"The disaster occurred after years of multiple warnings from the train drivers' official union, while the current government was passing legislation that would make drivers' ability to strike or take industrial action for safety concerns unlawful."
"Three weeks before the crash, the rail workers' union had raised concerns over problems with the administration of the rail network which could put the passengers in danger."
The system has been in a steep decline for 5 years at least.
I take the plane now, because between delays, stops in the middle of nowhere and strong vibrations where there was a smooth ride before, it became unbearable.
[added translation]: "The LZB safety system, which controls Spain's high-speed rail network, malfunctioned on Wednesday morning, causing about eight trains to come to a halt in the area. The control center then switched to manual control and ordered all trains to resume operation. However, the Iryo, for reasons that remain unclear, was unable to start and remained stationary. And that is where human error came into play, according to these initial hypotheses."
Honestly, to blame the controller after the automated system has failed is pretty low. The system does not run this way normally for good reasons, and whilst the controller maybe trained to handle the situation they won't be well practised at it.
The primary reason is computer failure followed by the decision to run the system manually.
When computers fail here in the Netherlands, trains are just stopped until they can be fixed.
In some cases, trains can be ordered to drive "at sight" -- slow enough (walking speed, basically) to stop if there's something visible on the tracks that shouldn't be there (train, car, person, cow, whatever)
Not just when computers fail. When union negotiations fail, when it's too cold, when it's too hot, when it snows, when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks, or whenever they come up with a new excuse.
You don't want trains to collide because sick people are forced to work when they shouldn't and realistically can't.
> when it's too cold
You don't want trains to derail due to rails breaking.
> when it's too hot
You don't want trains to derail due to rails buckling.
> when it snows
You don't want trains to go the wrong way (including into another train) due to switches freezing shut.
> when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks
You don't want trains to collide as slippery rails made braking impossible.
> or whenever they come up with a new excuse.
Usually it's a reason, not an excuse. Train people like nothing more than seeing the trains ride past, they don't cancel them unless they absolutely have to. Just because you don't personally understand the reasoning behind it, doesn't mean there isn't one.
That's the thing. They know it was built poorly and can't handle pretty much anything, so they don't trust the hardware and get a few extra days off as an added convenience.
Proper training focuses specifically on those exceptional situations (like it does for airplane pilots), with strong emphasis on always falling back on safe procedures. Even so, you can't cover 100% of possibilities.
Those override switches are dangerous enough to have tamper evident seals, or sometimes padlocks. And even if they are to be used, there just must be something mechanical to substitute those systems, most simply and least efficiently by physical tokens(tablets) assigned to each stations. Trains had those systems literally since late 19th century.
Passenger service with just verbal orders over a phone is simply unacceptable.
I know nothing about railroad systems but in complicated / ambiguous situations, is it possible to limit train speed to make it easier to monitor or control traffic ?
You're not supposed to run trains in ambiguous situations period.
On single lines with bi-directional services, you can design and implement a token based lock system: it's literally a token, often referred to as tablets, what inspired mutexes in computer science. They are like a golden medal or a durable hunk of metal, with the name of the station it belongs to engraved, often enclosed in a leather case or something. The arriving train drops the token it holds at the station, and obtains the new one when departing. The trains traveling opposite side will return them. When a train fails to obtain it, whether because it merely failed to catch it or the new one hasn't arrived, it MUST stop once, before it technically leaves the part of the rail that is considered "the station", until one is obtained.
This won't work as-is if there's going to be a T shaped crossing in which lines branch from the trunk line into short segments to stations. The crossing must be a station with its own lock token in that case. But that also can be some sort of crude technical stop for staff uses only with just maintenance guys with helmets and vests as station masters and apprentices moving the tokens around.
If they couldn't get computers handle it or make signals turn from red to blue or at least red to nothing, and didn't even have that token system, the train cannot move. It may technically be able to, and maybe it's ok for moving just few meters back and forth, but that's it. The trains should not have been operated at all if they couldn't figure out the computers.
I think Spain needs a complete mindset change, to fully come to the 21st century. While there are truly many people who "take their job" seriously, the overall "world of work", and professional standards are very, very low in Spain. Yes, it's a generalization, but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard.
In short, Spain needs to re-invent its world of professionalism. I'm not saying that it should become like Swizerland overnight but the current mindset is incompatible with the 21st century's complexities. Portugal is currently further along that road.
>but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Sounds just like Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and any many other EU countries, including the EU itself, where there's "employment for life" guaranteed by the state or by strong unions, which makes them ripe for cronyism, complacency and incompetence to thrive unchecked until people inevitably die, and only then can audits and system reforms actually be done. The way it works, is that things need to get worse, before they are allowed to get better. I think this has been the case in politics since time immemorial.
>Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard. [...] Portugal is currently further along that road
From what I saw interviewing, Portugal has much lower earnings, and earnings aren't something the government can control. What the government CAN DO to stimulate high earnings to happen, is provide incentives and an environment for attracting businesses and investment, but that typically correlates with low taxes and low government welfare spending, policies that Spaniards and other Europeans aren't known for supporting, so there you go. You get what you vote for.
Do you have any (counter)arguments to bring to the discussion, or do you enjoy firing vague snarky one-liners from the hip before moving on to the next thread?
Yes, I do agree with some of that. People in this latitude don't want "private" anything because of the reasons mentioned before. It all boils down to a bad company culture, hiring is not merit-based, companies don't compete in the classical sense. And on Portugal, taken in context, salaries have been even lower in Portugal, but they are improving, and there are many more high-tech jobs going around in Portugal. It might not be a major difference from where you are looking, but they do tend to take their "world of work" more seriously.
Meanwhile people in the US have been framing Spain as some kind of post-work utopia. The "we quit our jobs and moved our family to Spain" is all over social media.
A lot of that is due to relatively low rents by EU standards (even if locals might complain, because their salaries are low compared to some other EU countries).
Let me provide some context to that. At the highest levels of Spanish earning or net worth brackets people experience a completely different life than most everyday people. With a net worth of $1-2M you can live in a bubble essentially, living in a gated community with 24/7 security, with a helicopter landing pad. As a wealthy expat you can brute-force most of the societal struggles. Having 1-2M in your pocket enables a life that requires 20M+ in the US.
So far it seems that at 8:30 a computer system called LZB was shutdown to some infra issues. Immediately the trains stopped in that line. At 8:36, someone said it was okay to let the trains continue over that rail at full speed as it was "all clear". At 8:53 there was the collision. So far 68 deaths.
Just a couple of days ago the Spanish Transport minister appeared in a comedy sketch where he made fun of the current dysfunctional state of the rail system he is responsible of[1]:
> "Due to a system malfunction, the elevator will be out of service longer than usual," the public address system announces. The minister laments, "Oh, for heaven's sake. As if we didn't have enough to deal with already with Renfe."
It's an absolute disgrace to the country that this man first got to minister position, and that it's still there after two major incidents with lots of deaths.
It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.
Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.
> worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
The rail infrastructure is already publicly maintained via a government agency, ADIF. ADIF is not a goverment-owned for-profit corporation, its primary mandate is public service, not profit maximization, and ADIF doesn't compete with anyone, it's a state monopoly.
That's a sweet excuse until you understand that even state-owned nonprofits these days are run the way a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking private-sector manager would run it. Because there very probably is a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking public-sector manager running it.
Let's not jump to conclusions. Funding rail infrastructure is important, but it's not clear at all whether that would have helped prevent this accident. Malfunctions can happen even in the most advanced newly-built systems. Often the overall safety level depends more on how you deal with degraded states than how the system performs in its fully functional state.
Every year that passes, Japan's record of zero fatal high-speed train accidents since the Shinkansen was inaugurated in the 1960s becomes more and more incredible, with 10 billion passengers and counting.
(Excluding suicides/people falling on tracks, that is. And that one poor student in 1995 who got stuck in the door of a departing train and was dragged to his death.)
As someone from the US I have repeatedly heard that Spain's economy is doing reasonably well. And I just looked it up, unemployment is approximately the lowest it has been in two decades. Considering the post 2009 era of economic turmoil that Spain went through, that economic momentum seems like a real positive.
In June Goldman Sachs put out an article noting how well Spain's economy is doing, which included this employment comparison (showing Spain's outperformance versus its peers):
The jobs being created are tending more toward high value, high productivity jobs that pay better than average. That's no doubt helping diversify Spain's economy further away from tourism, which should provide greater long-term economic strength and stability. Overall it might be a really good decade coming up for the people of Spain.
I would also add how greatly improved living in Spain has been. The change in last 15 years is dramatic. Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga even Madrid are top of the list of best liveable cities. I am not sure how (probably local politics) but almost no other cities in europe managed to become so great.
Then lets crash 10x more trains, it will still be safer than cars. The point is not to be safer than cars, the point is to not die while taking my daily commute in a form of transportation I have no control over whatsoever. Especially if its easy to mitigate like in the case of trains.
> the point is to not die while taking my daily commute
Exactly, which is why you need to take trains, not cars.
Everything else you said completely misconstrues the point, nobody is arguing for less train or car safety, or that this crash was fine. That's ridiculous.
Guys, let's not turn everything into a trains vs cars debate. Obviously, trains are much safer.
But the argument that the relative risk of trains is far lower is, unfortunately, often used as an excuse to not take safety in absolute terms seriously. It's almost like saying: "Because trains are already so much safer than cars, the few crashes that still happen are just bound to happen, they're a fact of life we have to accept, and not worth doing anything about." (I am exaggerating, of course.)
But many of these accidents are in fact easy to prevent, even without huge investment in new infrastructure. So we should prioritize that and make our voices heard that we care about railway safety! And no, this is not a psyop to make people drive their cars more, that would be ridiculous.
Tell that to the dozens of families who lost loved ones today! At least 68 people (and still counting) lost their lives. Ambitious, loving, caring human beings, who died completely unnecessarily! No excuse is good enough to justify that.
This type of accident is particularly unacceptable because it's so preventable! I'm not going to speculate on the causes before the official report is out. But a collision between two trains is not that hard to prevent with a train protection system. And if that system (or a component of it) crashes (or malfunctions in a fail-safe way), but operations should still continue, then there need to be safe fallback protocols in place that everyone is trained to follow.
One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
"Someone made a mistake" is never an acceptable excuse. That's what we had to learn in aviation a long time ago. Nobody goes to work wanting to cause a fatal accident. The train dispatcher(s), driver(s), and whoever else might have been involved in this, (most likely) did not intend to cause this. But it is almost always a combination of bad procedures, normalization of deviance, lack of safety culture, bad training, lack of regulatory oversight, and of course inadequate technical equipment and safety systems, that together lead to fatal accidents.
Accidents like this one are fully preventable, there's no excuse, but that doesn't mean we should blame a particular person. Instead, it is the entire system, which is supposed to have multiple redundant layers of safety, that failed us. Investigators are going to come up with many recommendations to prevent similar accidents in the future. Let's hope (and make our voices heard) that these recommendations actually get implemented as well.
Every protocol has corner cases, we have seen it world wide several times. It's frustrating to accept it because yesterday's accident was just a one word mistake from an operator, and my first reaction is also yours, it's unacceptable. But sadly and rationally, it can happen. As always has been, let's hope this leads to better protocols.
There was no excuse at all in my post, not sure what you're replying to.
It was only pointed out that despite failures in train systems, it's still safer than driving a car.
> One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place, but overruled. The protocol wasn't followed. The driver was supposed to go at 40, it's the protocol, but the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed. The normal speed on that track is 200km/h by the way.
There is no doubt whatsoever that trains are far safer than cars. But often that fact is used as an excuse to not invest in safety. "We don't need to do anything to make thing X safer, because look at that other thing Y that people do which is way more dangerous."
(I assume you didn't mean it that way, but some people really do make this argument.)
Human lives matter in absolute numbers, and we should strive to increase safety wherever possible with reasonable effort. Railways in some countries still have some very low-hanging fruit!
The aviation industry has shown that safety as the number one priority does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Layers of redundancy, excellent training, and very good investigations and changes based on their recommendations are what keeps the flying public safe.
Accidents still happen in aviation, but we're at a point of diminishing returns where increasing safety is getting quite difficult. When an aircrew encounters a problem, they can't just stop the plane mid-air to figure things out. The plane has to land, no matter what. That is inherently more risky.
Contrast that with a train, which can more or less just stop wherever it is when something goes wrong. This allows for building a lot of fail-safe/passively safe systems. When there's a problem, just halt operations and take your time to figure things out. Good procedures and adherence to them are still absolutely necessary, but at least there's usually no actual time pressure (only perceived) and malfunctions rarely pose an actual risk if handled correctly.
What aviation has also shown us is that accident investigations need to be 100% honest about underlying causes. "This guy made a mistake, too bad" is never ever an acceptable reason. We have to dig deeper.
People will always make mistakes. But how was such a simple mistake allowed to have such dire consequences? Were there not enough layers of redundancy? Was the training inadequate? Were the rules and procedures inadequate, underspecified, or unclear? Was there a company culture of bending the rules to get the job done? Was there a general lack of safety culture and incident management? Etc.pp.
> All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place
I had guessed that was the case, but didn't want to state it definitively, as I'm not familiar with the rules in Spain specifically. But that then raises the question of why the rules weren't followed.
> the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed
As I explained earlier, "there's been a misunderstanding" is not good enough, I'm sure the report will dig deep to find the underlying causes and will issue plenty of recommendations to prevent this in the future.
I will refrain from speculating on what those causes are though, as there are far too many possibilities. But it's almost certainly a combination of multiple unfortunate factors that led to this horrible accident.
My feeling is there is a serious psychological manipulation campaign going on against the west and allies via social media.
Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy", "Russia is better than our own government, the UK is a failure".
1. I see the same from people in some non-western (or western allied) countries too.
2. I do not see many comments like that (although i do not look at youtube comments, i do see comments on these on social media) and have never seen any saying Russia is better than the UK!
3. The feeling of failure in the UK goes back to long before the Ukraine war - it has been developing over many decades.
My view is the west had a golden age after winning the cold war and cannot cope with the loss of its global dominance since. This has also had bad effects for some countries outside the west (not necessarily western allied) and there have been other political shifts around the world too.
I also think the way the news operates, and the rise of social media and mobile phones, lockdowns during the pandemic, have a lot to do with it.
> Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy"
Is even worse. See: Operation Doppelgänger [1]
The fact is that last week a wave of fridges operating under old software were attacked in France, apparently using LLM to abuse vulnerabilities; and this week one of the last high-speed routes still operating under the old security system crashed at every level. The "postmortem" of this failure will be very interesting to read.
While Russian bots and manipulation campaigns are real, sadly, I feel that there's enough legitimate issues that you'd still see many people upset even if the bots weren't there.
Normal publications rarely publish good news. At most, news are often neutral, but mostly bad. One has to go out of their way to read actual good news.
The relative safety of various transportation modes varies a bit by country. In the USA at least, commercial airliners and buses are marginally safer than trains. (All of those are much safer than passenger cars.)
