It's Electric!

Tim, visualize that Belgian Railways double-ender you posted a picture of some time ago. The Belgian paint scheme comes close to the old New Haven hunter green and gold, last applied to an electric locomotive 50 years ago. I'm going to mess with some North American minds by painting my undecorated one in that paint scheme.We're on to your Virgin Voyager tricks. They don't pass the collision standards here. Diesel multiple units have to share the permanent way with SD90MACs and other real diesels on these shores!

I'm not convinced that the US collision standards are neccesarily better, they just seem to have a different emphasis.

The US standards seem to advocate a high level of force below which the car *must not* distort (which is a far higher level than over here), but from what I can tell there is then little regard for what happens in a collision more violent than the bodyshell is designed to withstand.

In the BNSF-Metrolink collision a couple of years back I was surprised that the lead push-pull car failed in the area of an internal staircase, 2/3 of the way back along the car, in an area where there are also passenger seats. This appeared to lead to folk being trapped and possibly the deaths in the car, this failure occurred whilst there was little damage to the cab end that took the brunt of the initial collision force.

Over here, (admittedly we would have had a full-width cab there whereas that cab car did not) the cab area of the car would have been a crumple zone that would have started to absorb any impacts that exceeded the structural rigidity of the car, protecting the areas of passenger use.

It just seems to me that the standards for cab cars in the US are more based on preventing a large road vehicle from entering the cab area in a grade crossing accident than dealing with train-train collisions. And that's fair enough, a train appears to be far more likely to hit a truck on a crossing than another train from the info I hear.

As for "real trains", check out the stats on the Great Heck collision. 150mph+ head on impact between a passenger and freight train. In terms of force of impact, the sort of stats generated there are hard to beat. It even involved one of our imported "SD69's"...

Point taken about the nature of the standards. The butting collision standards for U.S. passenger stock were revised after a 1972 fatal collision in Chicago that also involved some standard heavyweight single-level emus overriding the floor of some new lightweight double-level emus. That ensures some other place will be the weakest place in the coach, and in double-level coaches that weakness is likely to be near the stairwell.As far as collisions at speed, all bets are off. In January of 1987, one of those AEM7s was leading an Amtrak train at 128 mph when it hit a stopped GP38 light engine set at Gunpow interlocking timetable east of Baltimore. The AEM7 disintegrated.It is also instructive to compare one of those SD69s with an SD90MAC ... you wonder who brought the American Flyer engine to the Lionel party...

Quote: "It is also instructive to compare one of those SD69s with an SD90MAC ... you wonder who brought the American Flyer engine to the Lionel party..."

Know what you mean there....
:-D