Hi!
N8N
The price you'd have to pay to avoid this would be the elimination of level crossings between tracks and streets. They've been at it in Germany for decades, and it's even mandatory that there be no level crossings if the trains are to go beyond 100 mph here.
IMHO, that's not being done to avoid hitting cars on level crossings, but to prevent nasty train wrecks from being caused by one. Hitting a car at 100 mph is certainly not good even for a train, but hitting one at 200 mph would lead to certain disaster. (Hitting a big truck with a light railcar does lead to disaster at much lesser speeds than that, but that's the price that even we in Germany pay. After all, trucks and trains rarely collide -- mostly it's pbuttenger cars with ignorant or reckless drivers, mostly the latter AFAICT.)
Actually, the standard safe stopping distance for trains going up to 100 mph is one kilometre. That's how far ahead stops are signalled in Germany, on no-more-than-100-mph tracks. I believe that emergency stops can be done much more quickly. Faster trains have LZB, which is essentially a system to radio stops into moving trains so that the driver doesn't have to look out for signals anymore.
Who's at fault hereP) The law of unintended consequences strikes again. The dead vehicle in question would have been happily occupying someone's yard had the government not interfered in the owner's plans...
And no, this is not related to train length. Or at least, not much. Every wagon has its own brake system, after all. The only thing that increases with train length is the time for the loss of air pressure, which actuates the brakes, to propagate to the end of the train. But I understand they're already experimenting with electrically actuated brakes to overcome this problem.
But of course, there's no way to look out for stopped cars on the tracks for one kilometre ahead, or even more than a couple hundred metres at best. Consequently, cars do get hit on level railway crossings all the time, even on tracks where the train's speed is limited to 30 or 40 mph. And even at 30 mph, trains are apt to transform a car into a bizarrely shaped heap of twisted metal out of which the driver and pbuttengers can be extracted only a bit at a time.
And while the law clearly states that in such occurrences the car driver is to blame no matter what, the press usually reports a "train crash" or some such, thereby hinting that somehow the train driver (or railway company) is to blame.
I think it's the same all over the world.
Yours, Erik. -- "He said, 'I sold my blood for money There wasn't any pain But I just can't stand the feeling it's in someone else's veins'" -- Joan Osborne, "Pensacola"
