1 Dead, Dozens Injured After Trams Collide In Kemerovo, Russia

Authorities in the Siberian city of Kemerovo said on June 6 that one person died and more than 100 people were injured after the tram's braking system failed and slammed into another tram. Seventy-eight people, including five children, were hospitalized.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1l7_8xy4ho

That looks like staggering incompetence in design. Most commercial vehicles nowadays have 'fail-safe' braking systems where pneumatic pressure is required to keep the brakes OFF and by default the brakes are kept ON as a result of simple and reliable springs. In that situation multiple things would normally have had to go wrong to be unable to apply the brakes as there is usually more than one way of exhausting the air in the system, forcing the brakes to come on. Britain learned this experience from the earliest days of railway disasters, of which we had a few. How come this lesson appears to have been forgotten? If anyone who picked up this story locally can update us in due course I would be interested in hearing what the root of the problem is here.