Road accident news
11/01/2008

Car takes wrong turn down railway line

Drivers throughout the world are becoming more and more reliant on their sat nav systems to help them get from A to B without a road accident.

There's no doubt that the wonderful little in-car GPS systems are a valuable navigational tool, but one has to start asking questions when they start telling you to drive your car down a railway line.

That's the predicament one US driver found himself in last week; his vehicle trapped on the tracks and a high-speed goods train thundering towards him.

Not surprisingly, the result of this bizarre incident was a fiery road accident (or should that be railway accident?) that saw one car, one train and and 250 feet of track destroyed. In addition, one car driver was left extremely red-faced as 500 angry passengers were stranded for more than two hours with nothing to do but stare at the wreckage of a destroyed automobile.

Further investigation into the car accident discovered that the driver had become trapped on the railway tracks when his sat nav system had ordered him to take a right turn off the road he had been travelling on. There was no road to turn right into but, because his computer commanded it, the New York man went right anyway.

And, not surprisingly, the chaos that followed was the result. Miraculously, nobody was hurt in the incident and so it seems that personal injury claims for road accident compensation won't need to be made.

Although he won't be in court to face a personal injury lawyer, the driver of the car that caused the smash could very well find himself dragged in front of a judge to answer charges of dangerous driving.