Derail: Why Trains Crash

by Nicholas Faith

Railways are by far the safest means of land transport. As a result, the public is deeply shocked when, as is inevitable, there is a major disaster on the rails. Such tragedies can have many causes - drivers are inattentive, tired - or even drunk, on level crossings drivers grow impatient waiting for the train to pass, or their vehicles are simply too slow. Derail is an unprecedented analysis of many of the most dramatic, bizarre and terrifying rail accidents over the past 150 years. In the nineteenth century, terrible crashes like those at Versailles in 1842 and Armagh in 1889 led to better safety regulations, and the phenomenon of post-traumatic shock disorder recognized the psychological impact of crashes. Above all, Derail provides some answers to the crucial questions posed in the last twelve years since the disaster at Clapham in 1988: what lessons have been learned from past disasters? What has been done, and what steps remain to be taken, to increase rail safety? And can, or indeed should, we afford even more safety measures? With Derail, Nicholas Faith looks at the tense and often gruesome work carried out by rail investigators as they search for evidence in the aftermath of crashes such as these; and compare the differing approaches to rail safety by the UK, the US Europe and Japan where incredibly there has been no high-speed rail disaster of any kind since 1965.

198 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2000

About the author

Nicholas Faith is a former senior editor for the Sunday Times and The Economist, a journalist and author.

He has written widely on wines, spirits and transport.

In 1996 he founded the International Spirits Challenge.

In September 2010 Nicholas Faith was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Bureau National Interprofessional de Cognac.