Most things don’t happen the way they do in the movies. Changes are less sudden, incidents less surprising, humans less attractive. But when a runaway train tore through the Australian outback, the action sequence that followed seems to have come right out of a Tony Scott flick.
The whole mess started when the engineer stopped the 268-car, four-locomotive train and hopped out to inspect one of the cars, according to the Australian Transport Safety Board. While he was on the ground (presumably distracted by giant spiders and roving kangaroos), the train pulled away with nobody on board. Loaded down with iron ore, it was soon hitting 68 mph. The train, operated by metals, mining, and petroleum giant BHP, covered a remarkable 57 miles before the company stopped it—by flinging it off the tracks.
Nobody was hurt, though the investigators, who are working to determine why the train pulled away in the first place, rated the damage to the equipment as “substantial.”
Here’s one spot of good news: The technology to prevent an extended runaway train incident like this one already exists. Positive Train Control systems use train- and rail-mounted GPS and sensors to track locomotive movement and alert conductors and dispatchers to imminent derailments or collisions. If humans don’t react to the warnings, the systems are designed to automatically brake trains before something terrible goes down. Congressional legislation demanded that America's rail operators implement Positive Train Control by 2015, but the Department of Transportation extended the deadline to December 2018 after many struggled to deploy the technology in time. According to the DOT’s Positive Train Control dashboard, just 18 of 40 railroads had PTC implemented on all their locomotives by July of this year.
Still, with any luck, Hollywood’s window of opportunity for runaway-train-based screenplays just might be closing.
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