TTC: Russell Hill Crash 20 Years Later

[the lemur]

Though what the operator did was clearly poor safety, from what I understand, nothing the operator did that day was out of the ordinary.

I thought it was an error attributable to inexperience, compounded by a design flaw. Didn't the driver believe he had seen a combination of signals that was theoretically impossible?

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

You mean something like criminal negligence?

Definitely.

AoD

 

[smallspy]

I thought it was an error attributable to inexperience, compounded by a design flaw. Didn't the driver believe he had seen a combination of signals that was theoretically impossible?

Had the trip arm been working correctly, it wouldn't have mattered what the operator thought he saw - it would have stopped the trailing train short of the first one. There were a lot of issues with the way training had been done up to that point, but the theory was that the signalling system would catch any errors in operation.

For anyone looking for more background into the incident, and the inquest following it, check out this link: http://www.daveirwin.com/inquest/inquestintro.htm

Dan
Toronto, Ont.