THE INQUEST WILL BE INSTRUCTIVE.  A Chinese bullet train stopped, ostensibly because a lightning strike knocked out its power car, to be rammed by its follower.  News reports give 43 dead and 211 injured.

The first four cars of the moving train fell about 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) off the viaduct onto the ground below. One carriage ended up in a vertical position, leaning against the viaduct.

The Ministry of Railways said in a statement that the first four cars of the moving train and the last two of the stalled train derailed.

The circumstances suggest an episode of routine kills, with the follower accustomed to seeing approach signals clearing up as his train nears the signal, which works well as long as the leading train maintains track speed.  The Communist propensity to purge, however, waits for no report from the division superintendent.

Three railway officials were fired after the crash and would be subject to investigation, Xinhua quoted the ministry as saying. They were identified as Long Jing, head of the Shanghai Railway Bureau; Li Jia, head of the Shanghai railway bureau's committee of the Communist Party of China; and deputy chief of the bureau, He Shengli.

The track record of these bullet trains does not suggest the discipline of The Milwaukee Road, or The Pennsylvania Railroad.

It was the first derailment on China's high-speed rail network since the country launched bullet trains with a top speed of 155 miles (250 kilometers) per hour in 2007, the China Daily reported.

It is an embarrassment for China, which plans to massively expand its bullet train network to link its far-flung regions and show off its rising wealth and technological prowess. It is also trying to sell its trains to Latin America and the Middle East.

Last month, it launched to great fanfare the Beijing-to-Shanghai high-speed line, where trains travel at a maximum speed of 186 miles (300 kilometers) per hour. The speed was cut from the originally planned 217 mph (350 kph) after questions were raised about safety.

In less than four weeks of operation, power outages and other malfunctions have plagued the showcase 820-mile (1,318-kilometer) line. The Railways Ministry has apologized for the problems and said that summer thunderstorms and winds were the cause in some cases.

The second train involved in the crash came from Beijing and both trains were destined for Fuzhou in eastern Fujian province. Wang, who only gave his surname, as is common with Chinese officials, said it was unclear how long the first train had sat on the track before being struck. State broadcaster CCTV said there were more than 900 passengers on the train that stalled, and more than 500 passengers on the train that hit it.

There's something amiss in the dispatching and signalling, if rear-end collisions occur and nobody knows how long the train in advance has been stopped.

SECOND SECTION.  Rules written in blood.

An executive at one of the biggest foreign suppliers of high-speed train technology to China said it is unusual, though not unprecedented, for lightning to halt high-speed trains.

He also said the accident suggested a serious deficiency in the rail network's "automatic train stop" or ATS system, a critical backup measure that is supposed to halt trains under certain situations such as when a rail line is obstructed.

"Obviously, ATS was not functioning properly," said the executive. "It makes me not want to ride high-speed trains in China—not until they get to the bottom of what happened in Wenzhou," he said.

Automatic train stop is an early twentieth-century technology, it can be as simple as a mechanical trip that activates a brake valve under the car (look closely at the pilot of a North Shore or Roarin' Elgin car on your next visit to a trolley museum) or it can reduce the train speed if the engineer doesn't do so on his own (worked well enough for The Milwaukee Road when the Hiawathas were the fastest thing on rails) or it can allow the engineer to acknowledge the restrictive aspect without actually reducing speed, which might be the routine thing to do if one's train routinely follows another train yellow for yellow ... safely until the train in advance makes an unexpected stop.