Swordie Bloggie

On Wednesday, 16 May, there were two incidents I encountered… first is the small fire in the office which I posted earlier… the second is a panic situation at a railway crossing… not really panic, just not sure what’s going on…

OK, the small fire in the office was in the morning… and our encounter with a train was in the evening after we had our tea at Kepayan Low Cost Housing Shop.

On our way back to the office after having tea, there was slight traffic jam before the Sebulan roundabout… just after the tunnel. My colleague was driving and I was sitting at the back… another colleague was sitting at the front. Our car has to stop on the rail track coz cars in front of us have to give way to other cars at the roundabout. Suddenly there was loud siren… the sound is familiar on TV… a siren sound of Japanese attacking. We don’t know where the sound coming from… we were guessing if it an ambulance of fire engine… but it just don’t sound like one.

We were looking around… then we saw the rail track light has turned green… oh crap… usually it is red… that means the train is coming… argggghh… my colleague started reversing, lucky the cars behind gave us room to reverse… then I saw the boom gate coming down… if we did not reverse, the bar will hit right on top of the car… lucky we have enough room to reverse… then the train appears… I open the window and started recording the incoming train…

I can’t imagine how the car gonna look like if it still on the track when the train arrived. The car is less than a ton and the train is like 1000 times heavier than the car. Metals will be crumpled… metal bars universal joint will dislodge… Lucky the train was only going at about 30 km/h…

In the video, the yellow-black bar is the boom gate which was right above our car… right above me. The siren is actually coming from the concrete box right next to the car… you can see that in the video too… but we were wondering, the alarm sound is not the standard railway crossing sound… normally it is the sound of bell… TING TING TING TING TING TING… that’s the reason we can’t figure out what the sound was… if it the bell, then we should’ve be able to identify it right away… 😛 But lucky nothing happen to us… 😀

The fastest train I ever ride is the KLIA Express or Express Rail Link (ERL) from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) to KL Central Station. It travels up to 160 km/h, but since the 28 minutes journey is quite smooth, you won’t feel the speed, except when it go through under bridge which is something like tunnel… that’s the time you will feel the ‘vacuum’ and when it pass with another train from opposite direction, it will shake for a while… air turbulence.

And the fastest machine I ever ride is the Boeing777… which can travel up to 900 km/h. But when you are inside the plane, you won’t feel anything except when the plane drop altitude suddenly or when it tried to avoid air pocket or air turbulence or probably thick clouds.

Back to train, in October there was big news in Sabah where a train hit an oil tanker… it caused a massive traffic jam in front of the Kota Kinabalu International Airport (KKIA). The train could be travelling around 60 or 70 km/h and luckily there was no casualties… only some injuries like broken legs… some passengers jump out from the train.

And in China, on 23rd December 2011, a new bullet train was showcased to the world… the super-rapid test train is capable of travelling at 500 km/h… yes that is five zero zero km per hour… it’s fast… China made their big ambition to build the largest super train network a decade ago into reality. But with this super speed machine where there will be hundreds of it in the near future, it’s hard to imagine how China will do their simulation or collision estimation and avoidance so that train collision like the recent collision in July can be avoided. In the July collision, two of its high-speed train collided… 😛