Ah but the good news thing is actually nothing to do with Spain and everything to do with news in this era. It’s a problem everywhere that news is like 95% bad, and not because the world is getting any worse either.
Both things can be true. The world is getting worse and news is overeager to tell you about it while ignoring the good things that are happening. Knowing about the good things wouldn't stop the bad things from still being true, but at least the news wouldn't be entirely depressing.
That's not really fair though. Almost all pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided the accident if they were observant and took responsibility for their own safety. People just walk out in front of cars, assuming they will stop, buried in their phone with earplugs in.
I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.
If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.
You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.
My claims are self-evident. Anyone with any common sense can tell this is just a description of reality.
Cars don't just appear out of nowhere. They are for the most part highly predictable.
I should add the caveat that I am specifically talking about Western countries where traffic is quite orderly. In Thailand we had to cross multi-lane roads by just walking into traffic while traffic weaved around us, they wouldn't stop for us even at crossings unless there were lights. In this situation you don't have much of a choice. Here in Norway, cars will stop for you so there is no need to walk out until you are sure the car is stopping. Some times if I'm crossing a multi-lane road I'll walk across one lane then stop and make sure the car coming in the next lane is also stopping for me. Some times they don't. I look both ways even on one way streets.
I've had many situations where drivers clearly don't notice me, and since I didn't walk in front of them I'm fine. Also had a few situations where someone I'm with walks out and I pull them back just in time to watch a car/bus pass right in front of them.
As far as I can tell, the idea that rail is the safest form of transit is just false. At least looking at recent Europe-wide data, and even if you make the _very_ favorable decision to include only occupant fatalities, modern commercial aviation has meaningfully lower fatalities per passenger-km than modern rail.
Aviation is generally used for longer journeys, and most of its risk is in the take-off / landing (so per-trip instead of per-mile). I wonder what happens if you compare fatalities-per-passenger-trip (or per-passenger-mile) on typical-length trips where aviation and HSR are competitive?
No, it has not. Two different events in different places with different causes. Two stochastic events that are not remotely related, but close in time.
Yesterday's accident was a protocol tragedy, someone made a terrible mistake, and sadly those things happen, everywhere. Having two accidents in less than a year is heart breaking, and everyone is feeling that anxiety.
I've taken than train line several times, and will take it again when it's available. Fear of an accident is human and natural when you ride a bus, a train or a plane, but one has to be rational, worldwide transportation is safe.
It does not matter that they were stochastic events because the reason we have regulation and procedures and protocols for these systems is to reduce randomness and mistakes as close to zero.
While individually each event can maybe just be random mistake having two could be the beginning of some new information about the system(s) we have to consider.
So we should all say and act like this is not acceptable and we need more focus on making these stochastic events not happen now that they are not just a mere probability over an event space filled with randomness. They just happened.
> Yesterday's accident was a protocol tragedy, someone made a terrible mistake, and sadly those things happen, everywhere.
IDK where you live but no, in Europe, it virtually never happens.
I will speak for France but the latest “big/mediatic” accidents were two (probably) Russian sabotages with not a lot of victims.
Then back to 2015 in Eckwersheim where a test train derailed on track trial (dramatic but no commercial passengers and the train was overspeeding voluntarily for the trial, even if it was an error).
Other than that we need to get back to 2013 to find the Brétigny-sur-Orge derailment.
Other accidents regularly happen but except from Bretigny derailment, I don’t remember passengers being killed in the last decades.
No one ever died as a commercial passenger of a TGV and hundreds are running at 320km/h every day since half a century. A few conductors died from a collision even that, in 45 years of service, is anecdotal (from a safety perspective, of course not for the victims).
Both accidents involved Iryo, a Italian operator that started running high speed trains on Spain a few years ago. Given how small their fleet is, it's weird that they have been involved in every recent accident, but at least the Adamuz one was clearly the fault of the tracks and not the trains.
Spain's network liberalization is recent-ish, operators like Iryo exist since 2021.
Perhaps the synchronization between renfe and others is a weak point in the system. Decades of assuming that everything in the network is theirs, increased wear and tear, etc.
To be fair, what you're describing is literally an increase in inefficiency caused by liberalization. It's what large corporations solve by "vertical integration" or "in-housing".
If you operate a rail network you need to keep track (pun not intended) of the exact state of all parts of the infrastructure, maintain and update the schedules and routes to account for repairs or disruptions, observe utilization and demand changes (not all of which can be profitable due to externalities like the social benefit of connecting people in remote places even if they don't provide enough revenue) and of course you need to keep track of where your trains currently are and where they are going and need a system of signaling, failsafes and communication to prevent incidents like "rear-ending" a stopped train (which this looks like it was).
Once you start breaking this up into a separate companies (like Spain has done and other countries did in order to "liberalize" the natural monopoly of public transit) you create inefficiencies and misaligned incentives. If you then throw competitors in the mix (who of course only compete in the few profitable aspects like high-speed rail because they only exist to extract surplus value from the system by withdrawing more from it than they put in - that's the literal definition of "profit") the misalignment of incentives gets worse and at worst so does communication.
As a software developer, it's kinda like having to build a publicly document general purpose API for your server-client application so it can work with arbitary third-party clients while having your team at the same time be moved into separate organizational units with different managers. Yes, sure, you can do that, but you better hope this will be reflected by another digit being added to the budget because not only will it make the project a lot more expensive but the same goes for every change that needs to be made to it in the future (not to mention front-to-back performance optimization is pretty much off the table) - except the point here is cutting government expenses so you don't get a real budget and this isn't a greenfield project but a brownfield legacy codebase never intended to serve this use case.
That should never cause a crash. You don't let one train go onto a section of track unless you know that there's no other train on that section of track. If train A has failed to move when instructed, then train B waits for it to move.
That all is true, and furthermore the AVE train was running way above the 30 kmh limit set when the automatic control systems fails. The only way this accident could happen is if someone violated every existing procedure.
The train operators do not seem to be a factor in either incident. Still too early to know what happened today, but the first findings point to an entirely different type of incident.
Also it's of course worth acknowledging that the means of preventing accidents as a train operator is fairly limited beyond the basics. Even if you see something and react in time, trains are extremely efficient at going where the rails will take them but that makes them also very bad at stopping to do so even when you want them to.
Some days ago I actually traveled on these high speed trains to Madrid (the same route Madrid - Seville). I paid extra to be able to select a middle car seat because of similar disaster that happened in Spain only in January this year:
There is train colision in spain every month, atleast 8 of last 12 crashes are linked to russian hacking campaings, railway systems are computers too ;) Also there were 2 physical sabotages by unknown actor, but whole europe is under russian sabotage spree for last 4 years, so it is murky in europe right now.
Because rail is quite non line of sight and quite infrastructure defined pathing.
The automatic coordination system hit a fail condition; they neglected the fallback protocols that had rules for spacing determined to work reliably without the computer keeping real time supervision; they crashed.
This is in the way more like the Washington D.C. helicopter plane mid-air where some normalization of deviance got people to ignore automated protection systems.
If most involved had known the fallback protocols they would have refused to move/continue while the protocols were utterly neglected. At least with a robust safety culture active, ofc.
> This is in the way more like the Washington D.C. helicopter plane mid-air where some normalization of deviance got people to ignore automated protection systems.
I think that's not quite accurate. Yes, there was a normalization of deviance. But it wasn't primarily that automated protection systems were ignored.
First, the systems on board both aircraft could not have saved them. TCAS resolution advisories are inhibited below 900ft AGL and aural traffic advisories are inhibited below 400ft AGL. The aircraft collided below that altitude. The system wasn't ignored, it just doesn't do much at low altitude. The RJ crew got a TA about 20s prior to the crash, but that's not something that would normally require evasive action (they're trained to act immediately on an RA, not a TA). They were set up for landing. It's hard to find any fault with them.
The RJ wasn't equipped with ADS-B In, and the helo's ADS-B Out was misconfigured since installation. ADS-B In could have alerted both crews almost a minute prior to impact. But it wasn't available.
Second, if you're referring to the tower: Yes, the controller did get an automated conflict alert, but he did not ignore it. He asked PAT-25 whether they had the RJ in sight and told them to pass behind it. This response wasn't good enough, but that's mainly attributed to the controller's high workload and time pressure leading to omissions.
A proper traffic advisory should have included azimuth, distance, direction of travel, and type and altitude of the conflicting aircraft, e.g.:
PAT-25, traffic ten o'clock, one mile, north-west bound, a CRJ descending through four hundred, circling approach to runway 33.
A proper safety alert should also include an action to resolve the situation, e.g.:
Traffic alert, PAT-25, traffic ten o'clock, one mile, a CRJ on final for runway 33. Advise you [descend/turn] immediately.
Either one might have prevented the accident. But when ATC gets busy, the reality of those calls often looks quite different than how they're described in a textbook. Combining local and helicopter control with 12 aircraft on frequency is just too much. Of course, that leads to routine conflict alerts (5 separate events in the 18 minutes leading up to the crash). Sure, nuisance alerts lead to desensitization (and the report discusses that), but here the workload seems to have been the bigger underlying factor.
Of course, this is far from the only contributing factor. The normalization of deviance that the NTSB actually found are that visual separation had become the primary way of separating helicopters from aircraft, helicopter crews reporting "in sight" when they hadn't positively identified the traffic yet, the tower trying to "make it work" rather than forcibly slowing operations down, etc.
That in addition to putting a helicopter route as little as 75ft below the approach path, the helicopter's altimeter being 100ft off (within spec!), the helicopter crew's use of night vision gogggles severely limiting field of view, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft being on separate frequencies severely limiting the RJ crew's SA.
And perhaps most egregiously, the FAA ignoring the countless warning signs (15 thousand close proximity events over 3 years, are you kidding me?) Failing to fix the helo route, failing to reduce arrival rate (the request from Potomac TRACON wasn't forwarded due to being "too political"), failing to improve the tower's conflict alert software...
People did not ignore automation, the regulators ignored lots of growing holes in the slices of Swiss cheese.
So you detect them miles away. It's a real-time analysis problem: assign a latency equal to the longest time required to react and that's the time you have to detect an oncoming train.
The problem then becomes avoiding false positives – on multi-track lines, trains on adjacent lines can pass each other as little as 3 to 4 metres away, and within stations and junctions, you can't properly predict a collision without also being aware of the current point positions.
The signalling system has already all the necessary data here, the trains by default none to few of it.
Hence it is usually way more tractable to just improve the reliability and functionality of the signalling system itself and don't bother with complicated technical fallback solutions.
(Things might look differently if you've only got single track lines and no modern signalling system in place – in that case a TCAS-like system might be worth it and not too difficult to implement, especially if you limit its scope to the plain single track line outside of station areas.)
Flying is different – the difference between your positional accuracy and the minimum safe separation between planes is way more favourable, so detection of potential conflicts is much easier.
And – while these days air traffic controllers do usually have computerised aids available to detect impending traffic conflicts, ultimately the system still relies on controllers correctly detecting any conflicts, issuing the correct commands to pilots, and those pilots then correctly executing those commands, too. That's a lot of human in the loop, so the impetus for some fallback safety system (TCAS or whatever) is much stronger.
With trains on the other hand, the default state for any kind of remotely modern signalling (for at least a few decades already, actually) is that the signalling is able to automatically ensure that the route is set correctly, that no conflicting routes are set and that no other trains are occupying the route. Likewise, even without full automated driving it is still possible to ensure that trains are actually following the commands of the signalling.
Hence with railways, the appetite for a completely secondary technical fallback systems to cover outages of the primary signalling system has been much lower, and like I said, it is usally more tractable to try improving the safety and reliability of the primary signalling system. (Though yes, for the fallback case you also need to properly prepare appropriate manual procedures that take into account the increased failure risk of manual operations…)
I was responding to the comment that there wasn't a sensor available that would work.
I worked on a system that sat in the railroad right-of-way and by necessity had to detect an oncoming train from at least half a mile away due to our response time. We were aware that the railroad already had the data on where the trains were, but for RR safety, there was no way that we could get access to that, so we had to place our own sensor next to the track.
You raise an interesting point that if you're near a switching point, you need to know the point's position to determine if there's a potential collision. For my system, it was placed far enough away so that was not an issue: if we detected a train, we knew it was coming our way.
Cab-signalling train protection systems like LZB (and more modern alternatives like ETCS) are generally considered to be sufficient to ensure safe separation. The interlocking only allows setting a route if all its sections are detected vacant, conflicting routes are locked out, and flanks are protected. Meanwhile, the train protection system prevents trains from exceeding their movement authority. These systems can even largely monitor themselves and are designed to be fail-safe (often by putting all signals on danger and letting the operators figure it out).
But in those cases where the system does crash and reset, how can operations be started again? That's where you need well-specified fallback procedures. One such procedure might be that, in case axle counter sections to lose their counts (because of a crash of the interlocking or the axle count evaluator), causing affected sections to show as disturbed and mandating a manual reset, each section must be swept by a train running on sight (under a caution order in LZB or OS mode in ETCS).
People can say it's 'years of neglect' and might even believe it, but to me it's clear train liberalisation directly caused 2 train incident in Spain this year. Yes trains are slightly cheaper (for now, look at GB to estimate how long the low prices will last), but I'm not so sure the redundancy you pay for in a public monopoly is worthless, especially in areas where an incident can cause this many deaths.
"Directly" is way too strong. Yes, it may have been a factor here that the train that remained standing still was from another operator, but there are many more important factors at play, the main one being apparent lack of safety mindset of the controller. In other European countries with even more operators, the safety record is not commensurably worse.
It is though. It's like the electricity market. We try to liberalize it, we see it doesn't work, so we add regulations and regulators (here the "controller"), and each time there is a failure, we blame regulation or regulators, or both. Sometime when it's too egregious we blame the particular company that was caught fucking up, because blaming the system that allows such fuck ups would cost to much: ideologues in power agreeing to the idea that maybe, market do not work everywhere.
The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure. Hope this was the final straw we have to endure and they pay for their negligence at best, evil at worst in court.
Sorry to make a political statement with this tragedy, but the downgrade in Spain in recent years is just too much.
DEP and my condolences to the relatives and love ones.
Not only it's a political statement but it's also one that's disingenuous.
The dismantling of public services, of which the maintenance of train tracks is part of it, has been done by all kinds of governing parties in Spain, and the cuts have been greater when a right wing government was in place.
To shift all the blame to just the latest ones in power is manipulative at best.
The current government has been in power for more than 8 years. Eight years. To deflect blame to a currently non existent right wing movement is real mental gymnastics on your end.
Close collaborators of the current president are in jail due to corruption, much of it from stealing from ADIF.
It's the second time in a year something like this happens.
All my thoughts go to the victims of this tragedy.
I'm not denying their responsibilities, but to just blame the current government , forgetting all the previous history, and not looking first into what is to really blame, is a blatant manipulative tactic.
It could all be that the prime minister himself when to the control room and forced the collision to happen, and if that I'd join you all on blaming him. But we need to study what happened and then we can try to make it not happen again.
