 Playing difficult videos are financially supported by the generosity of my Patreon and YouTube members. Members get early ad free access to videos, usually Monday or Tuesday before it's released on the main channel. You can also get other perks depending on the pledge, including your name at the end of the video. Right well thanks for listening to me talk, back to the normal scheduled dose of well me talking. Emergency crews are picking over the remains of what is looking one of Japan's worst rail disasters. A 7 car commuter train has derailed on a tight corner, resulting in two of the front carriages being launched into an apartment building. The train had been travelling on Fukushima Line on a semi-express rapid passenger service. Now the train was involved, clearly by looking at the wreckage the train had left the tracks with a great force, but how and why? The disaster would unravel the inherent pressure prevalent but not unique to Japanese railways. The disaster acts as a warning for all industries and the power that fear of failure can actually create a far worse situation. My name is John and welcome to Plainly Difficult, today we are going to look at the Amagasaki derailment. I must admit, as a bit of a train fan, Japanese railways have always been fascinating to me. Sadly I haven't been able to travel to the country yet to see it first hand, but the efficiency of the use of the limited track space and smaller track gauge really gets my geeky side going. I mean just look at their timetabling. Well there may be some signaling and train protection geeking out in this video, just a warning before we get started. So we start with a brief history of the company that operated the fatal train journey in 2005, all the way back to his birth in 1987. This was when the National Railway Operator, Japanese National Rail, was split up during privatisation. Several new companies were formed to operate their respective area of operations, one of which was JR West, which unsurprisingly would operate in the west of the Japanese island of Honshu. JR West was tasked with operating the complex web of lines and interconnected services around the city of Osaka, Japan's third most populous metropolitan area. They also operated trains around Hiroshima, but that's irrelevant for this particular video. Anyways like in all busy urban rail networks, you have certain pinch points where multiple lines join one another. One such place is Amagasaki, just to the west of central Osaka. It had been in operation since 1879, mainly as a local stop only, but this would change in 1997 when the station became a busy intersection. The station is where three lines intersect, the JR Kobe line, Tokaido main line, the JR Tarakazuka line and the JR Tozai line. Officially it is the terminus of the latter two, but all services actually carry on. For example, a train on the Tozai line would instead of terminating at Amagasaki transfer onto the Tarakazuka line and carry on westwards. Or if traveling on the Tarakazuka line eastbound, the train would transfer onto the Tozai line to travel out towards the Gakintoshi line on the east. This is what many services do every day, but if I show you on a map you may see a little bit of an issue here with the topography of the area, particularly to the west eastbound service. In order to reach Amagasaki station, trains need to negotiate a bit of a curve, followed by another curve, in order to be facing in the up eastbound direction. I should also say Japan has a similar line direction nomenclature as the UK, being up in the direction of the Dayton Point and down the way from it. Usually the Dayton Point is the nearest biggest city. Anyways, I think before we get into the disaster train, which was a west to east service on the Tarakazuka line to the Tozai line, we need to talk about the signalling in the area, and more importantly the train protection system, or lack thereof, in use at the time of the disaster. The rail geek stuff. This is my favourite part of these videos. Japanese signalling has a few similarities with British signalling, but also has some similarities with European and US signalling. For reference UK signalling is known as route signalling, where just the route is indicated to the driver, with speed being indicated via fixed speed boards. The other method is speed signalling, where the signals themselves tell the driver what speed to proceed at. This makes Japan a bit of a hybrid system. But I won't be delving too much into this, just a brief overview as a foundation for the protection systems as they approve to be a very important component, or lack of, in the disaster later. Well as you may or may not know, a large portion of Japanese railways use a smaller gauge than the standard four foot eight and a half inches used across the world. It uses a three foot six inch gauge. This inherently is less stable than standard gauge, and even the Japanese thought this when they built the Shinkansen network, to standard gauge specs in the 1960s. So Japanese signalling uses multiple aspects, which tell the driver not only how far ahead they can proceed, but also at what speed. They use the usual suspects in signalling red, yellow and green. I'll only cover three and four aspect signalling here, but there is a lot more depth to what I'll talk about here. But in three aspects, it is perceived for green, caution on a single yellow, and stop is red. Four aspect has the additional double yellow called speed restriction, which is very similar