FRENCH RAILWAY DISASTER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21712, 30 January 1934, Page 13

FRENCH RAILWAY DISASTER

Sir,—-Apropos _of tho appalling railway tragedy which occurred near Paris on the night of December 23 last, it astonishes inc why the methods of traffic control in these days of safety devices should ho so crude as to render snch happening* possible. It is abundantly evident they have no " tablet " systems in that part of tho world, for in that case 110 train could como within miles of another train running in front ol it; but there might bo such things as electrically controlled fog sirens, automatic signal discs, " danger ahead" indicators, or even the common old swallow-tailed and homo semaphore. As to the tablet, this system was introduced in our own railways 111 the year 1903 by the then chief signal enginoer, and since then it has been superseded in some, but not all, trunk lines by the automatic triple-light discs, which are only reliable so long as there is no fault in the circuit by which they are controlled. Tho tablet, although now considered obsolete, has been the safest of all the methods used in either single or double tracks. Tho only instance iii New Zealand of accident arising out of a following train crashing into another standing at a station occurred a few years before the introduction of tho tablet. The Whangamarino accident in 1914 was of a different order. In this case one train was being flagged into the siding to allow another to cross. Owing to tho faulty position of the home signal light, which it was said at the time was caused by contraction of tho connecting wire through frost, the express failed to stop outside tho section. Could it have been that the signalling system 011 the French railway was interfered with by the cold, or by other contributing, though rare, causes? No explanation seems to be offered. J. Orr. i