There's lots on unrest in Spain, and Europe, but there's also lots of inference from different parties, so many that we don't even know them all or what they want. Are the violent demonstrations organised by far right, Russia, US, Israel, far left? we don't know, but they tend to give worse press to all the leftist movements, so I'm thinking that is not their origin, given all the other non violent movements going around.
With all this there's everyday more and more manipulation, in social media, in news, in comments, that all (that I've seen) comes from the far right or similar movements. You message, and the one I responded, sound a lot like them.
I'm not defending this government, they are too right wing for me, not enough social spending, not fighting enough corruption (which both main parties and several of the minor do take part in), too Spanish for my taste (I'm Catalan). OTOH I despise blame calling before having the whole picture.
At this point, Spain must have the worst high speed rail safety record in Europe if not.. more broadly?
I am a little surprised doing some light searching that its one of the longest high speed rail systems / highest passenger count HSR systems in Europe?
I've only taken HSR in France & Italy and not been to Spain in over 15 years so was not aware of the build out.
* France HSR ~150M annual journeys / 110B annual passenger-kms
"Italy’s annual high-speed rail (HSR) passenger fatality rate is effectively zero, as there has never been a passenger fatality recorded on the country’s dedicated high-speed network"
"France’s dedicated high-speed lines (LGV—Lignes à Grande Vitesse) have historically maintained an extraordinary safety record. Across several decades of commercial operation since launching in 1981, there has never been a passenger fatality resulting from a high-speed crash during commercial service on a dedicated high-speed line"
Spain by comparison has 2 fatal accidents adding up to ~100 passenger deaths this year alone. Something like 300 fatalities in its history.
When LZB drops out, does the fallback to ASFA plus verbal authorization actually enforce block separation, or is it basically just driver discipline at 300 km/h?
When on verbal authorization, controller discipline is probably more important than driver discipline. And I really hope they don't do that at 300 km/h.
It does, but only when trains are separated by blocks in the first place. LZB blocks are way shorter, so after LZB went down these two trains seem to have been inside the same ASFA block. The failover from LZB to ASFA must be done correctly (and always with line of sight speed limits) until all trains get into their own blocks before ASFA works as designed. This seems to be the procedure that failed.
ASFA is max 200 km/h btw but that doesn’t matter to how this went down.
The Adamuz train crash was a maintenance issue, or lack of checks after the maintenance jobs, as some sources say that part of the line was very recently renewed. Today's crash seems to be a human failure from ADIF train control.
This one is the kind of thing that's not supposed to be able to even happen (one train running into the back of another) if positive train control is implemented properly.
People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC but their system is very simple and it works (it throws the train into emergency if it passes a red signal by physically knocking out the air).
Exactly, this can't happen. You need to put measures on this.
Both the maintenance issue and bad systems that lead to human error creating this crash need to be taken responsability by the public system and fix them.
Apparently they have the automated systems, but they were not working, so they were under human operating rules.
Which, in the USA at least, severely limits speed you're allowed to use (because once the only thing between you and gory death is a human, eventually that human makes a mistake).
I've always thought that a train lacking PTC on the rails should be able to "deploy" a small car-sized thing that runs ahead of it at the same speed but 2x current stopping distance away from the locomotive - if it stops communicating or detects any anomalies the train goes into emergency.
They told the train to drive "as normal". This was a controller mistake as the procedure says they could only drive in visual/slow mode.
Same mistake was made with other train and the driver replied that that was not allowed, and the operator corrected accordingly. But the driver of the train that crashed didn't raise the issue.
As it looks now the controller made a mistake when taking over manual control of the segment after systems failure ("continue as normal" vs "continue slow"). The train driver probably should have also known they should not drive at normal speed without safeties in the segment, but I guess they trusted control had cleared previous trains.
Between 10-20 minutes control room did not realize a train was approaching an occupied section where the other train was holding on a red track signal.
Human error but signals serious deficiencies at protocol, oversight etc. In control room.
People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC
Who does this? The US barely has PTC because freight companies continue to fight it tooth and nail. You only need to look at the Amtrak Cascades crash to see how subpar even modern rail infrastructure is in the US. Neither is PTC a panacea as anyone who is old enough to remember when Thales' craptastic train control system sent a Muni train the wrong way down the wrong tracks in San Francisco.
There are definitely groups of people who hate the limited speeds of Amtrak, especially in the southwest corridor (the trains Amtrak runs there are capable of "technically high-speed (120 mph)" but can't do it because the freights haven't paid for the rails to be upgraded.
Everyone wants PTC installed, nobody wants to pay for it. Amtrak wants the railroads to pay for it. The railroads don't care about it because they run 50 MPH or less freights, so they want the government to pay for it. The government has no funding and wants Amtrak to pay for it. Amtrak reminds the government that Amtrak is just the government with a bad wig on, and the cycle continues.
And California keeps trying to build a high-speed rail for infinity billion dollars when the cost to PTC the entire LOSSAN corridor is only $250-500 million (and many agencies have done parts of it themselves already).
The state of US rail is entirely due to nobody actually giving a shit and there not being a central authority powerful enough to force it thought (because nobody gives a shit). Kind of the story of the USA in general.
The human failure appears to be mistake number 3 or 4.
1. Automated system fails
2. Decision is made to run the system manually
3. Iyro train fails to move on when instructed (Comms failure?, train failure?)
4. Controller uses imprecise language when instructing following train.
To say this is totally down to 4 is to scapegoat the last link in the chain.
East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained
Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed
USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure
The United States actually possesses one of the most efficient, profitable, and advanced freight rail networks in the world with 140,000 miles of well maintained rail. Being optimized for freight the rails are designed for slower moving heavy cars instead of lighter fast moving passenger cars.
Giant chunks of it lack basic safety features like crossing gates; there are 4.6 derailments per day; it is considered normal to have trains slow down to near walking pace due to poor track maintenance; electrification is a rounding error; trains routinely sit idling in sidings for huge chunks of the day; railroads are unable to comply with the legally-mandated requirement to let on-time scheduled passenger trains have priority; and high-speed rail basically doesn't exist despite several corridors being the perfect scenario for it.
By any metric except $/ton/mile, US rail is a giant failure. The only reason it still exists is because the US got screwed over by geography and can't make use of waterways for over half the country. Want to ship grain out of Montana, or coal out of Wyoming? You have to use a train, no other option.
With a car, you should always drive at a speed so you can stop in the distance you can see and predict as the driver. With a train, you can’t really do that if you don’t want to go walking speed around every bend in the track. So a high speed train is always operating in a state where it needs external sources to tell it if the way is clear.
Also because nobody feels profitable to use Waymo to seed chaos and create riots. In that case the situation will change drastically in a couple minutes.
People would still blame Waymo, not the government, so there is not any gain unless you are a Waymo's competitor.
I always thought there is a system of rail signals which should prevent accidents like this always in place, like dividing railroad into sections, turn on red light if the next section is occupied, yellow before that and so on...
Did it fail somehow which lead to this accident? I think such systems must be redundant enough to survive even without power/computers?
- A fault in the signaling system caused an Iryo and a Renfe train to stop -- the Iryo train was in front.
- For some reason, the control center authorized the Renfe train to proceed at full speed, despite the cab signaling showing it should stop. It then hit the Iryo train that was stopped in front of it.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the main issues that caused this are likely:
- Poor / improper maintenance causes the primary signaling/communication system to frequently fail. The standard "correct" behavior in this case is to manually authorize stopped trains to proceed slowly (at approx 10 mph so they can stop if they see another train) to the next station and wait for the system to be restored.
- Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear.
- That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.
> - Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear.
- That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.
This is a 200km/h line, which is right at the limit of the speed where you don't need in-cabin signaling (plenty of lines in France run at 200km/h without it), which explains why a careless control center operator could end up in this spot.
Hum, I wonder just right now if allowing the train to go to full speed (and giving priority to the restart over other trains) was related with the pressure of carrying a prominent politician. Have the team of the ex-minister pressed RENFE with the need to arrive urgently so "just ignore the protocol this time"?.
Is speculation of course but at this moment we must evaluate every hypothesis.
Politicians are the kind of people that are caught in the highway driving at 200 Km/h, just to arrive in time to a meeting in a 20 people's village. Could explain the strange control behavior.
> El Mundo is reporting that the Iryo train flagged a failure in its LZB signalling system 10 minutes before the crash, but the train behind did not receive the information due to a potential human error.
> Investigators believe the AVE high-speed train travelling behind crashed into the stationary Iryo service.
> A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident, government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control - and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
Some further points:
- Apparently some of the drivers involved were in training
- Infra maintenance is abysmal. Budgets are poor and or misspent
- Second time this happens, in 9 months
PS. They knew or should have known that the AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) train was ordered (manually) to continue forward, when it should not have. There was at least one known train blocking the track. The LZB system had failed - as reported by drivers systemwide. The Control Center at Atocha station decided for trains to move forward. According to the Transportation Minister this is inexplicable - even further, trains did not follow protocols beyond this: They are supposed to engage in "marcha a la vista" (very very slow, cautious, line-of-sight only traversal to the nearest destination) when in any doubt. This was not ordered, but "normal" further travel.-
Witnesses report, riders that use that same line every day, that trains were also frequently stopped yesterday - reasons unknown. But there were warning signs.-
64 Km. were affected by a "computer failure" at 08:30 local. 08:36, the "decision" was taken from Atocha to continue operations. 25 Km. later, the crash takes place.-
I was in Spain a year ago and it felt like the high speed trains weren't running as smoothly as they were when I was last there a decade earlier. At the time I chalked it up to false memories and not to judge based on vibes, but I guess my spidey senses were accurate. It also felt like a contradiction as there was a decent amount of expansion construction that I saw.
Post-crash investigation is much worse than with plane crashes, and also measures taken. We had an accident in 2013 (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidente_ferroviario_de_Santi...), 80 death. "Investigation" was only to decide who goes to jail, and surprise the driver goes, with another guy from Renfe Safety department. It was also decided to change the ERTMS, with 60m € budget. AFAIK, still uninstalled.
If that was a plane crash, rarely pilots are to take all the blame and even if they are the main cause, the recommendations would be to add more training, more off time, redundant measures to help the pilot or overcome their mistakes and they usually do deep investigations that end in plane redesign / retrofit, changes in routes, adding safety equipment, etc. It never goes "human error", and close the report.
With the current news this was not a manteinance issue (that might be a problem anyway), but a failure in "control tower" that put two planes in the same runway, with one of them stopped in the middle. It is beyond logic how two trains can be in the same railway closer than X distance, even with human allowing it, instead of having a TCAS-like system.
Maintenance is not sexy for anyone; there was an article posted earlier with "advice for junior engineers" that had the top advice "(1) Pick business impact over backlog". Maintenance is backlog.
A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay
They do have such sensors, and have for many years! Japan's shinkansen pioneered this tech in the 1960s (and has an essentially perfect safety record). It's just that by necessity, the sensing is done through the tracks, rather than directly by the train cars.
You might be imagining something like the automated emergency braking that's used in automobiles, where radar is used to detect an imminent collision. But high-speed trains have stopping distances measured in miles, and it's not feasible for one train to detect another at such distances (especially e.g. on parallel tracks or around curves).
So instead the train positions have to be monitored and relayed by sensors in the tracks, which necessitates a coordination system. And it seems that that system is what broke down. The automated system should have been (and presumably was) fail-safe, but instead of stopping trains until it was fixed, the operators chose to override it and use a much more fallible manual signaling system.
> Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
I'm sure you're already aware that this is an irrational fear. As bad as this accident is, and as reprehensible as it was that it was allowed to happen, I'm pretty sure there have still been significantly fewer fatalities per passenger-km in Spain this year than there have been on US highways. It's just that we've become numb to the fact that 100 Americans die in car accidents every day.
Metro style trains all have it. It's just continental long distance systems that are sometimes lax about those things.
Train wheels are all solid metal so you can watch out for electrical faults between the left and right rails. You can, and this is in fact how many metro style trains operate, require the ground infra to be responding OK and report no faults in the next part of the rail for the train to enter a new section.
Reading other comments, looks like this Spanish system did have a German system that is more advanced that basic electrical fault based system, it was just switched off because it was broken. That's downright reckless, and it shouldn't be a normal behavior.
They don't advertise you how those things work, because it's useless information for most. Doesn't mean they never had such systems for the past ~150 years.
You're conflating multiple things – 1. train detection (which can be track circuits, as described by you, axle counters or on the most modern systems even train-based train detection), 2. how to transmit the stop/go information to the train (driver), and 3. how to ensure that the train (driver).
LZB (the "German system that is more advanced that basic electrical fault based system") does 2. and 3., but in its usual mainline implementations still needs a conventional train detection system.
> it was just switched off because it was broken. That's downright reckless, and it shouldn't be a normal behavior.
The Spanish line in question is actually equipped with conventional colour-light signalling (and the corresponding conventional train protection system) as a fall back, which is perfectly safe, too.
The only critical bit (which by the looks of it unfortunately failed here) is managing an unplanned transition between the two, because for reasons of cost, the fallback signalling utilises much longer block sections than the LZB signalling, so if the LZB fails unannouncedly, you can end up with multiple trains (each inside its own dedicated LZB block section) inside the same line-side signalling block section, so restarting the train needs to be safely managed by getting them out of the accidentally shared block section one at a time.
> “A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident,” government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control — and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
This is not the first time something broadly like that happens. In 2013 another train crashed because there was a section of the track where the operator had to manually adjust the speed, and he didn't.
One would think that the operation of these trains would be fully automated at all times, and with sufficient allowances to handle emergencies safely.
Point in case: Japan has not had a single death due to a crash of a high speed train, even though they have been operating an extensive network for decades.
The operation is fully automated until the point when the system breaks and the human controller orders manual overrides.
They could have waited for recovery etc. The issue is they switched to manual and then botched it. We don't know root cause yet (bad management, timetable pressure, lax work culture...?).
According to the available information, the failure of the automated system caused six trains to stop. They were then given manually the go-ahead to proceed at full speed (!!!). Six does not sound like a huge number of them to ensure that the train ahead is moving normally before the train behind is told to continue. This sounds like a massive failure in either the protocol or the operator's ability to follow the protocol. Mind boggling stuff, really.
As a Spaniard I am profoundly ashamed that these crashes are happening, when other countries like China, France and Japan seem to manage just fine with their extensive high-speed rail networks.
The safety system fails because the trains are no longer in a safe position. You need to have them in manual mode to move them to a safe position to be able to start the safety system again. The manual override is the recovery, if you want to wait, you are going to wait for eternity. However the issue this ties seems to be, that they did not place the system into manual mode, when they should have. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298796
"racing cars" actually would not be stationary. "Race cars" are the class of vehicle, which can be stationary. If the cars are racing, they are not stationary.
"High-speed" is ambiguous. It can be used to describe the class of vehicle, or it can be used to describe the state of motion of the vehicle.
America is a big place. Common terminology in one place is unheard of in another, especially in the age before the internet.
I saw a discussion thread the other day about the word for a pile of blankets and pillows at a kids sleepover. Every Southerner knew the term “pallet”. Pretty much everyone else didn’t have a word for it at all, other than a “pile”.
