Great Western Coffee Shop

Reports state and video shows huge fire after collision, rail tank wagon was carrying petrol.
No serious injuries reported.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56117353 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56117353)

Edited to correct link.

Have you used the correct URL there - that's a truck sliding off a road and no fire?

No it was the wrong link, about an unrelated incident.
Now corrected. Sorry to spread confusion.

From the Web Socialist Web Site (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/08/bnsf-m08.html) - stats on USA train safety triggered (earlier in the article, not quoted) by two more incidents.


Big country, higher numbers expected that in smaller ones ... but even taking that into account, the figures are really bad

At the risk of showing a ghoulish interest in the figures in this article, they beg a number of questions.

The most striking is the number of non-employee fatalities - of the 3,102 fatalities in 25 years for this company 3020 are non-employees, and of the 21,148 fatalities on the US rail system 20,656 were non-employees. What is happening? It does not seem to be primarily an employment issue (although the number of employee victims at about 20 a year for the whole US is not good - the UK seems to be about 2 to 3 a year on average).

From the ORR website, sadly suicides are the largest proportion of deaths on the UK rail system, at between 200-300 a year. This is a terrible toll, not only for the families of the deceased but the employees and emergency services involved in the incidents and their aftermaths. Does this though account for the lion's share of the US figures too?

A visit to the following web address - https://www.bts.gov/content/transportation-fatalities-mode indicates that most fatalities are crossing deaths (showing a reduction form about 500 a year to 2-300 later on, but with the improvement stalled in recent years) and trespassers (a steady 400-500 a year).

This doesn't quite fit the WSWS agenda, does it?

The BTS refer to the FRA (http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/) for more detail, but I'm struggling to get much sense out of there. It's as bad as the Belgian State Archives, which I was grappling with earlier today (though at least it's all in one language). The closest I can find is a database query that gives detailed tables, but only per year rather than aggregated. But certainly the numbers are dominated by grade crossings and trespassers/suicides, outweighing employees by about 100:1.

Just speculating really, but might the American statistics be as much a road safety problem as a rail safety one? Certainly Youtube is full of videos (some cautionary, some dramatic, some ghoulish) of cars and trucks crashing into trains on American crossings. While some of them might be due to faulty signals and/or barriers, a lot of them show drivers ignoring the signals. American driving tests in many states are rather undemanding by UK or European standards and their HGVs in particular are designed in a way that doesn't facilitate vision. Plus, the way in which US trains mostly go over crossings very slowly, blowing their horns, might lull road users into a false sense of security when it comes to the few trains which go faster – as well as for those which are going slowly (because "look, it's so slow, even though the barriers are down there's still time to cross..."). And the lack of fencing might be a factor when it comes to trespassers.