Great Western Coffee Shop

At least 42 people have been killed and nine people hurt in a collision between a train and a small bus in eastern Ukraine, officials say.

The incident happened near the town of Marhanets, south of the main regional city of Dnipropetrovsk.

The inter-city passenger bus tried to cross the track, ignoring the warning of an approaching train, reports said.

Some of the injured are in a critical condition and the death toll could rise.

Railway officials said all the casualties were on the bus.

The ministry of the interior said the train had dragged the bus for 30 metres after the collision.

"The driver of the bus broke traffic laws by driving through a red light before colliding with the train," a spokeswoman for the regional traffic police told the Agence France-Presse news agency. "It's utter carnage there."

The Transport Minister Kostyantyn Yefymenko is quoted in several Ukrainian news agencies recounting what survivors have already been saying to investigators. "The bus was standing still," said Mr Yefymenko, "and the driver was standing near the bus, then he got in and started driving right before the locomotive."

This, he said, was despite passengers warning the driver that the alarm lights were flashing.

President Viktor Yanukovych has ordered law enforcement agencies to carry out a detailed investigation to establish who was responsible for the accident.

But the Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said he thought authorities should install automatic crossing gates anyway. "It is not worth saving on human lives," said Mr Azarov.

Ukraine has a bad safety record due to the poor condition of many roads and drivers who regularly flout the rules.

The president conveyed his condolences to the relatives of the victims and has declared Wednesday a national day of mourning.

Yes, the driving, if I understood correctly, is done by adults but the children ? and they're teenagers really ? act as "driver's assistants" which presumably is something like an apprentice.

On the general subject of child labour, I've been reading Mary Beard's SPQR, in which she says of child labour in the Roman Empire that it was universal and not regarded as any sort of problem, in fact it would not even be recognised as a category. And she adds in parentheses that even today it's almost exclusively a Western concept.

Interesting!
There is another "childrens railway" in Budapest. This was set up Hunarian Railways as `sort of training railway for youngsters aspiring to work on the railway. I visited it a few years ago. it was staffed by children but the drivers were adults. I think it was "One engine in Steam" so the chances of a collision were very low! A very enjoyable afternoon trundling through the Hungarian countryside as I recall.

I am sure that I saw one of these railways featured on either Tony Robinson or Chris Tarrant's railways programmes. I can't find anything on Google to confirm this though.

The Budapest one was featured in the 1980 series of Great Railway Journeys, in an episode called Changing Trains.

Ukrainian Railways (Ukrainian: Укрзалізниця, Ukrzaliznytsia) is a state-owned joint-stock company of rail transport in Ukraine, a monopoly that controls the vast majority of the railroad transportation in the country.[nb 1] It possesses a combined total track length of over 23,000 km, making it the 13th largest in the world. Ukrainian Railways is also the world's 6th largest rail passenger transporter and world's 7th largest freight transporter.

People referred on the train are mostly either long-term hospitalized patients or recent war-wounded who need post-operative care following traumatic injuries. Of more than 600 patients transported and cared for on MSF’s medical train over two months, 355 were injured as a direct result of the war. The overwhelming majority of these patients suffered blast injuries. And 11 percent of war-related trauma patients were younger than 18, and 30 percent older than 60.
(https://img.msf.org/Doc_Prod/TR1/4/1/0/f/MSB127237.jpg?d63790727202)
The medical team inside the ICU of the MSF medical train monitor and stabilize a seriously war-wounded patient during the journey from Pokvrosk, eastern Ukraine to Lviv, in western Ukraine. The journey took approximately 20 hours.

And how many hospital trains does the UK have available in case of war or other emergency ?

Very impressive, in particular the amount of space available if compared to the hospital trains of the last war. Standard looking wheeled hospital beds rather than fixed bunks. On board oxygen production rather than being reliant on cylinders of limited capacity.

And how many hospital trains does the UK have available in case of war or other emergency ?

Very impressive, in particular the amount of space available if compared to the hospital trains of the last war. Standard looking wheeled hospital beds rather than fixed bunks. On board oxygen production rather than being reliant on cylinders of limited capacity.

And how many hospital trains does the UK have available in case of war or other emergency ?

Under what scenario could hospital trains possibly be needed in the UK?

A look at the Dunkirk Dynamo rail operations 75 years ago

How the railways evacuated 300,000 troops from Channel Ports

The United Kingdom and France have just celebrated the 75th anniversary of ‘The miracle of Dunkirk’, the evacuation over several days of 300,000 troops from the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France back to the English Channel ports.

But what part did the railways play in this epic event 75 years ago? To start with, the BEF was conveyed under planned arrangements to the Channel Ports for embarkation by train as were nine Ambulance trains out of the 25 such trains that existed at that time

Under what scenario could hospital trains possibly be needed in the UK?

The art of thinking about the unthinkable?   From rail.co.uk (http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/2015/dunkirk-75-years-on/)


I dread to think of wounder troops returning in the future ...

23 days! In Britain they wouldn't have got to GRIP level 1 in that time!

Suggest you put me on your ignore list,

if this facility is available on this message board.

The plans are to build the new high-speed link on the existing Warsaw-Lviv-Kyiv route, adapting it to the European gauge width of 1435 mm in order to carry trains moving at speeds of up to 250 kilometres per hour.

There have been internal requests to identify any redundant equipment that has no future operational use that could be released to assist the Ukraine

Could they use Mick Lynch for anything?

I thought he was a prominent apologist for Putin. They may be tempted to answer something impolite - or worse.

‘Rail Force One’: how Ukraine railways got Joe Biden safely to Kyiv
Alexander Kamyshin, head of the service, doesn’t get much sleep, but his team coordinated the president’s visit without a single leak

Alexander Kamyshin, the head of Ukraine’s railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, doesn’t get much sleep at the best of times. On Sunday night, as Joe Biden was being ferried into Ukraine in a 10-hour night journey from Poland – in a carriage now known as “Rail Force One”, he got almost none.

Along with others involved in the secret operation to bring the US president to his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Kamyshin watched the progress of the train in a command centre.

A handsome bearded man sporting a hipster-ish braid of hair that falls over the shaved sides of his head, Kamyshin is deliberately vague about many of the details.

But in the past year, his dedicated team has brought in world leaders, VIPs and diplomatic missions on an almost daily basis as part of a programme called “Iron Diplomacy”.

Security is everything, he told the Guardian in an interview at Kyiv’s main railway station. “We have not had one leak. There have been no photographs from train attendants. We respect the confidence of the delegations.

“It’s not a challenge. It’s our job that we do every day. Imagine,” he says with smile, “the president of the United States coming to a war-torn country by train.

“The challenge is treat the delegations properly because, like Biden, they spend more time on the train than they do in Kyiv. He spent 20 hours on the train and four hours in Kyiv. Everyone knows Ukrainians are brave. We also want them to know that we are welcoming.” ...

(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e9f3a5ec14e620a4bfaf1c8ada0d122d474c85e7/0_0_6686_4462/master/6686.jpg?width=1900&quality=85&dpr=1&s=none)
Two institutions have played a crucial role in thwarting Russia’s plan to conquer Ukraine. One is the Ukrainian army. It successfully defended the capital, Kyiv, and has recaptured large swathes of territory seized last year by Moscow in the north-east and south. Another counteroffensive looms. The second – surprisingly, perhaps – is Ukraine’s railway.