That's also a possible factor in why those sitting in the rear half of the plane during a crash are more likely to survive - they have the front of the plane as the crumple zone.
Although for trains, it looks like the middle might be the safest (in case of a rear-end collision).
Well actually. Trains are designed now to not have "telescoping" crashes. If you think the trains being sturdy doesn't lead to a reduction in loss of life in these collisions.. Well it could be much, much worse.
I'm not familiar with all the safety features in design now, but there are quite a few. I wouldn't be surprised if they are designed to deflect and derail during collision now.
The public minister of transport is still on his chair after the last ones. No responsability admited and blaming the far right for attacking him with media.
Is amazing how the current politic scene at spain has shittified, they get away with everything and ppl will still clap for them.
There are all kinds of isolated systems that trigger warnings but the thing that seems to be missing everywhere is a centralized simulation with all the data in it. Or perhaps a series of simulations each slightly further in the future. If any variable changes run it again until it reaches its time stamp.
For example, it shouldn't be possible in 2026 for a vehicle to get stuck on the crossing (with cameras) without the train driver getting a notification. You can even power down an entire track if it's obstructed. You might not want self driving, self breaking seems quite desirable.
Depending on where, there can be lots and lots of small crossings. The cameras themselves might not be that expensive, but keeping them in working order is very nontrivial.
There is also the issue of recognition software that doesn't have too many false positives, and properly tuning it for each crossing, in all light situations. The amount of time and work needed can really be very large. I'm not against it though. Some pilot projects would be a good idea.
The accidents/deaths in Europe have been dropping over the years.
But I think the main difference is that while trains are extremely popular in Japan, in Europe it's been for decades under attack from governments who push roads and driving instead. This leads to underfunding and hollowing out of the train services.
Classic example seen all around Europe is partial privatization where it's often some state owned company that manages the expensive rails maintenance and unprofitable (but required) train lines while private companies get the profitable lines. This often leads to public opinion that trains are subsidized too much which leads to more decline of the services.
Another complication is that Japan is one country with one system where everybody speaks same language but trains in EU have to connect different systems together and it is hard to come to unified systems and laws around trains.
What this chart doesn't show you is how much more expensive it is to advance the grade of automation. Systems like the Docklands Railway are only safe because all their tracks are grade separated with exclusive track. They still need a person on board to be sure that nobody is stuck in the doors or wedged between the train and platform before the train starts moving.
"Have computers control everything" is four words to say, but it's millions or billions more in money, and adds years to the projects. London's Crossrail, for example, was years late due to the complexity of switching between 4 separate signalling systems (ETCS on the Heathrow branch, AWS on the GWML, TPWS on the GEML, and CBTC in their tunnel and exclusive track.)
We're still using TPWS on the ECML, for example, because:
> TPWS was developed by British Rail and its successor Railtrack, following a determination in 1994 that British Rail's Automatic Train Protection system was not economical – ATP would cost £600 million (equivalent to £1.2 billion in 2024) to implement, compared to value in lives saved: £3 – £4 million (£6 – 8 million in 2024), per life saved, which was estimated to be 2.9 per year.
TPWS is where a little light comes on saying it would be a good idea to brake now because you passed a signal at danger. Only very fancy versions of TPWS will actually apply the brakes for you.
> Both crashes would have been prevented by an operational automatic train protection (ATP) system, wider fitting of which had been rejected on cost grounds. The crash severely damaged public confidence in the management and regulation of safety of Britain's privatised railway system.
But even then, an inquiry asked to look specifically into ATP determined we were right to reject it, it was just Too. Fucking. Expensive.
> Since both the Paddington and Southall crashes had reopened public debate on ATP, a separate joint inquiry considering the issue in the light of both crashes was also held in 2000; it confirmed the rejection of ATP and the mandatory adoption of a cheaper and less effective system, but noted a mismatch between public opinion and cost-benefit analysis.
> "Have computers control everything" is four words to say, but it's millions or billions more in money, and adds years to the projects.
The delays, the reduced amount of infrastructure built, and passing on of those costs in ticket prices causes people to use other forms of transport that are less safe thereby causing more casualties than a slightly less safe rail system would.
> They still need a person on board to be sure that nobody is stuck in the doors or wedged between the train and platform before the train starts moving.
Why do they need someone?
Skytain in Vancouver is fully automated and driverless with no attendant on board. Grade separated, doors automatically close, and there are sensors that trigger if someone enters the guideway.
That's a "nobody's dead yet" scenario. Safety standards require full platform doors at all stations for attendant-free operation, i.e. the platform has wall-to-ceiling barriers, the train arrives perfectly aligned (which means zero variation in train configuration, which rules out almost all mainline stations that accept different operators services), and the platform doors open and close in sync with the train doors.
Anything less is begging to get someone wedged in there as the train drives off, even if it's just a limb or a trailing bag strap.
> In June 2023, the operator of the Vancouver SkyTrain, TransLink announced a feasibility study into installing platform screen doors on the Expo and Millennium lines. Such installation was previously deemed infeasible, due to SkyTrain's diverse fleet and different door positions. However, with the acquisition of the Alstom Mark V trains, which will replace the ageing Mark I, the door positions allow for a feasibility study to proceed.
EDIT: I found some SkyTrain stats for you. 2016-2025, 1 fatal train-passenger interaction on the platform, 36 fatal in the guideway. Most were intentional suicide attempts.
I am aware, iirc the rate doubled after covid with most being self harm which is why the platform door discussion has started again. Primarily to prevent suicides and the resulting system shutdowns as the number of unintentional major injuries or deaths has been pretty low over its 40 years of no drivers or attendants and being the 4th busiest in canada/usa. The two new lines currently under construction right now will also not have platform doors.
So despite being fully automated is comparable with most other major metros/train systems that have a driver/attendant with the only metro's performing significantly better being the ones with platform doors - hence my comment of asking "why is an attendant needed for automation?" when it doesn't significantly improve safety in the same way doors would.
in the end we still may not end up with platform doors even thou the study can proceed now as the cost will be astronomical and always with safety systems there might not be the appetite for it.
As Skytrain has no attendants, there's a certain level of risk of passenger injury and death no matter how good the sensors are. If Skytrain had platform doors, there would likely be less, but probably never zero, and TransLink baulk at the cost (for now).
Other systems, e.g. the Docklands Light Railway, which has attendants that can also drive if needed, are OK with paying those attendants (for now). I presume they've done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that it's cheaper to keep paying humans to ensure every train departs safely, and to operate the manual controls if the automation fails, than it is to upgrade the system to the point that doesn't require them and is also considered safe.
Skytrain is from the 1990s. However elevators have been fully automated since before I can remember (1960s is my guess, but that is a guess if you care to look it up I'll stand corrected)
> TPWS is where a little light comes on saying it would be a good idea to brake now because you passed a signal at danger. Only very fancy versions of TPWS will actually apply the brakes for you.
You're confusing AWS and TPWS – AWS is the older system (based on pre-WW II technology but only deployed nationwide after WW II) which sort of roughly fits your first sentence, while TPWS will actually stop you if you're trying to pass a signal at danger (with the caveat that most automatic signals on the plain line aren't fitted on the basis that a train will relatively rarely actually have to stop at one – statistically that's absolutely sensible if you only have a limited amount of money and want to cover the higher risk signals first, but unfortunately the recent Elstow train crash did manage to hit that particular gap in the system…).
> But even then, an inquiry asked to look specifically into ATP determined we were right to reject it, it was just Too. Fucking. Expensive.
But you did eventually get TPWS which does deliver a quite large fraction of the safety benefits of ATP at a significantly smaller fraction of the costs.
In Oslo, Norway, we have train signaling errors all the time it feels like. It leads to a lot of delays and things. But I think that when these systems are not working, it is better to slow down everything even going as far as to put some trains on hold for some time, to avoid human errors in manual instruction and routing leading to crashes and deaths.
"Signalfeil" (signal error) does not actually always mean that there is an error with the signaling! Happened to read up on this while stuck on a train due to signal error!
It is means that they have gotten a signal that there is an error somewhere, which might be the signaling system, but also loads of other things! [1]
The term is super confusing thought, should probably have been "error signal" instead
"In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's."
That's patently false, as Spain has the largest High-speed rail network in the world after China and it has seen constant expansion for the last 30 years.
Maintenance and expansion are two different things. Governments of the day tend to favour big announcements for shiny new things, while simultaneously deferring maintenance whenever they can to redirect money to various other priorities.
I think you have to talk about how this is measured. Their network is huge, but frequencies are low and the maintenance costs per KM of track are very high relative to ridership. If you just think about the metric of KM of high-speed track, it's true, Spain has a larger network than, for example, Japan. But Japan is sending high-speed trains down some of its lines every 3 and a half minutes! Nothing remotely like that is happening in Spain.
This route is the last of the Spanish high speed lines that still has an older train protection system. There has been a similar accident in 2002 in Germany where LZB was also used: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienf%C3%B6rmige_Zugbeeinflu... . Now after 24 years you might think they had mitigating procedures in place...
The railroads in the USA were trying to push back and delay improvements to automated safety systems until the 2015 Amtrak 188 crash https://youtu.be/-mzaavmtT9M
Only was finally fully rolled out in I think 2020 5 years after the accident.
Delaying/avoiding spending money on safety seems to be common around the world.
As long as vision zero is considered more of a gross infringement on personal freedums than a laudable goal, making trains as safe as they are uniquely fit to become is not exactly a great way to allocate funds to maximize impact. Trains are already very safe. Even where they currently lack 4 layers of fail-safe systems operated at a level where that still permits reliable&punctual service. The same money on making them shine could be spent on improving car infrastructure (or even removing some car infrastructure!) for greater expected harm reduction.
EU statistics say that per km traveled there are 28x more deaths when traveling by car then by train. With trains you basically don't get passenger deaths except those which end up in media. Also in the train related deaths almost everything are not passengers but people on tracks or level crossing users.
The incompetence in the world that is likely the underlying cause for this, is a serious cancer that is ruining our society. We need to speak out even against what seems like lesser issues, because we normalize that behaviour until it perverts everything.
The only way to achieve higher levels of competence is to enforce higher levels of accountability. Over the last couple of years Spain has suffered major infrastructural catastrophes without any leadership being held accountable at all. It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
You lost me at that part. It is entirely unreasonable to consider that in the vast majority of the world, where state-sanctioned killing of citizens has been abolished.
> Gross negligence is a lack of care that demonstrates reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others, which is so great it appears to be a conscious violation of other people's rights to safety. Gross negligence is a heightened degree of negligence representing an extreme departure from the ordinary standard of care. Falling between intent to do wrongful harm and ordinary negligence, gross negligence is defined as willful, wanton, and reckless conduct affecting the life or property or another.
Oh, I'm sure it might have been marginally effective in some very specific circumstances.
But that was far from the norm. In the hope that you might actually go and educate yourself somewhat on the topic, here is the Times report on the last public execution ever carried out in England, that of Michael Barrett on 26 May 1868.
its not only in spain where this type of issues have been on the uptick. people not getting jailed can be indicative also of the whole story not being told.
The history was a little more complex than that. The trains were not too wide, they were the right legal size where ordered.
The problem is while the trains were being built, the laws changed, requiring now extra space between trains and tunnels to evacuate people.
The only solution would be to dump all the trains and start from scratch in a new design for narrower trains that still keep the same comfort and safety levels. This is not realistic.
If you order a car that has legally given the green light to be built in 2026, the government can't say in 2027 that your car must had measured 1m less. Would be unfair for buyer and maker. Unless the government can show a very solid reason, they must accept the car model for the expected years of car life. This is why we still can drive legally cars with no airbags, and with toy seat belts. Cars that no way would be accepted to be built today.
Who ordered the trains was doing everything right, the problem was created by who changed the specifications in the middle of the process.
> It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
It is entirely unreasonable to consider capital punishment.
* an eye for an eye solves nothing - it doesn't bring dead people back to life, it just results in another person killed
* it's not an effective deterrent, it won't change how people act more than the risk of jail-time will
* it's unethical. It sounds like 'justice' if your idea of justice is simple retribution, but it completely undermines the concept of redemption - it advocates treating people as unfixable and unable to atone for their 'sins' and instead of limiting the pain and suffering - it spreads pain to more people
* no system is perfectly and inevitable you will end up punishing somebody with death based on faulty / flawed evidence that only later comes to light as being flawed/faulty. You can't bring a dead person back to life and say "sorry we got it wrong"
* finally - and perhaps most critically - tragedies such as these are almost the result of failures across an entire system with 10s, 100s, sometimes 1000s of people each culpable to varying degrees with many 'sliding doors' moments where such a tragedy could have been avoided had a different decision been taken. Sure you can always simplify things and point to the symbolic figurehead and say they are ultimately accountable and should take the ultimate responsibility for the group's failure (bonus points if in doing so you highlight how well paid they are to take on such a responsibility). But what you'll arrive at isn't justice and higher standards - instead you'll just have another dead person, killed in cold blood and the generic hope that somehow that additional death will act as a stronger driver of change than the already very real deaths that occurred in the tragedy itself.
I was just listening to the EconTalk podcast, and the guest was a Spanish demographer that specifically said that Spanish train system was being starved for funding in the past 10 years or so. This is because the population is aging, and all of the growth in the economy is being directed towards pensions and health care for the rapidly growing number of retirees.
Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.
Won’t speak for the poster, but in my experience the incompetence of the average person is only exceeded by the incompetence of the ownership class. The people Ayn Rand lauded are usually the largest obstacle to actually Getting Shit Done.
Competence in what, is the question. Obviously they are competent in making money. The biggest scammers are also competent in making money too, though.
Look at the current US President, for instance. He is richer than any of us will ever be, but what exactly is his competence?
I was incredulous, I wondered what sort of LoC does book rankings like it's Buzzfeed, I thought "Maybe it's the LoC after a Trump-infestation or DOGE", but (1):
> In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible.
The fact that you equate a survey result (who knows who heard of the survey, or if there was a campaign to skew the results) to the LoC giving it a rating, and "that's why I read it", and you think this is a good rebuttal, reveals to me a lot about you.
Regardless of how that one survey was done AS ends up on many best US fiction book lists. The 90s may have also been one of the AS peaks, as I recall being told to read from multiple people (family and teachers). From your own link:
The novel made the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books of the Century in 1996, and Radcliffe Publishing ranked it 92 out of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. In 1999, Atlas Shrugged was number 37 in the list of 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians. A Harris poll placed Atlas Shrugged on America’s Top 10 Favorite Book List in 2008, and The Modern Library ranked it the number one best novel published in the English language in 2009. The novel is listed as number six on Boston Library’s list of 100 Most Influential Books of the Century, and it ranks number five on the list of the 20 Most Inspirational Books ever written. Atlas Shrugged has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese (2007).
From a story perspective, I found AS too long and preferred The Fountainhead. Were they influential to my younger self? Sure, much like the Bible was to me as an atheist. A story with both good and bad ideas to draw from.
