Author: Aarian Marshall / Source: WIRED
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.”
Runaway trains are rare, and runaway trains that remain on the lam for nearly an hour are even rarer. “That’s very unusual,” says Allan Zarembski, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Delaware who studies railroad safety and derailment prevention.
It does, however, make sense that it took railway authorities some time to track down and derail the thing, given the landscape of this section of Western Australia, called the Pilbara: Under 50,000 people live in the 194,000-square-mile region, known mainly for its iron mining operations. And it makes sense that…
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