And now for this week's Tuesday Train Wreck...
So my co-workers and I are sitting in our office a couple of minutes before 5:00, watching the clock tick maddeningly slowly towards closing time, and still giggling about our last customer ("Where would I find 'P' in the alphabet?")... when we hear a kind of grinding, crashing sound outside. Somebody yells, "Train crash!", and we all laugh, because we have dozens of trains trundling through our station every day, and they quite often bang and crash about when they're shunting back and forth.
Imagine our collective surprise when our office manager comes running in, yelling for someone to call the emergency services. Like all pure-bred homo sapiens, we all went out for a good gawk. The media, like all pure-bred news-sniffers, were there practically before we were.
I took this with my mobile phone, so it's a bit crappy. Click for bigger image.
It seems the engine in the picture was shunting one shipping container through the station yards when the mechanism that collapses the container to make it fit under bridges malfunctioned and it popped open, collecting - and, um, demolishing - the overhead footbridge in the process.
I believe a couple of people had minor injuries, but this could've been MUCH worse. Remember I said it happened just before 5pm? Well, within 5 minutes, that bridge would have been full of people; hundreds of commuters cross it every day on the way to and from work. I park my car on the other side of that bridge. Because I work so close to the bridge, I'm usually walking across it only a minute or two after 5:00. Lucky escape, huh?
A couple of notes on the pic:
* See the guy in orange? He's one of our train drivers. He gossips like an old woman (as he is demonstrating here with the drivers from the company with the messed up train). He was driving the engine you can see at the far right of the pic. He was about to park the train at the platform you can see there, ready for our morning departure tomorrow. He - and our train - also had a lucky escape, managing to pull up short of the collapsing bridge.
* The people on the right were some of the first (apart from those of us who work there) on the scene. The way they could whip out a camera/phone gives a whole new meaning to the term "quickshooter". That was nothing, however, compared to the hordes of people jeanlucbev and I saw a couple of hours later when we drove past and they were lifting the bridge with 3 cranes. Oooh, cranes!
* The cops were in the process of sealing off the area with their trusty sealing-off Police!Emergency tape. The ambulances had been and gone, but if you look hard you can see a fire engine hiding behind that tall pole thing.
Okay, I think that's all. Bye.
Imagine our collective surprise when our office manager comes running in, yelling for someone to call the emergency services. Like all pure-bred homo sapiens, we all went out for a good gawk. The media, like all pure-bred news-sniffers, were there practically before we were.
I took this with my mobile phone, so it's a bit crappy. Click for bigger image.
It seems the engine in the picture was shunting one shipping container through the station yards when the mechanism that collapses the container to make it fit under bridges malfunctioned and it popped open, collecting - and, um, demolishing - the overhead footbridge in the process.
I believe a couple of people had minor injuries, but this could've been MUCH worse. Remember I said it happened just before 5pm? Well, within 5 minutes, that bridge would have been full of people; hundreds of commuters cross it every day on the way to and from work. I park my car on the other side of that bridge. Because I work so close to the bridge, I'm usually walking across it only a minute or two after 5:00. Lucky escape, huh?
A couple of notes on the pic:
* See the guy in orange? He's one of our train drivers. He gossips like an old woman (as he is demonstrating here with the drivers from the company with the messed up train). He was driving the engine you can see at the far right of the pic. He was about to park the train at the platform you can see there, ready for our morning departure tomorrow. He - and our train - also had a lucky escape, managing to pull up short of the collapsing bridge.
* The people on the right were some of the first (apart from those of us who work there) on the scene. The way they could whip out a camera/phone gives a whole new meaning to the term "quickshooter". That was nothing, however, compared to the hordes of people jeanlucbev and I saw a couple of hours later when we drove past and they were lifting the bridge with 3 cranes. Oooh, cranes!
* The cops were in the process of sealing off the area with their trusty sealing-off Police!Emergency tape. The ambulances had been and gone, but if you look hard you can see a fire engine hiding behind that tall pole thing.
Okay, I think that's all. Bye.