Buttevant Rail Disaster

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Buttevant Rail Disaster was a train crash in Buttevant, County Cork in the Republic of Ireland on August 8, 1980. The Iarnrod Eireann Train was en route from Dublin to Cork and at 12.45pm the Dublin to Cork express entered the Buttevant station at 70mph 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.

[edit] Aftermath

Both CIE and the Government were under severe public pressure to improve safety and to modernise the fleet, eliminating the wooden bodied rolling stock that had failed so badly during the incident. The decision to purchase a new fleet of modern intercity coaches based on the British Rail Mark 3 design was quickly made. 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. The expert bodies that reviewed that accident discovered that the old timber-frame carriage bodies mounted on a steel frame were totally inadequate and were completely destroyed, while the more modern steel frame carriage bodies survived. This accident led to a major review of the national rail safety policy 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 1950s) metal bodied coaches.