Re: "Day of the Roses"

["Roderick Smith" <rodsmith@werple.net.au>]

Adding to my earlier post, with the same theme, I have now read the report
(coroner's? judicial?) again: http://www.ecr.mu.oz.au/~jnc/granville

Day of the Roses was itself derailed by its distortion of the causes,
pushed with the same lack of subtlety which characterised Victorian
melodrama and 1950s USA tv shows.

As with the many cases analysed in the classic book 'Red for danger', the
derailment was caused by several factors coinciding: principally the track
condition, but also the wear on one leading wheel and one leading flange
(to limits, but not beyond).

Correctly, the show was careful not to claim that the driver had been going
too fast (although it made an issue of the train being 3 min late at
Parramatta).  The 3 minutes of lateness was a red herring: the train was
being driven normally and was not pushing to make up time.  The show
promoted the line that the transport authority had an excessive and
uncharacteristically high speed limit at the site, to achieve political
goals.  Nobody in this discussion thread has quoted contemporary or current
speed limits for other curves of 500 m radius on the system.  The constant
line was pushed that 46-class locos were derailment prone (considered and
rejected at the real inquest), and that 4620 was particularly jinxed.  What
did the intrepid investigator discover when he forced his way into the
storage depot with a court order in the middle of the night (looking like
Paul Drake, but without a confident Perry Mason and admiring Della Street
lurking in the bushes)?

The wear on the track resulted in the track being overgauge by up to  22
mm: not of itself a major problem.  Curves were often overgauged to allow
steam locos to pass (typically 12 mm).  With coned wheels on a curved head,
there is some automatic sideways adjustment to allow slightly differential
speeds.

The wear on the track resulted in rapid changes of nominal radius: down to
260 m.  This would cause lurching and high sideways forces: not good for a
worn wheel on worn rail with fixings no longer capable of holding the rail
precisely.

The engineers differed in their opinions on what the limit should have
been.  An Australian engineer stated that this curve should have had a
limit of 70 km/h (presumably the source of the D or R investigator's mole's
comments).  The UK engineer did not regard 80 km/h as excessive.

For 80 km/h around a curve of 500 m radius, the ideal cant is 140 mm (5.7
degrees).  Railway systems always undercant, to allow for the fact that not
all trains travel at maximum speed.  At the inquest (where this evidence
was tendered in imperial), it was stated that such a curve should have been
canted with 6 inches of lift on the outer rail (153 mm).  Normal NSW
practice would have been to provide half of this (ie 3 degrees of cant
deficiency).  Because the formation was a part of curved points, only 1.5
inches was provided (ie 4 degrees of cant deficiency).
Current NSW standards use 4 degrees of deficiency for trains such as XPT.
Current UK standards accept 6 degrees of deficiency.  With the UK standard,
80 km/h would have been regarded as safe at the Granville site, even with
no canting at all, provided that the track was maintained and aligned
properly.
These figures are set by passenger-comfort levels, not by risk of
derailment.

Day of the Roses did not consider these points, although the real inquest
did.  Instead we got over-dramatised USA-style personal clashes, with a
spurious engineering measurement being presented.  The lack of veracity
here, far more than Brisbane sites doctored as Sydney ones, turned what
could have been a powerful and compelling piece of history into just
another tv show.

I am not fussed with Brisbane sites masquerading as Sydney ones: it is fun
detecting them all.  We used to do this with Melbourne-made crime shows:
great test of skill identifying all the sites.

-- 
Regards
Roderick Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor

Robert Whyte <5dtv@ucaqld.com.au> wrote in article
<362d2ecc.5315371@news.uq.edu.au>...
> > James Forrester wrote in message <362C0F8C.F24490AC@sydney.gecm.com>...
> >> It seems many of the "error" correctors forget that movies are not
real, they
> >> may portray real events but they are in fact fictional so must by
defintion
> >> contain some inconsistency with the real world.