I was in Shanxi Lu getting off line 1 and walking down the road to line 10. I was on my way to the Confucius Temple (I needed YuYuan station) where I wanted to take some photos. However, when I got to Line 10 Shanxi road station the police were turning people away and not allowing anyone on line 10. How was I going to get there now.
I don’t know the bus routes in Shanghai yet. So I walked. I walked towards the Yan’an elevated road and then walked up onto the pedestrian bridge across the tangle of roads. When I got to the top I saw that the police had closed a main route into town. People were standing on the bridge watching the police adn there were ambulances and police cars flying everywhere.
I wondered what on earth was going on and I took a video. Then, I carried on and eventually got to a bus which would take me to the temple. I got there a lot later than I had wanted and was pretty fed up that line 10 was closed – very inconvenient. When I got back to the hotel I thought I would check online to see whether there was any clue to this chaos. I read this…
A Shanghai subway train rammed into the back of another locomotive after a signaling fault, injuring 260 people and adding to concerns that the pace of China’s rail expansion may undermine safety. The crash happened while controllers were running operations using a manual system following an equipment failure, Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co. said in a statement. Three of the injured are in a critical condition. The accident on line 10, which opened last year, occurred between Yuyuan station, in the city’s historic district, and Lao Ximen at about 2:51 p.m.
“It is a severe accident and should be a wakeup call for the managers of operators, suppliers and planners,” said Xie Weida, a professor at Shanghai-based Tongji University’s Urban Mass Transit Railway Research Institute. “Shanghai has pushed metro line projects pretty quickly in recent years as demand for public transportation is huge.”