I can understand a lot of the dislike of that novel, but her description of how the United States slowly falls apart due to culturally-reinforced incompetence is worth appreciating.
From what I can remember (of reading the book 25 years ago), it predicted an increasing suspicion and resentment of excellence and competence, coinciding with a rise in socialist sentiments. The net result is that various aspects of society would begin to break down as the total amount of competence in the culture vanishes.
I think she attributed too much of the symptoms merely to socialism; obviously the world is more complex than that. But we've got this train crash, the ongoing issues with Boeing airplanes, several multi-billion dollar public infrastructure projects across America that have stalled and will likely never be completed (like the California high speed rail system), the list goes on.
To me it seems the opposite is happening: the push for higher profits by the Capitalists is overriding the competence of rank and file, resulting in these disasters. And all these profits just shoring up wealth that is accruing unequally to those same Capitalists is what is inciting socialist sentiments.
To me Ayn Rand's writings always seemed like an Economics Horror story: effective at instilling dread in its readers, but of some highly unrealistic boogeyman.
Right, we don't know about this one, but typically there are some corners being cut somewhere or some other money motive lurking in the background, like the Boeing one OP mentioned.
When I said that the world is more complex than that, I meant that she oversimplified it. To say that the opposite has happened is also an oversimplification.
It's a more correct oversimplification than the other one though ;-)
Like I'd be really curious to see evidence of people saying, either directly or indirectly, that "we should be suspicious of competence and excellence."
On the other hand, you already mentioned concrete evidence of money-seeking causing disasters: Boeing.
How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'? How do you remediate it? More draconian, individualized worker surveillance?
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.
Incompetence and laziness are very different things. You can have very hard working, engaged, active people that are still incompetent for the job they are supposed to do.
Yes. Modern levels of reliability and safety don't come from workers trying harder or caring more, it requires systems, procedures, controls, redundancy, fail-safes.
> This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
It's both. The nihilism (see France riots for ex) and general incompetence that many of us see in the workplace or in our dealings with, for example, government agencies, and in our dealings with others is obviously there too and needs to be rooted out.
How do you deal with incompetence? In Europe I have no idea because of labor laws. In America we should probably be aggressively firing bad workers and grifters, and at the same time increasing wages and benefits and providing for items like safety and proper rest for those who actually want to show up and get things done.
Well people in Spain have a lot less working hours than in other European countries such as Greece, Poland, and Malta. Whether work hours means doing actual work or just loafing around is harder to measure.
From your own link, of all the EU nation states Spain is pretty much middle-of-the-pack for per-worker hours.
Another counterpoint: higher work hour countries have higher rates of death per kilometer of active track [0]
Greece (highest in the EU for work hours) = 22.3 rail deaths per 1k kilometer of track followed by Portugal (another high work hour ranking) with 6.2, Portugal (about 200 more hours than Spain annual) at 6.2, and Hungary (at about 100 more hours) at 5.8.
The only two countries with less deaths per 1K KM of track and more work hours are Ireland and Estonia. All the rest (Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Slovenia, Luxembourg) have less annual work hours than Spain.
No, I don't think all people in Spain work the same number of hours. Also, I think "other European countries" are not a homogenous group, average number of hours worked differs per country.
Automation of a bad process or security measure is not a way out of the incompetence of people who designed it. Automation of garbage only brings more garbage.
Because the people with automation targets are not the same people responsible for the quality of the process and you get what you measure. Been there, done that.
For a moment there my first tought was that "autonation" might be something like the concept of a nation made by the individual itself or something like that.
We need to create a word for typos/autocomplete errors that have a positive result like this on the reader.
no clear cause has yet been named. it can be many things and ultimately they will always blame human error because it gives away the least information about what really happened.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
Once upon a time I did root cause analysis professionally, and a trainer told us if you attributed the root cause to people without finding malice you were just being lazy. At the very least I doubt anyone to blame here was actually involved in the accident, but someone who decided it was not in the budget to put an automated system in place faster.
They had an automated system, it had failed earlier in the day in that section causing trains to be signalled to stop. Then they had a manual go-slow human backup protocol which appears to also have not been observed - some drivers were given clearance to continue as normal. Swiss cheese of compounded failures, with tragic results.
> And what are the systemic practices in place that led to people not following the official protocol?
I guess we'll find out. Apparently one of two drivers who were given the go ahead for normal operations requested additional confirmation because he or she (rightly) thought go-slow was the expected response for transit resumption under the fallback protocol. Some incompetence in the control authority Adif, then, but I'm sure that'll be the focus of the inquiry they will no doubt have.
I'm so fucking tired of you people constantly trying to reduce human accountability after accidents like this that claim lives. It's always the fault of the system and never the fault of any people. As if we are all just cogs in a machine that is controlled by no-one. It is your fatalistic worldview that is directly causing accidents like this. How many more people have to die before we can fix things? Just stop.
Obviously individual people can be at fault, but it is this further process of asking _why_ individual people fail—pointing to systems, procedures, cultures—that has (in part) contributed to the extraordinary safety of aviation.
So I would say on the contrary, it is that systems worldview that actually leads to lasting improvements. Because human nature is not changing in a hurry.
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
Who wants to design a basic cryptographic p2p lock between trains that limit their speed 30km/h if they're not able to get proof they're alone on a track; when the alternative is to debate endlessly about whom to blame, and which billion-dollar conglomerate has the technical prowess to sit on the committee to debate the specs for a much worse system.
I could have been more precise, but it's the same ideas underpinning HTTPS and git - long before blockchain became a hype.
Did you instead want to build some central hub that grounds all train traffic if unreachable, or create a bunch of semaphores that anything can overwrite by accident or on purpose?
I'm genuinely curious here.
I can understand being intimidated by concepts outside your wheelhouse, but if you have a simpler solution you'd feel safe with i'm all ears.
I'm not saying this is all there is too it, but I am saying all the other design choices like recovery modes, operator experience, etc - should build around cryptography between tracks and trains.
We can call them cryptographic semaphores if that makes your brain turn on again.
I don't know anything about trains so I can't really propose a solution. I just thought your proposal was funny in that it was very "HN flavored" in a domain that is somewhat far from typical HN domains. Not saying if it's good or bad, just saying I thought it was funny.
At this moment, may be incompetence, but I wouldn't discard still a sabotage that go out of hand.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why. The proprietary automatic brake system of Siemens was working fine for 30 years, but it was too old, maybe too expensive and being replaced by a different system (non proprietary?). This shouldn't had caused any problem, as stopping the trains when a problem happens in the railway is the by-default security protocol.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why this person didn't saw that light in the screen, or why in the age of mobile phones and internet, he/she was unable to warn about the second train.
And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near a train station before to crash into the Italian train, in a perfectly sunny day. It does not make any sense and, seemly, it goes directly against the security protocol.
We don't know still if the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or didn't even tried to stop the train (maybe suffered a dismay or a heart attack?). Survivors say that they didn't noticed a decrease of speed before the impact. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
For foreign journalists, to paint Spain as a third world country is practically a sport, and they love to write the word 'siesta' for some strange fetish, but the reality is that this is one of the most modern high-speed train systems in the planet, and worked like a charm for more than 30 years until now.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war, including strange delays and strange train accidents all around Europe in the last two or three years (Poland, France, etc). We can safely assume that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this another added source of chaos happened suspiciously close to the November Spanish elections with plenty of strikes and riots that happened to occur overnight.
Taking the whole context, the probability of all of that happening by chance at the same time before the elections, is basically zero.
And wouldn't be the first also that "Russians messing with elections" meant exactly: Russians messing with elections.
If you have a better explanation by all what is happening in Europe just right now, with perfectly coordinated teams of people seeding chaos and unrest, I will hear it with maximum interest.
And yes, I know that Trump is not exactly a friend of anything latino related unless he can take advantage of it, and is specially unfriendly with the Spanish president.
My bet is that all of this will suddenly stop after Russia collapses by the self-destruction of their economy triggered by a chain of Putin's unhinged decisions
> And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events
Update. A second security system should had stopped the train automatically in the next red semaphore (or reduced the velocity to 40Km/h) without machinist intervention. That system was down also. And control had 17 minutes to warn the incoming train and to talk directly with the Italian train, but they apparently failed to do it.
So at least there are two different automatized computer security systems that failed on a row, plus a control center that acted in a strange way, plus a machinist that may, or may not, had tried to pull the brakes and she is missing.
And now they are saying that a former minister of employment was traveling in that train and she is also missing.
> Update. A second security system should had stopped the train automatically in the next red semaphore (or reduced the velocity to 40Km/h) without machinist intervention. That system was down also.
No, it wasn't, from the way things have presumably played out, the scenario has simply hit an inherent design limitation. Namely LZB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung) is the primary signalling and train protection system, but as a fallback, conventional colour-light lineside signalling together with the corresponding conventional train protections system (ASFA) has also been provided.
As a fallback system however, the lineside signalling has been set up with much longer signalling sections than the LZB, i.e. one conventional signalling section comprises multiple LZB signalling section. As such, it is still perfectly safe and serviceable, with the only immediate drawback that capacity will be significantly reduced due to the longer signalling sections (and also slower running speeds – the lineside signalling is limited to 200 km/h max).
The only problem comes in when you need to make an unscheduled transition from LZB to lineside signalling because of an LZB fault – while at first the trains will be safely braked to an immediate stop, you may now have ended up with multiple trains (all safely inside their own LZB block section) within the same lineside signalling block section. Which means that now there is no "next red semaphore" to prevent the second/third/… train from running into the train in front.
The proper procedure therefore is to untangle the trains by running them out of that accidentally shared block section one at a time and most likely at a reduced speed, too, but for some reason that procedure wasn't followed here…
so thanks everyone for downvotes just because you use slow news sources or deny the truth EU high speed trains are extremely dangerous compared to China on deaths/volume
> ABC is American, not sure why you'd claim this is a Spanish newspaper.
I have no words for stupidity of some commenters here...
"ABC (Spanish: [aˈβeθe]) is a Spanish national daily newspaper. Along with El Mundo and El País, it is one of Spain's three newspapers of record."
"ABC was first published in Madrid on 1 January 1903[1][2] by Torcuato Luca de Tena y Álvarez-Ossorio.[3][4] The founding publishing house was Prensa Española, which was led by the founder of the paper, Luca de Tena.[4] The paper started as a weekly newspaper, turning daily in June 1905.[5] In 1928, ABC had two editions, one for Madrid and the other for Seville.[4][6] The latter was named ABC de Sevilla.[4]"
"ABC is the longest-running national newspaper in Spain. With clear roots in its founding values, it constantly evolves, adapting to technological innovations and social changes to offer the best information offer"
Don't forget that several countries such as russia are waging hybrid warfare against the EU, there have been frequent sabotage acts against rail lines and cargo shipments. China is currently not targeted by russian hybrid warfare, and the US does not have a functional high speed rail system at all.
Ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem ('argument directed at the person'), is a rhetorical tactic of attacking the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion often using a totally irrelevant, but often highly charged attribute of the opponent's character or background.
A simple solution would be for all trains to have self recoding GPS which they probably all have and log their location on an internet map plus marking all the switches and allow open viewing to public and passengers to monitor their own train versus others. Ai can also be used to set the alarm.
The GPS location as well as track ID gets logged every few sec. They probably already have the info. Its not rocket science; that is how their systems probably work. They probably log the ID of previous and incoming switch too. They probably have all of this, just make it public.
Just a few days ago Spain is still in riot mode. The next protest is going to be on 31th October apparently.
This is gonna add fuel to the fire, and as I lived in East Asia (Hong Kong to be specific) I'm kind of curious why it all happened around the eurozone lately.
France, Albania, Belgium, Spain, Greece, UK and Serbia recently (although it is not eurozone but closely related anyway as part of the great Balkans). What's left? Germany and Poland I guess?
Anyhow it really reminds me of the First World War
because it is symptom of Sanchez government, two high speed train crashes within a year, his minister not resigning, throw there high living expenses, no wonder Spaniards protest
This is just 2.5 years after the same thing happened in Greece, killing 57:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempi_train_crash
No not exactly an "accident".
This is just 9 months after another catastrophic railway accident in Spain. In Adamuz, january 18th of this year 2026. 46 confirmed dead.
Yes, same government. 0 resignations, 0 political consequences, 0 apologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
The system has been in a steep decline for 5 years at least.
I take the plane now, because between delays, stops in the middle of nowhere and strong vibrations where there was a smooth ride before, it became unbearable.
seems very negligent. trains shouldn't be colliding in this day and age - given modern signal systems etc
Say it with me: social murder is fully legal and looked up on by society.
Its. Just. Good. Business.
El Pais is reporting they think it was a controller error,
https://elpais.com/espana/2026-10-28/por-que-han-chocado-dos...
An automated system[*] had failed earlier this morning, so controllers were working manually.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung ("LZB")
[added translation]: "The LZB safety system, which controls Spain's high-speed rail network, malfunctioned on Wednesday morning, causing about eight trains to come to a halt in the area. The control center then switched to manual control and ordered all trains to resume operation. However, the Iryo, for reasons that remain unclear, was unable to start and remained stationary. And that is where human error came into play, according to these initial hypotheses."
El Pais, English version: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-10-28/at-least-10-peop...
Honestly, to blame the controller after the automated system has failed is pretty low. The system does not run this way normally for good reasons, and whilst the controller maybe trained to handle the situation they won't be well practised at it.
The primary reason is computer failure followed by the decision to run the system manually.
When computers fail here in the Netherlands, trains are just stopped until they can be fixed.
In some cases, trains can be ordered to drive "at sight" -- slow enough (walking speed, basically) to stop if there's something visible on the tracks that shouldn't be there (train, car, person, cow, whatever)
Not just when computers fail. When union negotiations fail, when it's too cold, when it's too hot, when it snows, when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks, or whenever they come up with a new excuse.
You haven't used trains elsewhere if you think Dutch ones are bad.
Try a few weeks of German trains. Sometimes no trains leave on time for weeks.
Those inconveniences prevent tragedies like this one.
> When union negotiations fail
You don't want trains to collide because sick people are forced to work when they shouldn't and realistically can't.
> when it's too cold
You don't want trains to derail due to rails breaking.
> when it's too hot
You don't want trains to derail due to rails buckling.
> when it snows
You don't want trains to go the wrong way (including into another train) due to switches freezing shut.
> when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks
You don't want trains to collide as slippery rails made braking impossible.
> or whenever they come up with a new excuse.
Usually it's a reason, not an excuse. Train people like nothing more than seeing the trains ride past, they don't cancel them unless they absolutely have to. Just because you don't personally understand the reasoning behind it, doesn't mean there isn't one.
That's the thing. They know it was built poorly and can't handle pretty much anything, so they don't trust the hardware and get a few extra days off as an added convenience.
All trains stopped. Then a train was cleared to continue full speed while next one was waiting on a red light.
I wasn’t waiting. They was unable to restart and they told the control of this.
Proper training focuses specifically on those exceptional situations (like it does for airplane pilots), with strong emphasis on always falling back on safe procedures. Even so, you can't cover 100% of possibilities.
