The deodand was a medieval English legal concept requiring the owner of an object that caused someone's death to forfeit its value to the crown. This obscure law persisted into the Industrial Revolution until railways made it impractical, as railway companies faced ruinous costs when trains killed people.
A major outage disrupted Dutch railway services early Tuesday morning, with infrastructure company ProRail treating the incident as suspected sabotage after finding materials deliberately placed on tracks at multiple locations. Train services were severely affected around central cities including Zwolle, Deventer, and Amersfoort during rush hour, with no immediate suspect identified.
India completed its 2,800 km Dedicated Freight Corridor last week, a railway network built exclusively for cargo trains to avoid delays from passenger services. However, the corridor's success depends on solving the last-mile connectivity problem: trucks must still transport goods to and from freight terminals, creating a bottleneck that limits the corridor's efficiency gains.