RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Consider a test track that is used by only one experimental train. Dispatching and track occupancy rules are irrelevant, right? Wrong.

As many as 23 people may have been killed when the Transrapid magnetically levitated train collided with a maintenance vehicle on a large test track near the town of Lathen in northwest Germany on this Friday morning. The test track is 31.5 km long in total. The collision happened at 9:40 AM local time.

The three-car train was on a demonstration run with 29 passengers, mostly engineers and other technical and management personnel from the German gas and electric utility company RWE as well as employees of the mag-lev test track company IABG..

A rolling scaffold-like structure use for maintenance of the track, all of which is elevated above the ground in a forested area outside of this town near the German border with Holland, was apparently left forgotten on the track when the demonstration run started. The Mag-Lev train collided with the maintenance vehicle at an estimated speed of 200 km/h (124 mph). The train is capable of reaching 400 km/h on this track.

Railroad melodramas of the silent film era would find great comedy in a character animatedly pumping a handcar to stay ahead of an onrushing express. That's art, not life. One does not leave maintenance of way equipment, whether it is a handcar or an inspection truck or the rail grinding train or a maglev truing machine on a live track without protection of a track and time permit ("Track One, MA to CO, 10:30 am to 11:15 am, SHK") or a Form B work order. The railroads figured this out the first time a locomotive ran down a work horse, sometime before the Charles Minot era. The default premise is that if the track is capable of carrying a train, it is a live track. ("Expect movements on any track at any time in either direction.")

Even with modern protections, bad things can happen. I have a commercial videotape of a control-car ride on a Milwaukee North Line scoot in which the engineer describes a novice Union Pacific track inspector who requested track and time on the east track of their Skokie Valley line immediately before taking possession of the east track of the Canadian Pacific, a mile or so west. He bailed out just before a northbound Hiawatha nailed his truck.

One does not leave maintenance equipment "forgotten" on a live track. It is a shame that the boffins at Transrapid conceived of a research laboratory that happened to be a railroad without contemplating the possibility of work equipment occupying the track, or of unscheduled demonstration trains leaving the station without ascertaining that all expired work permits had been properly closed out. That neglect of basic premises of safe operation has ended 23 lives needlessly early. Spare a moment's thought for the families.

SECOND SECTION: The Transportationist.

Taking the long view, it should be remembered that all new transportation technologies have growing pains, some like the first train crash are overcome (the opening ceremonies of George Stepheson's Rocket on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway railway killed MP William Huskisson from Liverpool (September 15, 1830). However, some like the Hindenberg crash on May 6, 1937, doom the technology.

The "growing pain" in question is one that could have been anticipated, and that it occurred suggests a lack of experienced railroaders on the laboratory's safety team.