They ran the trains with no blocking, not even tokens!? In 2026!? Unbelievable.
There was a human override after all trains stopped.
Those override switches are dangerous enough to have tamper evident seals, or sometimes padlocks. And even if they are to be used, there just must be something mechanical to substitute those systems, most simply and least efficiently by physical tokens(tablets) assigned to each stations. Trains had those systems literally since late 19th century.
Passenger service with just verbal orders over a phone is simply unacceptable.
I know nothing about railroad systems but in complicated / ambiguous situations, is it possible to limit train speed to make it easier to monitor or control traffic ?
You're not supposed to run trains in ambiguous situations period.
On single lines with bi-directional services, you can design and implement a token based lock system: it's literally a token, often referred to as tablets, what inspired mutexes in computer science. They are like a golden medal or a durable hunk of metal, with the name of the station it belongs to engraved, often enclosed in a leather case or something. The arriving train drops the token it holds at the station, and obtains the new one when departing. The trains traveling opposite side will return them. When a train fails to obtain it, whether because it merely failed to catch it or the new one hasn't arrived, it MUST stop once, before it technically leaves the part of the rail that is considered "the station", until one is obtained.
This won't work as-is if there's going to be a T shaped crossing in which lines branch from the trunk line into short segments to stations. The crossing must be a station with its own lock token in that case. But that also can be some sort of crude technical stop for staff uses only with just maintenance guys with helmets and vests as station masters and apprentices moving the tokens around.
If they couldn't get computers handle it or make signals turn from red to blue or at least red to nothing, and didn't even have that token system, the train cannot move. It may technically be able to, and maybe it's ok for moving just few meters back and forth, but that's it. The trains should not have been operated at all if they couldn't figure out the computers.
I think Spain needs a complete mindset change, to fully come to the 21st century. While there are truly many people who "take their job" seriously, the overall "world of work", and professional standards are very, very low in Spain. Yes, it's a generalization, but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard.
In short, Spain needs to re-invent its world of professionalism. I'm not saying that it should become like Swizerland overnight but the current mindset is incompatible with the 21st century's complexities. Portugal is currently further along that road.
>but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Sounds just like Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and any many other EU countries, including the EU itself, where there's "employment for life" guaranteed by the state or by strong unions, which makes them ripe for cronyism, complacency and incompetence to thrive unchecked until people inevitably die, and only then can audits and system reforms actually be done. The way it works, is that things need to get worse, before they are allowed to get better. I think this has been the case in politics since time immemorial.
>Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard. [...] Portugal is currently further along that road
From what I saw interviewing, Portugal has much lower earnings, and earnings aren't something the government can control. What the government CAN DO to stimulate high earnings to happen, is provide incentives and an environment for attracting businesses and investment, but that typically correlates with low taxes and low government welfare spending, policies that Spaniards and other Europeans aren't known for supporting, so there you go. You get what you vote for.
Sounds líke your opinions are well ahead of your judgement.
Do you have any (counter)arguments to bring to the discussion, or do you enjoy firing vague snarky one-liners from the hip before moving on to the next thread?
Yes, I do agree with some of that. People in this latitude don't want "private" anything because of the reasons mentioned before. It all boils down to a bad company culture, hiring is not merit-based, companies don't compete in the classical sense. And on Portugal, taken in context, salaries have been even lower in Portugal, but they are improving, and there are many more high-tech jobs going around in Portugal. It might not be a major difference from where you are looking, but they do tend to take their "world of work" more seriously.
Meanwhile people in the US have been framing Spain as some kind of post-work utopia. The "we quit our jobs and moved our family to Spain" is all over social media.
Those are not incompatible though? I'm from Spain and it's a great place to retire.
The railway system in the US is not very impressive, though.
A lot of that is due to relatively low rents by EU standards (even if locals might complain, because their salaries are low compared to some other EU countries).
Not just rent but food and wine are also inexpensive (and amazing). Plus many Americans are already familiar with the language.
If you can work remotely (or not at all), Spain has a lot going for it.
Let me provide some context to that. At the highest levels of Spanish earning or net worth brackets people experience a completely different life than most everyday people. With a net worth of $1-2M you can live in a bubble essentially, living in a gated community with 24/7 security, with a helicopter landing pad. As a wealthy expat you can brute-force most of the societal struggles. Having 1-2M in your pocket enables a life that requires 20M+ in the US.
https://elpais.com/espana/2026-10-28/ultima-hora-del-choque-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/28/spain-high-speed-train-crash...
https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2026/10/28/toledo-tr...
https://www.reuters.com/live/spain-train-crash-live-deaths-i...
So far it seems that at 8:30 a computer system called LZB was shutdown to some infra issues. Immediately the trains stopped in that line. At 8:36, someone said it was okay to let the trains continue over that rail at full speed as it was "all clear". At 8:53 there was the collision. So far 68 deaths.
LZB is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung
Just a couple of days ago the Spanish Transport minister appeared in a comedy sketch where he made fun of the current dysfunctional state of the rail system he is responsible of[1]:
> "Due to a system malfunction, the elevator will be out of service longer than usual," the public address system announces. The minister laments, "Oh, for heaven's sake. As if we didn't have enough to deal with already with Renfe."
Very funny minister...
[1] https://www.lasexta.com/programas/cara-show-marc-giro/oscar-...
It's an absolute disgrace to the country that this man first got to minister position, and that it's still there after two major incidents with lots of deaths.
Remember who disinvested in the rail system maintenance: the previous right-wing government.
We are 8 years into Sanchez's government. Ridiculous scapegoat.
It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.
Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.
> worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
The rail infrastructure is already publicly maintained via a government agency, ADIF. ADIF is not a goverment-owned for-profit corporation, its primary mandate is public service, not profit maximization, and ADIF doesn't compete with anyone, it's a state monopoly.
That's a sweet excuse until you understand that even state-owned nonprofits these days are run the way a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking private-sector manager would run it. Because there very probably is a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking public-sector manager running it.
They are very bad capitalists then, because ADIF high speed lost 200 million dollars last year.
By the way, don't act as if the Japanese high speed network is not the best on the planet. It's much more liberalized than the Spanish one.
Let's not jump to conclusions. Funding rail infrastructure is important, but it's not clear at all whether that would have helped prevent this accident. Malfunctions can happen even in the most advanced newly-built systems. Often the overall safety level depends more on how you deal with degraded states than how the system performs in its fully functional state.
Every year that passes, Japan's record of zero fatal high-speed train accidents since the Shinkansen was inaugurated in the 1960s becomes more and more incredible, with 10 billion passengers and counting.
(Excluding suicides/people falling on tracks, that is. And that one poor student in 1995 who got stuck in the door of a departing train and was dragged to his death.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment ?
And this accident occurred a few weeks ago.
https://apnews.com/article/japan-train-accident-8759a27eaae8...
Neither was a Shinkansen.
Japan probably doesn't have DEI priorities in hiring staff.
Absolutely braindead take.
Japanese train companies do have DEI priorities in hiring and promoting staffs.
1: https://www.jreast.co.jp/recruit/career/diversity/propulsion...
It's become a real risk to take a train in Spain. Two severe accidents in the same year on what's typically considered the safest transport method.
I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
As someone from the US I have repeatedly heard that Spain's economy is doing reasonably well. And I just looked it up, unemployment is approximately the lowest it has been in two decades. Considering the post 2009 era of economic turmoil that Spain went through, that economic momentum seems like a real positive.
In June Goldman Sachs put out an article noting how well Spain's economy is doing, which included this employment comparison (showing Spain's outperformance versus its peers):
https://imgur.com/QqB74I6
Spain's unemployment rate has converged with Finland's, a remarkable improvement:
https://imgur.com/1cp6mL4
The jobs being created are tending more toward high value, high productivity jobs that pay better than average. That's no doubt helping diversify Spain's economy further away from tourism, which should provide greater long-term economic strength and stability. Overall it might be a really good decade coming up for the people of Spain.
I would also add how greatly improved living in Spain has been. The change in last 15 years is dramatic. Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga even Madrid are top of the list of best liveable cities. I am not sure how (probably local politics) but almost no other cities in europe managed to become so great.
Doing anything is a risk. The salient thing is relative risk. Even with record levels of train accidents it’s still the safest way to travel.
The bodycount sits around 100 this year for trains and 1775 last year for cars.
Even correcting for distance travelled it’s still way more safe.
Then lets crash 10x more trains, it will still be safer than cars. The point is not to be safer than cars, the point is to not die while taking my daily commute in a form of transportation I have no control over whatsoever. Especially if its easy to mitigate like in the case of trains.
> the point is to not die while taking my daily commute
Exactly, which is why you need to take trains, not cars.
Everything else you said completely misconstrues the point, nobody is arguing for less train or car safety, or that this crash was fine. That's ridiculous.
Guys, let's not turn everything into a trains vs cars debate. Obviously, trains are much safer.
But the argument that the relative risk of trains is far lower is, unfortunately, often used as an excuse to not take safety in absolute terms seriously. It's almost like saying: "Because trains are already so much safer than cars, the few crashes that still happen are just bound to happen, they're a fact of life we have to accept, and not worth doing anything about." (I am exaggerating, of course.)
But many of these accidents are in fact easy to prevent, even without huge investment in new infrastructure. So we should prioritize that and make our voices heard that we care about railway safety! And no, this is not a psyop to make people drive their cars more, that would be ridiculous.
Per capita ?
Per capita is pretty useless, you'd want to go per kilometer, which as I stated is still way safer for the train.
Tell that to the dozens of families who lost loved ones today! At least 68 people (and still counting) lost their lives. Ambitious, loving, caring human beings, who died completely unnecessarily! No excuse is good enough to justify that.
This type of accident is particularly unacceptable because it's so preventable! I'm not going to speculate on the causes before the official report is out. But a collision between two trains is not that hard to prevent with a train protection system. And if that system (or a component of it) crashes (or malfunctions in a fail-safe way), but operations should still continue, then there need to be safe fallback protocols in place that everyone is trained to follow.
One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
"Someone made a mistake" is never an acceptable excuse. That's what we had to learn in aviation a long time ago. Nobody goes to work wanting to cause a fatal accident. The train dispatcher(s), driver(s), and whoever else might have been involved in this, (most likely) did not intend to cause this. But it is almost always a combination of bad procedures, normalization of deviance, lack of safety culture, bad training, lack of regulatory oversight, and of course inadequate technical equipment and safety systems, that together lead to fatal accidents.
Accidents like this one are fully preventable, there's no excuse, but that doesn't mean we should blame a particular person. Instead, it is the entire system, which is supposed to have multiple redundant layers of safety, that failed us. Investigators are going to come up with many recommendations to prevent similar accidents in the future. Let's hope (and make our voices heard) that these recommendations actually get implemented as well.
Every protocol has corner cases, we have seen it world wide several times. It's frustrating to accept it because yesterday's accident was just a one word mistake from an operator, and my first reaction is also yours, it's unacceptable. But sadly and rationally, it can happen. As always has been, let's hope this leads to better protocols.
> No excuse is good enough to justify that.
There was no excuse at all in my post, not sure what you're replying to.
It was only pointed out that despite failures in train systems, it's still safer than driving a car.
> One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place, but overruled. The protocol wasn't followed. The driver was supposed to go at 40, it's the protocol, but the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed. The normal speed on that track is 200km/h by the way.
There is no doubt whatsoever that trains are far safer than cars. But often that fact is used as an excuse to not invest in safety. "We don't need to do anything to make thing X safer, because look at that other thing Y that people do which is way more dangerous." (I assume you didn't mean it that way, but some people really do make this argument.)
Human lives matter in absolute numbers, and we should strive to increase safety wherever possible with reasonable effort. Railways in some countries still have some very low-hanging fruit!
The aviation industry has shown that safety as the number one priority does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Layers of redundancy, excellent training, and very good investigations and changes based on their recommendations are what keeps the flying public safe.
Accidents still happen in aviation, but we're at a point of diminishing returns where increasing safety is getting quite difficult. When an aircrew encounters a problem, they can't just stop the plane mid-air to figure things out. The plane has to land, no matter what. That is inherently more risky.
Contrast that with a train, which can more or less just stop wherever it is when something goes wrong. This allows for building a lot of fail-safe/passively safe systems. When there's a problem, just halt operations and take your time to figure things out. Good procedures and adherence to them are still absolutely necessary, but at least there's usually no actual time pressure (only perceived) and malfunctions rarely pose an actual risk if handled correctly.
What aviation has also shown us is that accident investigations need to be 100% honest about underlying causes. "This guy made a mistake, too bad" is never ever an acceptable reason. We have to dig deeper.
People will always make mistakes. But how was such a simple mistake allowed to have such dire consequences? Were there not enough layers of redundancy? Was the training inadequate? Were the rules and procedures inadequate, underspecified, or unclear? Was there a company culture of bending the rules to get the job done? Was there a general lack of safety culture and incident management? Etc.pp.
> All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place
I had guessed that was the case, but didn't want to state it definitively, as I'm not familiar with the rules in Spain specifically. But that then raises the question of why the rules weren't followed.
> the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed
As I explained earlier, "there's been a misunderstanding" is not good enough, I'm sure the report will dig deep to find the underlying causes and will issue plenty of recommendations to prevent this in the future.
I will refrain from speculating on what those causes are though, as there are far too many possibilities. But it's almost certainly a combination of multiple unfortunate factors that led to this horrible accident.
its still probably the safest form of transport.
> I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
I hear comments like this from people from many countries.
My feeling is there is a serious psychological manipulation campaign going on against the west and allies via social media.
Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy", "Russia is better than our own government, the UK is a failure".
It's not healthy.
I do not think this is it, for several reasons:
1. I see the same from people in some non-western (or western allied) countries too. 2. I do not see many comments like that (although i do not look at youtube comments, i do see comments on these on social media) and have never seen any saying Russia is better than the UK! 3. The feeling of failure in the UK goes back to long before the Ukraine war - it has been developing over many decades.
My view is the west had a golden age after winning the cold war and cannot cope with the loss of its global dominance since. This has also had bad effects for some countries outside the west (not necessarily western allied) and there have been other political shifts around the world too.
I also think the way the news operates, and the rise of social media and mobile phones, lockdowns during the pandemic, have a lot to do with it.
> Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy"
Is even worse. See: Operation Doppelgänger [1]
The fact is that last week a wave of fridges operating under old software were attacked in France, apparently using LLM to abuse vulnerabilities; and this week one of the last high-speed routes still operating under the old security system crashed at every level. The "postmortem" of this failure will be very interesting to read.
[1] https://www.disinfo.eu/doppelganger-hub/
While Russian bots and manipulation campaigns are real, sadly, I feel that there's enough legitimate issues that you'd still see many people upset even if the bots weren't there.
Normal publications rarely publish good news. At most, news are often neutral, but mostly bad. One has to go out of their way to read actual good news.