to the UK preliminary caution. They also have another four aspect style, which is green for proceed, yellow over green for reduce speed, yellow for caution, and red for stop. In addition to this, there are also actually speed indicator boards for things like point work and tight curves. For the running line, the signals are known as block signals. These control the block section, and they're usually controlled by the movements of trains. At stations, there are home signals, which are the final signal before the station. These allow the train to enter station limits. And finally, for the purpose of this video, starting signals. These permit the train to depart the station. In reality, they can be many starting and home signals. To protect trains from the ramifications of operating incidents, a system called ATS is employed. The system, automatic train stop, is designed to stop a train. There are many variants in use all over the JR network, but on the west there were mainly two versions, ATS SW, and this system was capable of stopping a train if it passed a signal with danger. This worked by using a transponder on the train and a coil on the track. It had been surpassed in the 1990s by the better ATSP, which offered protection to trains that were over speeding in certain areas, with the addition of loops on the track on the approach to tight corners. But neither were installed on the curve at the end of the Tarakazuka Line near Amagasaki, which neatly brings us on to the disaster. The disaster. It is the morning of the 25th of April 2005, and Roryu Jiru Takami has started his shift. His shunts, his train, a 207 series, formed of two units, one 3-car and one 4-car, out of the depot, arriving at Hanaten station at 6.51am. There he is met by his conductor for the day. The conductor operates from the rear cab of the 7-car train. They will be working the train westwards towards Koyubashi and then on to Amagasaki, working as a stopping local service. The train then continued its journey along the curve on the Fukushima Line, heading towards the destination city of Tarakazuka. Just before reaching Tarakazuka, the train was suddenly stopped by an emergency brake application at roughly 8.53am in the morning. The ATSP system had intervened due to the driver passing a signal showing a red stop aspect. The train was now late into Tarakazuka, something frowned upon on the Japanese railway. Quickly the conductor and driver changed places. Takami, the driver, is now in the up-direction cab. At 9.03am, the train departs on its limited stop rapid commuter service, numbered 5418m. The journey will take them to Doshi-shame, along the Fukushima Line to Amagasaki, and then on to the JR Tosai Line and finally the Gakintoshi Line. Shortly after departing, the train overruns one of its station stops at Itami by four car lengths. The train was brought to a stand by the driver applying the emergency brake. The train was passed its correct stopping mark by roughly 72m. The train was partially out of the station, requiring it to be reversed back to the correct stopping location. As such, the service was delayed by roughly 90 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but the whole journey to Amagasaki only had about 28 seconds of slack in the timetable. Now this incident would require the conductor to report it to the company. Worried, the driver contacted the conductor via the cap-to-cap radio. Bearing in mind, this was whilst the train was moving. Takami asked the conductor to not report the incident. During his conversation, a passenger requested help from the conductor, resulting in him putting down the handset. After the station stop at Itami, roughly 700 passengers were on board. The train loading was typical for a morning rush hour commuter service. Worried of the implications of running late and now potentially the punishment of an overrun, Takami took more power speeding up the train. He managed to reduce the delay from 90 to 60 seconds. Due to the conductor having to report the overrun, he contacted the JR West Dispatcher. The conversation between the conductor and JR West could be heard over the radio in the driver's cab. Hearing this, Takami must have realised the situation, and that he was now looking at two serious reprimands. The conductor, attempting to do the driver a solid, downplayed the overrun from 72 meters to just 8, but it was too late. The train was heading for the tight right hand turn. The curve had a speed limit of 70 km an hour, or 43 mph. The train was actually going at 116 km an hour, roughly 72 mph. The driver applied the service brake, but it wasn't enough. As the track turned to the right, the first carriage derailed. The next front three cars derailed completely. The first car rammed into a parking lot of an apartment building. The second car hit the wall of the same building, becoming almost completely crumpled by the force of the third and fourth cars coming off the track behind it. The fifth car pushed into the rear of the third and fourth. The final two cars of the train stayed upright and still railed. With so many busy carriages crushed into one another, the number of casualties were high. Driver Takami being at the front lost his life along with 105 others. Local police estimated that the front carriage was where 43 of the victims had been, followed by 45 in the second, and the remaining of the victims being from the rest of the train. They injured totaled 562, and they have been sent all around the area to different