06-17-2011, 04:36 AM
Hi Guys --
Just woke up (way too early - it is 5:30am local time here - I am still jet lagged) in Minnesota on the first day of my summer vacation, and checked the web editions of the newspapers at home.
Seems like the Norwegian state railroads had a pretty scary experience yesterday.A passenger train from Oslo to Bergen, carrying about 250 passengers, lost overhead catenary power as it was a couple of hundred yards from entering a long snow shed on the Bergen line across the mountains yesterday morning.
As the power was lost, and the train started slowing down, the engineer also spotted that the far end of the snow shed was on fire. He put the train into emergency, managed to stop just short of the flames (instead of having the train roll to a halt inside the area that was on fire, and they immediately started evacuating people off the rear end of the train.
Took a while to get firefighters into the area, which is in a fairly remote area - only vacation cabins nearby, no one living there normally. But it looks like they got everybody off (minus their luggage) before the rest of the shed and the train (consisting of an 8 car passenger EMU set) was consumed by the flames.
There is a video of the burning shed on this web page, which also shows the train inside the shed: http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hordaland/1.7676591
Burned out train set:
![[Image: _SCC-AIPub_A-l_pet_1499162g.jpg]](http://media.aftenposten.no/archive/01499/_SCC-AIPub_A-l_pet_1499162g.jpg)
![[Image: _SCC-AIPub_A-l_pet_1499673x.jpg]](http://media.aftenposten.no/archive/01499/_SCC-AIPub_A-l_pet_1499673x.jpg)
Stein
Just woke up (way too early - it is 5:30am local time here - I am still jet lagged) in Minnesota on the first day of my summer vacation, and checked the web editions of the newspapers at home.
Seems like the Norwegian state railroads had a pretty scary experience yesterday.A passenger train from Oslo to Bergen, carrying about 250 passengers, lost overhead catenary power as it was a couple of hundred yards from entering a long snow shed on the Bergen line across the mountains yesterday morning.
As the power was lost, and the train started slowing down, the engineer also spotted that the far end of the snow shed was on fire. He put the train into emergency, managed to stop just short of the flames (instead of having the train roll to a halt inside the area that was on fire, and they immediately started evacuating people off the rear end of the train.
Took a while to get firefighters into the area, which is in a fairly remote area - only vacation cabins nearby, no one living there normally. But it looks like they got everybody off (minus their luggage) before the rest of the shed and the train (consisting of an 8 car passenger EMU set) was consumed by the flames.
There is a video of the burning shed on this web page, which also shows the train inside the shed: http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hordaland/1.7676591
Burned out train set:
Stein