The relative safety of various transportation modes varies a bit by country. In the USA at least, commercial airliners and buses are marginally safer than trains. (All of those are much safer than passenger cars.)
https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/ipsavage/436.pdf
Ah but the good news thing is actually nothing to do with Spain and everything to do with news in this era. It’s a problem everywhere that news is like 95% bad, and not because the world is getting any worse either.
Both things can be true. The world is getting worse and news is overeager to tell you about it while ignoring the good things that are happening. Knowing about the good things wouldn't stop the bad things from still being true, but at least the news wouldn't be entirely depressing.
There were 222 pedestrian urban-area deaths in Spain in 2025.
There is a risk of just being outside. Usually due to cars.
That's not really fair though. Almost all pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided the accident if they were observant and took responsibility for their own safety. People just walk out in front of cars, assuming they will stop, buried in their phone with earplugs in.
I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.
If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.
You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.
You’re making these claims and providing zero data to back them up
The claim that most people hit by cars were in the street?
My claims are self-evident. Anyone with any common sense can tell this is just a description of reality.
Cars don't just appear out of nowhere. They are for the most part highly predictable.
I should add the caveat that I am specifically talking about Western countries where traffic is quite orderly. In Thailand we had to cross multi-lane roads by just walking into traffic while traffic weaved around us, they wouldn't stop for us even at crossings unless there were lights. In this situation you don't have much of a choice. Here in Norway, cars will stop for you so there is no need to walk out until you are sure the car is stopping. Some times if I'm crossing a multi-lane road I'll walk across one lane then stop and make sure the car coming in the next lane is also stopping for me. Some times they don't. I look both ways even on one way streets.
I've had many situations where drivers clearly don't notice me, and since I didn't walk in front of them I'm fine. Also had a few situations where someone I'm with walks out and I pull them back just in time to watch a car/bus pass right in front of them.
As far as I can tell, the idea that rail is the safest form of transit is just false. At least looking at recent Europe-wide data, and even if you make the _very_ favorable decision to include only occupant fatalities, modern commercial aviation has meaningfully lower fatalities per passenger-km than modern rail.
Safest for passengers, it seems so. Safest for everybody else? Who knows?
Aviation is generally used for longer journeys, and most of its risk is in the take-off / landing (so per-trip instead of per-mile). I wonder what happens if you compare fatalities-per-passenger-trip (or per-passenger-mile) on typical-length trips where aviation and HSR are competitive?
Also trains seem safer because even in a collision like this many survived.
Most airplane crashes lose all souls.
Spain actually boasts about their train system quite a lot. That's why more attention on related news
The train in Spain derails mostly on the plain.
No, it has not. Two different events in different places with different causes. Two stochastic events that are not remotely related, but close in time.
Yesterday's accident was a protocol tragedy, someone made a terrible mistake, and sadly those things happen, everywhere. Having two accidents in less than a year is heart breaking, and everyone is feeling that anxiety.
I've taken than train line several times, and will take it again when it's available. Fear of an accident is human and natural when you ride a bus, a train or a plane, but one has to be rational, worldwide transportation is safe.
It does not matter that they were stochastic events because the reason we have regulation and procedures and protocols for these systems is to reduce randomness and mistakes as close to zero.
While individually each event can maybe just be random mistake having two could be the beginning of some new information about the system(s) we have to consider.
So we should all say and act like this is not acceptable and we need more focus on making these stochastic events not happen now that they are not just a mere probability over an event space filled with randomness. They just happened.
> Yesterday's accident was a protocol tragedy, someone made a terrible mistake, and sadly those things happen, everywhere.
IDK where you live but no, in Europe, it virtually never happens.
I will speak for France but the latest “big/mediatic” accidents were two (probably) Russian sabotages with not a lot of victims.
Then back to 2015 in Eckwersheim where a test train derailed on track trial (dramatic but no commercial passengers and the train was overspeeding voluntarily for the trial, even if it was an error).
Other than that we need to get back to 2013 to find the Brétigny-sur-Orge derailment.
Other accidents regularly happen but except from Bretigny derailment, I don’t remember passengers being killed in the last decades.
No one ever died as a commercial passenger of a TGV and hundreds are running at 320km/h every day since half a century. A few conductors died from a collision even that, in 45 years of service, is anecdotal (from a safety perspective, of course not for the victims).
So, no, Spain does seem to have a big issue.
https://www.reuters.com/world/two-high-speed-trains-rear-end...
Says the Spanish train crash in Jan of this year that killed 46 was the "same operators on the same line."
Both accidents involved Iryo, a Italian operator that started running high speed trains on Spain a few years ago. Given how small their fleet is, it's weird that they have been involved in every recent accident, but at least the Adamuz one was clearly the fault of the tracks and not the trains.
Spain's network liberalization is recent-ish, operators like Iryo exist since 2021.
Perhaps the synchronization between renfe and others is a weak point in the system. Decades of assuming that everything in the network is theirs, increased wear and tear, etc.
To be fair, what you're describing is literally an increase in inefficiency caused by liberalization. It's what large corporations solve by "vertical integration" or "in-housing".
If you operate a rail network you need to keep track (pun not intended) of the exact state of all parts of the infrastructure, maintain and update the schedules and routes to account for repairs or disruptions, observe utilization and demand changes (not all of which can be profitable due to externalities like the social benefit of connecting people in remote places even if they don't provide enough revenue) and of course you need to keep track of where your trains currently are and where they are going and need a system of signaling, failsafes and communication to prevent incidents like "rear-ending" a stopped train (which this looks like it was).
Once you start breaking this up into a separate companies (like Spain has done and other countries did in order to "liberalize" the natural monopoly of public transit) you create inefficiencies and misaligned incentives. If you then throw competitors in the mix (who of course only compete in the few profitable aspects like high-speed rail because they only exist to extract surplus value from the system by withdrawing more from it than they put in - that's the literal definition of "profit") the misalignment of incentives gets worse and at worst so does communication.
As a software developer, it's kinda like having to build a publicly document general purpose API for your server-client application so it can work with arbitary third-party clients while having your team at the same time be moved into separate organizational units with different managers. Yes, sure, you can do that, but you better hope this will be reflected by another digit being added to the budget because not only will it make the project a lot more expensive but the same goes for every change that needs to be made to it in the future (not to mention front-to-back performance optimization is pretty much off the table) - except the point here is cutting government expenses so you don't get a real budget and this isn't a greenfield project but a brownfield legacy codebase never intended to serve this use case.
But in this case Iryo seems the victim - it's train was stopped on the track and got hit from behind.
Because it failed to move forward when instructed, or so it seems.
That should never cause a crash. You don't let one train go onto a section of track unless you know that there's no other train on that section of track. If train A has failed to move when instructed, then train B waits for it to move.
That all is true, and furthermore the AVE train was running way above the 30 kmh limit set when the automatic control systems fails. The only way this accident could happen is if someone violated every existing procedure.
The train operators do not seem to be a factor in either incident. Still too early to know what happened today, but the first findings point to an entirely different type of incident.
Also it's of course worth acknowledging that the means of preventing accidents as a train operator is fairly limited beyond the basics. Even if you see something and react in time, trains are extremely efficient at going where the rails will take them but that makes them also very bad at stopping to do so even when you want them to.
Article is completely pay walled; please consider deleting and reposting with a readable source.
The criteria shouldn't be paid or not, it should be quality or slop.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv1j309d4g98t - available to me - I'm not sure how accessible the BBC news is now to those elsewhere?
Some days ago I actually traveled on these high speed trains to Madrid (the same route Madrid - Seville). I paid extra to be able to select a middle car seat because of similar disaster that happened in Spain only in January this year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
Does that technically save you or only mitigate around the hardest-to-be-hit
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20261028-two-high-speed-t...
As of writing the article says 10. Other sources, sadly, indicate up to 39.
There is train colision in spain every month, atleast 8 of last 12 crashes are linked to russian hacking campaings, railway systems are computers too ;) Also there were 2 physical sabotages by unknown actor, but whole europe is under russian sabotage spree for last 4 years, so it is murky in europe right now.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/european-...
Kaja Kalas EU official on russian sabotages : https://www.facebook.com/reel/1554741255960830
How come we have collision avoidance mandated and working in 3 and 2 dimensions (TCAS, AEB), but somehow do not have it in 1-dimensional motion?
This is exactly the thought I always have.
It seems impossible to imagine that there are any layers of defense in depth involved here… Because it should be so easy to avoid.
Because rail is quite non line of sight and quite infrastructure defined pathing.
The automatic coordination system hit a fail condition; they neglected the fallback protocols that had rules for spacing determined to work reliably without the computer keeping real time supervision; they crashed.
This is in the way more like the Washington D.C. helicopter plane mid-air where some normalization of deviance got people to ignore automated protection systems.
If most involved had known the fallback protocols they would have refused to move/continue while the protocols were utterly neglected. At least with a robust safety culture active, ofc.
> This is in the way more like the Washington D.C. helicopter plane mid-air where some normalization of deviance got people to ignore automated protection systems.
I think that's not quite accurate. Yes, there was a normalization of deviance. But it wasn't primarily that automated protection systems were ignored.
First, the systems on board both aircraft could not have saved them. TCAS resolution advisories are inhibited below 900ft AGL and aural traffic advisories are inhibited below 400ft AGL. The aircraft collided below that altitude. The system wasn't ignored, it just doesn't do much at low altitude. The RJ crew got a TA about 20s prior to the crash, but that's not something that would normally require evasive action (they're trained to act immediately on an RA, not a TA). They were set up for landing. It's hard to find any fault with them.
The RJ wasn't equipped with ADS-B In, and the helo's ADS-B Out was misconfigured since installation. ADS-B In could have alerted both crews almost a minute prior to impact. But it wasn't available.
Second, if you're referring to the tower: Yes, the controller did get an automated conflict alert, but he did not ignore it. He asked PAT-25 whether they had the RJ in sight and told them to pass behind it. This response wasn't good enough, but that's mainly attributed to the controller's high workload and time pressure leading to omissions.
A proper traffic advisory should have included azimuth, distance, direction of travel, and type and altitude of the conflicting aircraft, e.g.:
PAT-25, traffic ten o'clock, one mile, north-west bound, a CRJ descending through four hundred, circling approach to runway 33.
A proper safety alert should also include an action to resolve the situation, e.g.:
Traffic alert, PAT-25, traffic ten o'clock, one mile, a CRJ on final for runway 33. Advise you [descend/turn] immediately.
Either one might have prevented the accident. But when ATC gets busy, the reality of those calls often looks quite different than how they're described in a textbook. Combining local and helicopter control with 12 aircraft on frequency is just too much. Of course, that leads to routine conflict alerts (5 separate events in the 18 minutes leading up to the crash). Sure, nuisance alerts lead to desensitization (and the report discusses that), but here the workload seems to have been the bigger underlying factor.
Of course, this is far from the only contributing factor. The normalization of deviance that the NTSB actually found are that visual separation had become the primary way of separating helicopters from aircraft, helicopter crews reporting "in sight" when they hadn't positively identified the traffic yet, the tower trying to "make it work" rather than forcibly slowing operations down, etc.
That in addition to putting a helicopter route as little as 75ft below the approach path, the helicopter's altimeter being 100ft off (within spec!), the helicopter crew's use of night vision gogggles severely limiting field of view, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft being on separate frequencies severely limiting the RJ crew's SA.
And perhaps most egregiously, the FAA ignoring the countless warning signs (15 thousand close proximity events over 3 years, are you kidding me?) Failing to fix the helo route, failing to reduce arrival rate (the request from Potomac TRACON wasn't forwarded due to being "too political"), failing to improve the tower's conflict alert software... People did not ignore automation, the regulators ignored lots of growing holes in the slices of Swiss cheese.
There's not a sensor that can detect another train with enough warning to matter. Stopping takes miles, and turning isn't an option.
So you detect them miles away. It's a real-time analysis problem: assign a latency equal to the longest time required to react and that's the time you have to detect an oncoming train.
The problem then becomes avoiding false positives – on multi-track lines, trains on adjacent lines can pass each other as little as 3 to 4 metres away, and within stations and junctions, you can't properly predict a collision without also being aware of the current point positions.
The signalling system has already all the necessary data here, the trains by default none to few of it.
Hence it is usually way more tractable to just improve the reliability and functionality of the signalling system itself and don't bother with complicated technical fallback solutions.
(Things might look differently if you've only got single track lines and no modern signalling system in place – in that case a TCAS-like system might be worth it and not too difficult to implement, especially if you limit its scope to the plain single track line outside of station areas.)
Flying is different – the difference between your positional accuracy and the minimum safe separation between planes is way more favourable, so detection of potential conflicts is much easier.
And – while these days air traffic controllers do usually have computerised aids available to detect impending traffic conflicts, ultimately the system still relies on controllers correctly detecting any conflicts, issuing the correct commands to pilots, and those pilots then correctly executing those commands, too. That's a lot of human in the loop, so the impetus for some fallback safety system (TCAS or whatever) is much stronger.
With trains on the other hand, the default state for any kind of remotely modern signalling (for at least a few decades already, actually) is that the signalling is able to automatically ensure that the route is set correctly, that no conflicting routes are set and that no other trains are occupying the route. Likewise, even without full automated driving it is still possible to ensure that trains are actually following the commands of the signalling.
Hence with railways, the appetite for a completely secondary technical fallback systems to cover outages of the primary signalling system has been much lower, and like I said, it is usally more tractable to try improving the safety and reliability of the primary signalling system. (Though yes, for the fallback case you also need to properly prepare appropriate manual procedures that take into account the increased failure risk of manual operations…)
I was responding to the comment that there wasn't a sensor available that would work.
I worked on a system that sat in the railroad right-of-way and by necessity had to detect an oncoming train from at least half a mile away due to our response time. We were aware that the railroad already had the data on where the trains were, but for RR safety, there was no way that we could get access to that, so we had to place our own sensor next to the track.
You raise an interesting point that if you're near a switching point, you need to know the point's position to determine if there's a potential collision. For my system, it was placed far enough away so that was not an issue: if we detected a train, we knew it was coming our way.
GPS...?
Trains can safely pass each other within a few metres distance, so GPS by itself is not enough.
Cab-signalling train protection systems like LZB (and more modern alternatives like ETCS) are generally considered to be sufficient to ensure safe separation. The interlocking only allows setting a route if all its sections are detected vacant, conflicting routes are locked out, and flanks are protected. Meanwhile, the train protection system prevents trains from exceeding their movement authority. These systems can even largely monitor themselves and are designed to be fail-safe (often by putting all signals on danger and letting the operators figure it out).
But in those cases where the system does crash and reset, how can operations be started again? That's where you need well-specified fallback procedures. One such procedure might be that, in case axle counter sections to lose their counts (because of a crash of the interlocking or the axle count evaluator), causing affected sections to show as disturbed and mandating a manual reset, each section must be swept by a train running on sight (under a caution order in LZB or OS mode in ETCS).
at 30-40km/h, which is where the train controller really messed up there.
People can say it's 'years of neglect' and might even believe it, but to me it's clear train liberalisation directly caused 2 train incident in Spain this year. Yes trains are slightly cheaper (for now, look at GB to estimate how long the low prices will last), but I'm not so sure the redundancy you pay for in a public monopoly is worthless, especially in areas where an incident can cause this many deaths.