medical centres. The sheer size of the carriage is almost unbelievable to imagine. The cleanup, repair and investigation of the line between Amagasaki and Tarakazuka stations would take a while, with services resuming on the 19th of June 2005. But with reduced speed limits of 95kmh or 59mh on the straight section, and 60kmh or 37mh on the curve, but why was the driver so apparently anxious about running late? So much so to cause the demise of not only himself, but over 100 others. Well, we will find out after this short YouTube ad break. Investigation So why was he speeding? Why didn't he use the emergency brake, and why was he not aware of the route ahead? Well, seemingly on the face of it, this disaster has a few similarities with the Moorgate crash, a number of incidents leading up to the crash, improper train handling and reckless over-speeding resulting in a bloody death toll. And also like Moorgate, the key witness was amongst the victims. But the differences end there, as we will likely never know the cause of the Moorgate crash, be it suicide or my personal theory of loss of situational awareness caused by micro-sleep. But with the Amagasaki disaster, Takami's actions seems like he was scared of the ramifications of running late. And in Japan, it sounds a lot worse than meeting with your manager without a cup of tea, followed by an action plan and time of an instructor like you get on UK railways. The thing Takami feared was Nikin Koyiku in English, day shift education. But why was he scared of it? Well, he had been through his punishment slash retraining program before. The day shift education usually ran between 9 o'clock in the morning and quarter to six in the evening, at the company offices. It consisted mainly of report writing, but would be undertaken in a room with other employees in an effort to try and shame the driver. Many tasks would be requested on top of the reports, which included long hand copying of work rules, writing lines on a board, apologizing to work colleagues, weeding tracks, cutting grass and tending to flower beds. As an additional punishment, drivers would have their pay cut during the day shift education. They are also required to ask permission to use the toilet and have to follow any instructions given from the educator in charge. Before the disaster, Takami had done three counts of day shift education, totaling 18 days, one of which was 10 months before from an overrun of 100 meters. He was clearly struggling with the brutal timetable, leading him to make mistakes, thus leading him to more time on the day shift education. The mounting pressure led him down the path of loss of concentration and situational awareness in a job that can be very unforgiving if the mind wanders. Knowing the punishment he would have received resulted in attempt of trying to put right the earlier delay. It's common on the railway where drivers get caught up in chasing the timetable, but it is a very risky game to play. Additionally, why did he not use the emergency brake? Well, this ties back into JR West's policies, at a time where any use of emergency brake would need to be explained and justified later. Thus, presumably, Takami's mind would make a bad situation worse with his punishment. Investigators found that a train travelling the curve at any speed greater than 106 kilometers or 66 miles an hour would derail. The disaster was a combination of speed and lack of awareness of the corner, but that's not the whole picture. Aside from the human factors of Takami trying to claw back the delay and getting distracted, the question of protection systems need to be addressed. After all, they are meant to be able to step in when the skin and bone combo that is a human being messes up. As I mentioned before, JR West used two types of ATS, and on the line in question, the older ATS SW was in operation, although nothing was installed on this particular curve, even if it was the system ATS SW would have not been sufficient to protect the curve. Now, what is crazy about this disaster was that the train hit a building off of the railway. It's not hard to see why when looking at it on a map, it's almost like the building was a target at the end of the range, especially as the straight section of track leading up to it had a speed of 120 kilometers an hour or 75 miles an hour. Japanese building regulations don't restrict the construction of buildings near the railway, as long as it wouldn't obstruct any signals or impede the railway property, thus they are allowed to be built very close to the running line. In the wake of the disaster, changes at JR West had to be made. A number of resignations followed from the company's top bosses. In July 2009, West Japan company co-president Masao Yamazaki was charged with negligence, but found not guilty in January 2012, even though the company were critiqued on the poor risk assessment of the curve. The building the train hit was partially demolished in 2017, leaving one corner standing as a memorial, which opened in 2019. Now I'm going to rate this disaster as a dumpster fire, as an accident like this was just waiting to happen due to the pressure placed on JR West's drivers, and I'm going to give it a 6 on the legacy scale. This is a plain difficult production. All videos on the channel are creative commons attribution share light licensed. Plain difficult videos are produced by me, John, in the currently wet and windy corner of southern London UK. 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