How Do Train Crashes Happen?

April 6, 2023

As recent national news reminded us, trains are a vital part of our everyday life. Even when we are not riding them to work or across long distances to family and friends, they are carrying materials and ingredients to help build a nation.

Day and night, trains are running across the face of the nation. And they sometimes are involved in accidents. Because trains run on trails, accidents happen in a few very specific ways.

Derailment

The kind of accident that happened in early 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio was a derailment. This is when a force causes the train cars to jump from their rails. These are most common when a train tries to stop too quickly or unexpectedly, as when braking for something on the tracks.

Because trains are often being pulled by a large engine or two in front of a long line of cars, sudden braking creates uneven forces on the connections between train cars. Placing extra pressure on these joints causes them to break or disconnect, and cars jump the tracks.

Infringement

Another common kind of train accident occurs when something is on the tracks that shouldn’t be there. In some unfortunate situations, this other object is a car that couldn’t make it across the tracks because it stalled or chose to stop on the tracks.

When a collision like this occurs, the result is often devastating for the object that was in the tracks. Trains are incredibly heavy, and a car on the tracks before a train has a chance to start slowing down will show the effects of all the force of the accident. Train engines are built with an understanding that collisions might happen, and their reinforcement will render cars or other obstacles into debris.

Collision

Another cause of train accidents is a collision. While infringements are one kind of collision, this most devastating type of train accident is a collision between two trains that were mistakenly routed to the same track.

Though years of technology and training have been designed to prevent these sorts of catastrophic events, they still occur. In March, 2023, in Greece, two occupied trains collided head on, killing or injuring over 100 people.

These types of accidents can happen when a moving train strikes a train parked or stalled on the same track.

Fortunately, despite recent news, train crashes are rare, and crashes of passenger trains are just a small portion of the overall total.