G'morning David, 

 DW> Don't you know that, by British railway custom, the direction toward
 DW> London is *always* UP!

That's how I first wrote it ... but in honour of the perverse 
local custom Down Here of `going up to Auckland (the Queen city)' 
but `down to Wellington (the despised capitol)',  I cravenly 
changed it.

 DW> I vaguely remember the collision in Lewisham, near London, something
 DW> like 40 or even 50 years ago. Two commuter trains collided, and
 DW> hundreds of people were killed - far more than 151, I think. The system
 DW> was heavily automated, and this kind of accident should have been
 DW> impossible. It was eventually determined that the two trains must have
 DW> tripped a couple of sensors within a thousandth of a second of each
 DW> other. This fooled the system into thinking that only one train was
 DW> present, and for some reason this led to it giving both of them green
 DW> lights and applying power to both third-rails.

It's all relative - at that time, NZ would have had a total 
population of under a million,  and Tangiwhai remained its biggest 
ever disaster until the 1979 Erebus air crash down in Antartica 
when Air NZ's tourist plane flew into a 6000 metre Mt Erebus with 
a loss of 257 lives - as mistakenly programmed back in NZ before 
takeoff.

Even that 257 pales internationally with some ship and rail 
accidents, however.  NZ is still small at just over 4 million - 
and the railway system here has not expanded by a factor of 4 
since 1953 - if anything, its shrunk to a quarter of its former 
capacity.

:-)
 
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