When will news programmes ever start with the full list of the deadly car accidents of the day?

If TV showed the carnage of death and injury that occurs on a daily basis, maybe people would start carign about real dangers instead of focusing on noisier but ultimately irrelevant things like train accidents or terrorist attacks.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Tara Rose McAvoy, 18, the reigning Miss Deaf Texas, is killed by the snowplow on a 65-car Union Pacific freight train while walking alongside the tracks and text-messaging her parents. The train sounded its horn repeatedly...

You can't make this stuff up. No one would believe it.

A number of incidents can be put down to objects/people on the tracks, but I also wonder how much comes down to a failure to properly maintain the infrastructure?

It's been a big deal in the UK following on from some high profile collisions/derailings over the last few years and a lot of investment has been needed to sort the tracks out.

It also draws us into the debate on privatisation of public services...

Ad astra per aspera

I don't know what the totals come to, but I'd guess we're looking at perhaps a few thousand deaths worlwide over the last decade.

That's an excellent safety record. It's better than the airline industry can manage.

I know for sure that trains in the UK are now extremely safe. The last few high profile accidents have all been caused by motorists. Otherwise fatalities average to something like 10-20 per year. And that's mostly because of a handful of very big accidents a few years ago.

For comparison, car fatalities in the UK run at more than 3,000 per year. I don't know what the figure worlwide is, but it's certainly going to be a non-trivial number.

Erm, to sum up what others said with some additions:

• Train accidents, like plane accidents, are spectacular, and often affect a large number of people. Yet per the number of passengers or passenger-kilometres, trains are more safe than any other mode of transport (IIRC including walking).

• There is indeed much more passenger transport over here than over there (though with freight, it's just the other way). (BTW, do you ride planes? Whether yes or no, are you bothered by news of plane accidents?)

• What you posted is a Wiki list, not a statistical sample. Earlier years have fewer accidents because the record is incomplete. People can insert any minor accident that happens now, but won't bother to dig up the news records about every car crossing at red light or suicide jump.

• Indeed the most common type of "train acident" is in truth a car accident, i.e. when a driver ignores a red light or even drives around the bars to cross the tracks. According to police statistics, in over 95% of cases the driver is at fault, yet in many places drivers will complain why the railroad 'doesn't do something'. But a result is that in most European countries, a significant part of money on railway infrastructure is spent on road under/overpasses.

• Ah, that text-messaging girl. I hear of the most ridiculous train-car/pedestrian accidents from the USA. I don't really understand why -- yes there is car culture and all, but still there are a lot of freight trains around, and even if people don't know that trains are among the stiffest vehicles on Earth (I suspect even a collision between an oil tanker and a modern American Diesel locomotive would be 'won' by the latter: rail vehicles must have the strength to master the forces within miles long trains), one should have a basic sense of its mass, that it won't just stop next to you like a car. But I saw videos of idiots stopping right on the tracks in a traffic jam, or read of Houston drivers crossing in front of a tram...

• I'm not aware of any rise in the number of accidents. There has been some country-specific waves. In Britain, in the wake of privatisation, everyone saved money on track maintenance -- the result was a wave of accidents (but IIRC with less a hundred deaths total), followed by a massive repair programme from tax money. But this was years ago. More recently, in Spain, Greece and Turkey, the results of governments pushing for modernisation on the cheap (e.g., slimming down projects by leaving away safety-relevant parts and redundancies, often nationally waiving existing international standards) had some unfortunate results. In ex-Yugoslavia, railways are still reeling from the devastation and neglect during the wars, today especially in Serbia.

• Why do you say high-speed? There is no high-speed accident on the quoted list. High-speed trains are even more safe than other types of trains.

• I note that trains, being fixed-track vehicles, can be fitted with rather well-tuned and extensive safety systems. On better networks, nowadays most real train accidents (e.g. ones not involving cars) happen under two circumstances: (a) the safety system is temporarily deactivated due some works, and dispatchers aren't used to the fallback system (I suspect this must be behind that Spanish metro accident, didn't yet read the details), (b) shunting or multiple trains at stations trick the system.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Some graphs taken from this German pdf:

Total number of car, train traffic deaths per year in Germany (note: the 1991 spike comes from switching from Wet German to all-German data, train deaths include cars hit in crossings):

Deaths per billion passenger-kilometres in 2004 in Germany -- motorised private vehicles, busses, trains:

Comparison of absolute number and rate per passenger-kilometre of wounded, again 2004 in Germany (green is Other, the rest like on previous graph):

European comparison of the rate of traffic deaths per billion passenger-kilometre for private motorised vehicles and trains in 2002:

Missing from this comparison is airplanes, but as I recall, in some years it's rail that's better and in others planes, depending on which has a major accident.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

"I don't know if this is simply due to an increase in reporting or knowledge of contemporary events, or if it is reflective of something else. Is it just that more people are taking the train? Difficult to imagine, when cars are more readily available than ever before."

More news coverage, networks with 24 hours a day to focus on the news, more possible conflicts of pedestrians and motor vehicles with trains.

The list, however, is incomplete.  It would be extremely difficult to keep track of the (usually minor, but at least once a month somebody dies) collisions involving cars or pedestrians breaking basic safety rules in the Chicago, Illinois area alone.  (That doesn't begin to address the similar frequencies of such collisions in the big cities of Texas or California, where there are also ample opportunities for pedestrians and drivers to get in the way of trains.)

Stephen Karlson ATTITUDE is a nine letter word. BOATSPEED.

In the U.S. there is a concerted effort to get rid of grade crossings, which are the biggest railroad accident problem in rural areas. The number of crossings is surprizingly high:

Across its 32,000-route-mile network, BNSF has approximately...27,500...highway-rail at-grade crossings, including about 18,000 public crossings and 9,300 private crossings.

Around 1000 people altogether die in railroad accidents, most of them at grade crossings. In most years of the last two decades, the number of railroad passenger deaths in the U.S. has been in the single digits.

The train itself is safe, but crossing the tracks isn't.

In Italy, our worst historical rail disasters were due to far-right, Gladio-linked terrorist bombings etc. during the 1960s through 1980s - those were the big killers.   I was horrified at the news of yesterday's subway accident, terribly sorry at the girl's death and all those people wounded and shocked - the accident seems to have been due to the "system" advising drivers to deliberately discount certain safeguards to speed up peak-out traffic flow, catch up on accumulated delays, plus too much overtime (100 hours per month). The train-drivers' union had been warning about this for a couple of years. There have been several rail accidents here recently, mostly on fairly minor lines, due either to human-factor or poor maintenance snarlups or to freak accidents such as a vehicle from a motorway overpass or parallel road going out of control and landing on the tracks in front of a train!  Sad and very shocking for those involved but no big-big fatalities, nothing compared to road-accident stats!

"Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami