1830. 15 September – United Kingdom – William Huskisson becomes the first widely reported passenger train death.
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1830. 15 September – United Kingdom – William Huskisson becomes the first widely reported passenger train death. During the ceremonial opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, while standing on the track at Parkside, he is struck and fatally injured by the locomotive Rocket.
Train wrecks were shockingly common in the last half of the 1800s. Train travel was quite safe in the first half century of the 1800s. Trains didn't go very fast and there weren't many miles of track laid down. But around 1853, the number of train wrecks and people killed on trains suddenly rose sharply.
#1 Sri Lanka Tsunami Train WreckThe train, dubbed the Queen of the Sea, was destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26, 2004, in what is now considered the world's deadliest rail tragedy. It was a holiday weekend in Sri Lanka due to the full moon and the Christmas holiday weekend.
Worst accidentsThe worst accident was the Quintinshill rail disaster in Scotland in 1915 with 226 dead and 246 injured. Second worst, and the worst in England, was the 1952 Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash, which killed 112 people and injured 340.
Worst accidentsThe worst accident was the Quintinshill rail disaster in Scotland in 1915 with 226 dead and 246 injured. Second worst, and the worst in England, was the 1952 Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash, which killed 112 people and injured 340.
Before the air brake, railroad engineers would stop trains by cutting power, braking their locomotives and using the whistle to signal their brakemen. The brakemen would turn the brakes in one car and jump to the next to set the brakes there, and then to the next, etc.
Between June 1942 and October 1943 the POWs and forced labourers laid some 258 miles (415 km) of track from Ban Pong, Thailand (roughly 45 miles [72 km] west of Bangkok), to Thanbyuzayat, Burma (roughly 35 miles [56 km] south of Mawlamyine).
On 6 October 1866, brothers John and Simeon Reno staged what is generally believed to be the first train robbery in American history. Their take was $13,000 from an Ohio and Mississippi railroad train in Jackson County, Indiana.
Railroad deaths totaled 954 in 2022, an 11% increase from the 2021 revised total of 859 and the highest since 2007. Nonfatal injuries totaled 6,252, a 6% increase from the 2021 revised total of 5,882.
The work was backbreaking and highly dangerous. Approximately 1,200 died while building the Transcontinental Railroad. Over a thousand Chinese had their bones shipped back to China to be buried.
There were eight non-workforce fatalities (passenger or public) in the year April 2022 to March 2023: three occurred in mainline stations and two at the platform-train interface; two passenger fatalities at stations on the London Underground; and one fatality from a collision between a member of the public and a tram.
There were no fatal train collisions, derailments or overruns in 2019 for the twelfth consecutive calendar year. That continuing good performance contributes to a further reduction in the estimated mean frequency of such accidents from 0.20 per year in 2017 to 0.17 in 2019.
Train derailments are quite common in the U.S. The Department of Transportations' Federal Railroad Administration has reported an average of 1,475 train derailments per year between 2005-2021. Despite the relatively high number of derailments, they rarely lead to disaster.
Balasore, Odisha — Mohammad Afzal survived one of the worst train accidents in India's history, but remained in a state of high anxiety, unable to locate his friend who was in the same coach.
Compare it to other major forms of transportation – with 0.04 deaths per 100 million miles traveled, train travel is much more dangerous than airplanes' 0.01 deaths per 100 million miles.
In the earliest days of railways, braking technology was primitive. The first trains had brakes operative on the locomotive tender and on vehicles in the train, where porters or, in the United States brakemen, travelling for the purpose on those vehicles operated the brakes.
A total of 620 trains moved more than 319,000 troops from their landing points to locations all over the country. NRM said the industry achieved this while moving government traffic and carrying out further evacuations of children.