Buttevant Rail Disaster

Buttevant Rail Disaster was a train crash in Buttevant, County Cork in the Republic of Ireland on August 1 1980. The CIE Train was "en route" from Dublin to Cork and at 12:45 the Dublin to Cork express entered the Buttevant station at 115km/h carrying some 230 Bank Holiday passengers.

It careered into a siding and smashed into a stationary ballast train. The carriages immediately behind the engine and goods wagon jack-knifed and were thrown across four sets of rail-line. Two coaches and the dining car were totally demolished by the impact. It resulted in the deaths of 18 people and over 70 people being injured.

The accident

The accident happened because a set of facing points, operated by hand, were set to direct the train into the siding. These points were installed about four months previously and had not been connected to the signal cabin. The permanent way maintenance staff were expecting a stationary locomotive at the Up platform to move into the siding and had set the points as such, without obtaining permission from the signalman. Upon witnessing this, the signalman at Buttevant manually set the signals to the Danger aspect and informed the pointsman to reset the points but the train was travelling too fast to stop in time. The derailment occurred at around 100 km/h.

The train

The train consisted of 071 Class locomotive number 075, a generator van and 11 coaches. Six of the coaches consisted of wooden bodies on steel underframes. Four of these were either destroyed or badly damaged in the impact, the two which survived were at the rear of the train. The remainder of the coaches were light alloy Cravens stock; most of which survived the crash. The generator van, a modified BR Mark 1, was severely damaged. All of the vehicles were coupled using screw shackle couplings.

Aftermath

70% of Irish rail deaths over a 28 year period occurred as a result of this event (and the subsequent Cherryville junction accident which killed a further seven people) [http://www.gov.ie/debates-98/17nov98/sect5.htm] . CIE and the Government came under severe public pressure to improve safety and to modernise the fleet. A major review of the national rail safety policy has held and resulted in the rapid elimination of the wooden-bodied coaches that had formed part of the train.

The passengers who were most severely injured or killed were seated in coaches with wooden frames. This structure was incapable of surviving a high speed crash and did not come near to the safety standards provided by modern (post 1950's) metal bodied coaches. The expert bodies that reviewed that accident discovered that the old timber-frame carriage bodies mounted on a steel frame were totally inadequate as they were prone to complete collapse (the "accordion" effect) under the enormous compression forces of a high speed collision. While the steel underbody remained structurally intact, other carriages could "mount" the frame, completely compress, and destroy the wooden frame body.

The more modern steel frame carriage bodies survived due to their greater structural rigidity. On this basis the decision to purchase a new fleet of modern intercity coaches based on the British Rail Mark 3 design was quickly made. The Mark 3's longtitudinally corrugated roof can survive compression forces of over 300 tonnes. These coaches, an already well proven design, were built by BREL in Derby, England and, under licence, at CIE's own workshops at Inchicore in Dublin between 1980 and 1989.

Commemoration

On August 8 2005, a commemoration marking the 25th anniversary was held at the station. A bronze sculpture in the shape of two crossing train tracks was unveiled alongside a plaque commemorating the names of the victims at the Buttevant Railway station.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I was a survivor of the Buttevant railroad disaster of August 1, 1980. Reading above, you will see a statement that the manually operated points at Buttevant station had not been connected to the switch house where they could have been changed almost instantaneously. CIE have published a report on the so-called accident. Read it carefully. You will read the points had been connected, but had been disconnected, leaving them is such a state that they required four or five minutes, and a man with a pry bar and a wrench to set straight. CIE had an unconvincing argument for the accident version of the event. They never gave sufficient reason for keeping manually operated points on a main line, and they admitted they had no sufficient reason for disconnecting the points from a switch house.

I will tell you this much again, and I have made this argument since very soon after the derailment. It is nothing new and it is not intended to mislead or libel. The fact is that after six months of precisely worded terrorist threats in Germany which named (Eireann) phonetically at least fifty times very clearly and unmistabably, I was able to tell my roommate ( Jimmy Rowe) in the army that if I went to Ireland on leave they would derail my train. I told when, where, and how the derailment would occur. The threats included wording about derailment and crossing over some points. There is much more to this than stated here. I went on leave to Ireland. My train was derailed killing 18 and injuring some 65. The following morning of August 2, 1980 a powerful bomb ripped through the main train station of Bologna, Italy killing 86 and injuring over 200. There may have been a warning to me about that too. The threats about the derailment were much more detailed than mentioned here. The threats were made by Sergeant John P. Vogel and Spec 4 Stavrinakis of the US Army Germany. Both claimed they had connections with organized terrorist units in Europe. This and a lot more are all true accounts.

External links

* [http://www.transport.ie/viewitem.asp?id=6559&lang=ENG&loc=845 Official report into accident]
* [http://www.churchtown.net/Webpages/memories/CondonWJ.htm Eyewitness comment of railway worker on the day]