Canberra’s light rail drivers have reported 41 near misses and four collisions in the ACT since January.
Authorities are pleading with Canberra commuters not to risk their lives around light rail.
ACT police have reminded commuters that they could face penalties for dangerous conduct.
Includes a video with a selection of the latest examples of people not seeing the giant red thing that can be found in predictable locations…
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn’t there the moment before. I looked down: “Rail? WTF?” and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife’s pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC’s pulling, and 2 Dash-9’s pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
This. I don’t care if I get cancelled for saying this but I think trams should stick to the tracks that were but on the road for them.
They’re all over the bloody place, and how am I meant to see them with their size, bells, lights, and ads otherwise?
This is either a weirdly specific copypasta or your brain is somewhat ironically completely off the rails. Either way, I’m here for it
ACT drivers hitting things?! No fucking way! In 8 months the two trialed mobile phone detection cameras caught more incidents than the entire state of QLD did in a year. There’s crashed vehicles littered on the side of the roads everywhere. You would get hammered off a drinking game based in a Bunnings carpark. Stops are blown. Reds are blown. Some times people just drive off the road. The last time I was there I saw a five car accordion pile up on Kings Ave bridge. How do five people do that in a 70 zone on a straight fucking road?!
It cannot be believed how low ACT driving IQ is compared to the next lowest part of Australia. It has to be experienced—just an hour would be enough. It is comically mind-blowing.
