Federal Railroad Administration using ObservableHQ

To be fair, it's not that bad, but that being said, we have more trains than assholes over here in the Union.

Really should defrag that hard drive.

Interesting. Aging infrastructure? Staffing crisis? I find myself wondering how this compares to prior years. Certainly an unacceptable reality.

It could be just that these things happen, the EU also has over 1,000 derailments a year. It seems to me like this is just the norm and because a particularly bad one happened over there recently, everyone is paying attention

Edit: as u/nac_nabuc has pointed out, this is counting fatalities, not injuries, I must've just misread the data.

Do trains even like/need tracks 🤣

Are you sure you are comparing the same thing?

>Significant accident Any accident involving at least one rail vehicle in motion, resulting in at least one killed or seriously injured person, or in significant damage to stock, track, other installations or environment, or extensive disruptions to traffic. Accidents in workshops, warehouses and depots are excluded.

Says nothing about derailment. It's older data, but 2015 Europe has 0 deaths and 0 serious injuries from derailments and since your graph shows fatalities, my conclusion is that significant accident isnt limited to derailments.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=326173

Are you sure you are comparing the same thing?

Your graph says fatalities. But 2015 Europe had 0 deaths and 0 serious injuries from derailments, they were all killed in different types of accidents.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=326173

I'm sure I'm not. Just wanted to give some scale of things.

Just to give you a scale of how wrong your probably scale was: Spain had 8 derailments in 2021. Assuming every EU country has twice as many, including countries with people, Europe would have only a bit more than 400 per year while having 1/3 more population (22 of those countries have less population than Spain).

https://t.co/UN8avHovQz (pdf in Spanish sadly, p.28).

Just to give you a scale of how wrong your probably scale was: Spain had 8 derailments in 2021. Assuming every EU country has twice as many, including countries with people, Europe would have only a bit more than 400 per year while having 1/3 more population (22 of those countries have less population than Spain).

https://www.seguridadferroviaria.es/recursos_aesf/ias_nsa_espana_2022.pdf (p. 28, Spanish PDF)

Yes, you are absolutely correct. I'm not sure how I missed that.

My point was that, once preventative measures are at some level, as preventative measures reach diminishing returns, it is more efficient to deal with the very small number of accidents than it is to invest in trying to prevent them.

These recent Ohio and Greece accidents are the only ones I can recall that were bad enough to make the news. So at a rate of roughly 1 major accident in both the EU and US over...I would say around 5 years (although I might just not have heard about or not remember previous ones,) I would say the safety over this time has been pretty good. Definitely overwhelmingly better than road transport, which is its main competitor.

I've found data for Spain (47m people but probably not a lot of rail usage).

8 derailments in 2021, p. 28 of this pdf: https://www.seguridadferroviaria.es/recursos_aesf/ias_nsa_espana_2022.pdf

If the derailments are due to infrastructure problems like signaling and track maintenance it probably doesn't make sense to try and achieve higher standards of safety for the US since their infrastructure costs are so ridiculously high. Wouldn't be surprised if you'd see budgets that are closer to Spanish HIGh speed construction costs for just some signaling and small track upgrades.

Damn, respect for finding that.

The big problem with comparing the US and EU countries is just how different they are. US passenger transport is totally backward compared to its EU counterpart, the almost the exact reverse is true with freight rail.

Freight rail is far more prone to accidents because A) the trains are far longer and the carriages are far heavier, and B) accidents are far less of a problem because the consequences of freight derailments are usually minimal (with non-hazardous freight at least, which is the majority of freight)

The second huge difference is population density. There are vast tracts of rail in the US that are far far away from any major population centers, which naturally makes maintenance far more difficult.

The flip side of this, of course, is the average derailment in Europe will cause more injuries and fatalities, so using fatalities as a proxy for derailments (as I accidentally did above) is unfair toward the EU.

Yeah, it's not the most relevant comparison but Reddit loves US Vs EU comparisons. :-D

The US also moves a lot more freight by rail if I'm not mistaken.

>Yeah, it's not the most relevant comparison but Reddit loves US Vs EU comparisons.

This is so frustrating to me. As someone who works in a field that overlaps all of the favourite comparisons (economics, crime, transport etc.) I find myself screaming internally about how much of an oversimplification pretty much every comparison of two countries is.

When the Americans pull out their economic statistics (usually GDP/c) and Europeans pull out their crime statistics, I have to stop myself from commenting and pointing out how little value any of these metrics really provide for anything.

One major difference between European countries and the US when it comes to derailments is that most of our derailments are going to come from minor derailments from yard switching operations. When these happen, it’s generally something as small as a couple of wheels of one car getting on the ground. Since we primarily move freight (which requires a lot of switching) and Europe primarily moves people (which should require far less switching), you’re going to see a much larger number of derailments based on the type of operation.

I’d imagine most of those derailments in Spain and across the EU are main line derailments which are the types of derailments you generally think of. To get a good comparison we’d need to see how the US compares to the EU on main line derailments as they’re generally the ones that really matter.

How does it compare to previous years?

Have to question the meaning of “derailment” here. It’s difficult to imagine the common idea of derailment - bunches of cars spilling off the track causing mass damage - happening by the hundreds each year. Perhaps it includes any record of a wheel getting off track (technically a derail). Some context would be great

“The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) defines a derailment as a type of train accident where on-track equipment leaves the rail for a reason other than a collision, explosion, or highway-rail grade crossing impact.”

• 2022: 1276
• 2021: 1227
• 2020: 1240
• 2019: 1493
• 2018: 1533
• 2017: 1432
• 2016: 1354
• 2015: 1508
• 2014: 1484
• 2013: 1493
• 2012: 1467
• 2011: 1671
• 2010: 1540
• 2009: 1579

Edit: formatting

Really should derail that hard drive

The little-engine-that-could, and tried it and found out.

So it's gotten significantly... better in the last decade?

Not necessarily, just less derailments. We would need to compare other variables, which i’m in the process of trying to see what variables are available. Frequency, severity, and offender might be more interesting. If there are less derailments but more severe damage or more hazardous but less derailments then it could be misleading. I wanted to see what kind of questions people would ask to help guide the next stages of investigation. It’s never a simple answer, trying to let the data tell the story without introducing bias.

> If there are less derailments but more severe damage

I mean those are two completely different things.

It's not like they're specifically derailing dangerous trains. The derailments are random. If trains are carrying more dangerous cargo, then sure, I'd assume there would be some sort of correlation. But you can't really say "hey these random events are getting more hazardous."

The derailments are getting LESS frequent, and that's a good thing.

What you SHOULD do, is see how much is being shipped by train every year. If it's going down, then the fewer derailments make sense and don't mean that things are more safe. If they're going up (which I suspect) they these data show that it's getting significantly safer.

100% agree, the initial purpose to start with derailments as a raw number (never recommended) is to get ahead of the assumption that derailments are not common accidents, when in fact they occur the most often type of accident with a varying degree of outcome. The News headlines of a new derailments shouldn’t be shocking news, sad and terrible news yes, but not with out context, which I would like to have others question. I’m curious if this is consistent across all companies, or related to cars on line (available inventory) vs railcar loadings (active) ( which breaks down “originated” (schedule began) and number “received” (schedule terminated) by commodity type.

edits: autocorrect typos