Catastrophic Testing

The other day I wrote about this train accident where a crew had accidentally turned off the warning signals.

I wondered why they hadn't tested it.

Well, they WERE testing it, when the accident occurred.

Their final test was to let a train come through at 79 mph, and see if the signals worked okay.

Test result: Signals failed. Woman killed.

So the fatal mistake was not a failure to test. It was a failure to build extra safety features into the test - like having someone standing by the track to manually signal people to stop, just in case the signals failed.

There was a crew. Didn't any of them imagine what would happen if the test failed? Isn't there some kind of standard procedure for this sort of thing?

They didn't plan ahead.
Katie Lunn is dead.