughly 700 passengers (initial estimate was 580 passengers) on board at the time of the crash, 106 passengers, in addition to the driver, were killed and 562 others injured. • Most passengers and bystanders have said that the train appeared to have been travelling too fast. The incident was Japan's most serious since the 1963 Tsurumi rail accident in which two passenger trains collided with a derailed freight train, killing 162 people. • Investigators have focused on speeding by the 23-year-old driver, Ryūjirō Takami (who was among the dead), as being the most likely cause of the derailment. 25 minutes before the derailment, Takami had run a red light, causing the automatic train stop (ATS) to bring the train to a halt. • The train had also overshot the correct stopping position at an earlier stop at Itami Station, requiring him to back up the train, and resulting in a 90-second delay, about 4 minutes before the disaster. • By the time the train passed Tsukaguchi Station at a speed of 120 km/h, the delay had been reduced to 60 seconds • Investigators speculate that Takami may have been attempting to make up this lost time by increasing the train's speed beyond customary limits. Many reports from surviving passengers indicate that the train was travelling faster than normal. Plus, the driver might have been stressed because he would be punished both for having passed by a red light and for having overshot the platform at Itami Station. • Ten months before the crash, Takami had been reprimanded for overshooting a station platform by 100 meters. In the minutes leading up to the derailment, he might have been thinking of the punishment he would face, and not totally focused on driving. • Immediately after the rail crash occurred, some of the mass media pointed to the congested schedule of the Fukuchiyama Line as an indirect factor. In fact, cumulative changes over the previous three years had reduced the leeway in the train's schedule from 71 to 28 seconds over the 15 minutes between Takarazuka and Amagasaki stations. • Drivers face financial penalties for lateness as well as being forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, dayshift education ), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. • The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of incident. • This program consisted of violent verbal abuse, forcing the employees to repent by writing extensive reports. Also, during these times, drivers were forced to perform minor tasks, particularly involving cleaning, instead of their normal jobs. Many saw the process of nikkin kyoiku as a punishment and psychological torture, and not as driver retraining. • The driver had also received a non-essential phone call from the general control station at the time he was rounding the bend. • The speed limit on the segment of track where the derailment happened was 70 km/h (43 mph). The data recorder in the rear of the train (the rear cars were new and equipped with many extra devices) later showed that the train was moving at 116 km/h (72 mph) at that point. • Investigators ran a series of simulations and calculated that the train would derail on that curve if going any speed over 106 km/h (66 mph). It is believed that Ryūjirō Takami was so stressed about the inevitability of going back to nikkin kyoiku due to the two infractions from earlier (the red light he had overrun and the platform overshoot) that he did not notice that the train was going too fast. And when the driver did notice it, 4 seconds before the derailment, he used the service brake, instead of the emergency brake, to avoid another infraction, since use of the emergency brake had to be justified • Seconds From Disaster remains copyright 2012 NGC Network International, LCC All Rights Reserved.
#############################