Also the train network was neglected a lot since the 70s-80s so the car and oil companies could earn huge profits.
"Directly" is way too strong. Yes, it may have been a factor here that the train that remained standing still was from another operator, but there are many more important factors at play, the main one being apparent lack of safety mindset of the controller. In other European countries with even more operators, the safety record is not commensurably worse.
It is though. It's like the electricity market. We try to liberalize it, we see it doesn't work, so we add regulations and regulators (here the "controller"), and each time there is a failure, we blame regulation or regulators, or both. Sometime when it's too egregious we blame the particular company that was caught fucking up, because blaming the system that allows such fuck ups would cost to much: ideologues in power agreeing to the idea that maybe, market do not work everywhere.
Nice job, i won't get fooled again though.
Train controllers (dispatchers, signallers) existed way before liberalization.
There is merit to your arguments, but I still don't think it's the main issue in this case.
The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure. Hope this was the final straw we have to endure and they pay for their negligence at best, evil at worst in court.
Sorry to make a political statement with this tragedy, but the downgrade in Spain in recent years is just too much.
DEP and my condolences to the relatives and love ones.
Not only it's a political statement but it's also one that's disingenuous.
The dismantling of public services, of which the maintenance of train tracks is part of it, has been done by all kinds of governing parties in Spain, and the cuts have been greater when a right wing government was in place.
To shift all the blame to just the latest ones in power is manipulative at best.
There's nothing manipulative here. Anyone that follows Spanish politics and it's not a political hoolingan can see this.
Yet another unsourced vacuous 'everybody says so' statement. Frankly, bots do a better job...
Let me state some facts:
The current government has been in power for more than 8 years. Eight years. To deflect blame to a currently non existent right wing movement is real mental gymnastics on your end.
Close collaborators of the current president are in jail due to corruption, much of it from stealing from ADIF.
It's the second time in a year something like this happens.
All my thoughts go to the victims of this tragedy.
I'm not denying their responsibilities, but to just blame the current government , forgetting all the previous history, and not looking first into what is to really blame, is a blatant manipulative tactic.
It could all be that the prime minister himself when to the control room and forced the collision to happen, and if that I'd join you all on blaming him. But we need to study what happened and then we can try to make it not happen again.
There's lots on unrest in Spain, and Europe, but there's also lots of inference from different parties, so many that we don't even know them all or what they want. Are the violent demonstrations organised by far right, Russia, US, Israel, far left? we don't know, but they tend to give worse press to all the leftist movements, so I'm thinking that is not their origin, given all the other non violent movements going around.
With all this there's everyday more and more manipulation, in social media, in news, in comments, that all (that I've seen) comes from the far right or similar movements. You message, and the one I responded, sound a lot like them.
I'm not defending this government, they are too right wing for me, not enough social spending, not fighting enough corruption (which both main parties and several of the minor do take part in), too Spanish for my taste (I'm Catalan). OTOH I despise blame calling before having the whole picture.
> The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure
I don't know of any country where this is not the case
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271657
Yes, you could have saved yourself the disgraceful jab, specially taking into account that it was the previous government who disinvested in rail.
wastedpotenTial indeed...
At this point, Spain must have the worst high speed rail safety record in Europe if not.. more broadly?
I am a little surprised doing some light searching that its one of the longest high speed rail systems / highest passenger count HSR systems in Europe?
I've only taken HSR in France & Italy and not been to Spain in over 15 years so was not aware of the build out.
Would be interesting to see the figures per passenger-mile and per passenger-journey.
According to cursory search:
* Spain HSR ~45M annual journeys / 30B annual passenger-kms
* Italy HSR ~65M annual journeys / 50B annual passenger-kms
* France HSR ~150M annual journeys / 110B annual passenger-kms
"Italy’s annual high-speed rail (HSR) passenger fatality rate is effectively zero, as there has never been a passenger fatality recorded on the country’s dedicated high-speed network"
"France’s dedicated high-speed lines (LGV—Lignes à Grande Vitesse) have historically maintained an extraordinary safety record. Across several decades of commercial operation since launching in 1981, there has never been a passenger fatality resulting from a high-speed crash during commercial service on a dedicated high-speed line"
Spain by comparison has 2 fatal accidents adding up to ~100 passenger deaths this year alone. Something like 300 fatalities in its history.
This is quite bad.
When LZB drops out, does the fallback to ASFA plus verbal authorization actually enforce block separation, or is it basically just driver discipline at 300 km/h?
When on verbal authorization, controller discipline is probably more important than driver discipline. And I really hope they don't do that at 300 km/h.
It does, but only when trains are separated by blocks in the first place. LZB blocks are way shorter, so after LZB went down these two trains seem to have been inside the same ASFA block. The failover from LZB to ASFA must be done correctly (and always with line of sight speed limits) until all trains get into their own blocks before ASFA works as designed. This seems to be the procedure that failed.
ASFA is max 200 km/h btw but that doesn’t matter to how this went down.
Already posted 3 hours ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271032
There is something deeply broken with Spanish rail.
The Adamuz train crash was a maintenance issue, or lack of checks after the maintenance jobs, as some sources say that part of the line was very recently renewed. Today's crash seems to be a human failure from ADIF train control.
This one is the kind of thing that's not supposed to be able to even happen (one train running into the back of another) if positive train control is implemented properly.
People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC but their system is very simple and it works (it throws the train into emergency if it passes a red signal by physically knocking out the air).
Exactly, this can't happen. You need to put measures on this.
Both the maintenance issue and bad systems that lead to human error creating this crash need to be taken responsability by the public system and fix them.
Apparently they have the automated systems, but they were not working, so they were under human operating rules.
Which, in the USA at least, severely limits speed you're allowed to use (because once the only thing between you and gory death is a human, eventually that human makes a mistake).
Yeah, and seems like the automated systems have been failing a lot recently. Or that they didnt correctly designed them for this case.
This means the health of those systems and mantinability by whoever was responsible hasn't been well done.
I agree with you, once the only thing and death is a human, nothing can be trusted, humans will make mistakes.
I've always thought that a train lacking PTC on the rails should be able to "deploy" a small car-sized thing that runs ahead of it at the same speed but 2x current stopping distance away from the locomotive - if it stops communicating or detects any anomalies the train goes into emergency.
They told the train to drive "as normal". This was a controller mistake as the procedure says they could only drive in visual/slow mode.
Same mistake was made with other train and the driver replied that that was not allowed, and the operator corrected accordingly. But the driver of the train that crashed didn't raise the issue.
As it looks now the controller made a mistake when taking over manual control of the segment after systems failure ("continue as normal" vs "continue slow"). The train driver probably should have also known they should not drive at normal speed without safeties in the segment, but I guess they trusted control had cleared previous trains.
Between 10-20 minutes control room did not realize a train was approaching an occupied section where the other train was holding on a red track signal.
Human error but signals serious deficiencies at protocol, oversight etc. In control room.
Who does this? The US barely has PTC because freight companies continue to fight it tooth and nail. You only need to look at the Amtrak Cascades crash to see how subpar even modern rail infrastructure is in the US. Neither is PTC a panacea as anyone who is old enough to remember when Thales' craptastic train control system sent a Muni train the wrong way down the wrong tracks in San Francisco.
There are definitely groups of people who hate the limited speeds of Amtrak, especially in the southwest corridor (the trains Amtrak runs there are capable of "technically high-speed (120 mph)" but can't do it because the freights haven't paid for the rails to be upgraded.
Everyone wants PTC installed, nobody wants to pay for it. Amtrak wants the railroads to pay for it. The railroads don't care about it because they run 50 MPH or less freights, so they want the government to pay for it. The government has no funding and wants Amtrak to pay for it. Amtrak reminds the government that Amtrak is just the government with a bad wig on, and the cycle continues.
And California keeps trying to build a high-speed rail for infinity billion dollars when the cost to PTC the entire LOSSAN corridor is only $250-500 million (and many agencies have done parts of it themselves already).
The state of US rail is entirely due to nobody actually giving a shit and there not being a central authority powerful enough to force it thought (because nobody gives a shit). Kind of the story of the USA in general.
It's also a maintenance issue. The automatic control systems were offline and that's why they were manually controlling the trains.
Which is a valid fallback, but only with lower speeds. If someone made the call to go manual and continue at speeds over 30 km/h…
The human failure appears to be mistake number 3 or 4.
1. Automated system fails 2. Decision is made to run the system manually 3. Iyro train fails to move on when instructed (Comms failure?, train failure?) 4. Controller uses imprecise language when instructing following train.
To say this is totally down to 4 is to scapegoat the last link in the chain.
East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure
The United States actually possesses one of the most efficient, profitable, and advanced freight rail networks in the world with 140,000 miles of well maintained rail. Being optimized for freight the rails are designed for slower moving heavy cars instead of lighter fast moving passenger cars.
US rail is an embarrassment.
Giant chunks of it lack basic safety features like crossing gates; there are 4.6 derailments per day; it is considered normal to have trains slow down to near walking pace due to poor track maintenance; electrification is a rounding error; trains routinely sit idling in sidings for huge chunks of the day; railroads are unable to comply with the legally-mandated requirement to let on-time scheduled passenger trains have priority; and high-speed rail basically doesn't exist despite several corridors being the perfect scenario for it.
By any metric except $/ton/mile, US rail is a giant failure. The only reason it still exists is because the US got screwed over by geography and can't make use of waterways for over half the country. Want to ship grain out of Montana, or coal out of Wyoming? You have to use a train, no other option.
Please provide citations.
It feels like every few years there is such collision in Spain :-/
Last high speed train crash was just at the beginning of the year (Adamuz), with 46 casualties
the most recent crash with fatalities appears to be January 2026 https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260123-spain-train-coll...
How is it that Waymo can safely operate a car on public streets but accidents like this are still possible?
With a car, you should always drive at a speed so you can stop in the distance you can see and predict as the driver. With a train, you can’t really do that if you don’t want to go walking speed around every bend in the track. So a high speed train is always operating in a state where it needs external sources to tell it if the way is clear.
Perhaps part of the answer is liability.
Also because nobody feels profitable to use Waymo to seed chaos and create riots. In that case the situation will change drastically in a couple minutes.
People would still blame Waymo, not the government, so there is not any gain unless you are a Waymo's competitor.
I always thought there is a system of rail signals which should prevent accidents like this always in place, like dividing railroad into sections, turn on red light if the next section is occupied, yellow before that and so on...
Did it fail somehow which lead to this accident? I think such systems must be redundant enough to survive even without power/computers?
Better article:
https://inews.co.uk/news/39-dead-two-high-speed-trains-colli...
- A fault in the signaling system caused an Iryo and a Renfe train to stop -- the Iryo train was in front.
- For some reason, the control center authorized the Renfe train to proceed at full speed, despite the cab signaling showing it should stop. It then hit the Iryo train that was stopped in front of it.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the main issues that caused this are likely:
- Poor / improper maintenance causes the primary signaling/communication system to frequently fail. The standard "correct" behavior in this case is to manually authorize stopped trains to proceed slowly (at approx 10 mph so they can stop if they see another train) to the next station and wait for the system to be restored.
- Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear.
- That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.
Damn, I wonder if "control center" is just a bunch of software, not very reliable then!
No, that's the operations headquarters, staffed by people.
> - Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear. - That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.
This is a 200km/h line, which is right at the limit of the speed where you don't need in-cabin signaling (plenty of lines in France run at 200km/h without it), which explains why a careless control center operator could end up in this spot.
Hum, I wonder just right now if allowing the train to go to full speed (and giving priority to the restart over other trains) was related with the pressure of carrying a prominent politician. Have the team of the ex-minister pressed RENFE with the need to arrive urgently so "just ignore the protocol this time"?.
Is speculation of course but at this moment we must evaluate every hypothesis.
Politicians are the kind of people that are caught in the highway driving at 200 Km/h, just to arrive in time to a meeting in a 20 people's village. Could explain the strange control behavior.
> El Mundo is reporting that the Iryo train flagged a failure in its LZB signalling system 10 minutes before the crash, but the train behind did not receive the information due to a potential human error.
> Investigators believe the AVE high-speed train travelling behind crashed into the stationary Iryo service.
> A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident, government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control - and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2026/10/28/6ae1c9a1e9cf4a372...
Some further points: - Apparently some of the drivers involved were in training - Infra maintenance is abysmal. Budgets are poor and or misspent - Second time this happens, in 9 months
PS. They knew or should have known that the AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) train was ordered (manually) to continue forward, when it should not have. There was at least one known train blocking the track. The LZB system had failed - as reported by drivers systemwide. The Control Center at Atocha station decided for trains to move forward. According to the Transportation Minister this is inexplicable - even further, trains did not follow protocols beyond this: They are supposed to engage in "marcha a la vista" (very very slow, cautious, line-of-sight only traversal to the nearest destination) when in any doubt. This was not ordered, but "normal" further travel.-
Witnesses report, riders that use that same line every day, that trains were also frequently stopped yesterday - reasons unknown. But there were warning signs.-
64 Km. were affected by a "computer failure" at 08:30 local. 08:36, the "decision" was taken from Atocha to continue operations. 25 Km. later, the crash takes place.-
550 souls involved. 68 fatalties. 90 wounded, 50 severe.-
I was in Spain a year ago and it felt like the high speed trains weren't running as smoothly as they were when I was last there a decade earlier. At the time I chalked it up to false memories and not to judge based on vibes, but I guess my spidey senses were accurate. It also felt like a contradiction as there was a decent amount of expansion construction that I saw.
Alas, maintenance isn't sexy for governments.
Post-crash investigation is much worse than with plane crashes, and also measures taken. We had an accident in 2013 (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidente_ferroviario_de_Santi...), 80 death. "Investigation" was only to decide who goes to jail, and surprise the driver goes, with another guy from Renfe Safety department. It was also decided to change the ERTMS, with 60m € budget. AFAIK, still uninstalled.
If that was a plane crash, rarely pilots are to take all the blame and even if they are the main cause, the recommendations would be to add more training, more off time, redundant measures to help the pilot or overcome their mistakes and they usually do deep investigations that end in plane redesign / retrofit, changes in routes, adding safety equipment, etc. It never goes "human error", and close the report.
With the current news this was not a manteinance issue (that might be a problem anyway), but a failure in "control tower" that put two planes in the same runway, with one of them stopped in the middle. It is beyond logic how two trains can be in the same railway closer than X distance, even with human allowing it, instead of having a TCAS-like system.
Maintenance is not sexy for anyone; there was an article posted earlier with "advice for junior engineers" that had the top advice "(1) Pick business impact over backlog". Maintenance is backlog.
It's incredible the apparent level of incompetence displayed.
A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay
It baffles my mind that trains never had the technology for sensors so they could atleast slow down before incoming collisions.
Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
They do have such sensors, and have for many years! Japan's shinkansen pioneered this tech in the 1960s (and has an essentially perfect safety record). It's just that by necessity, the sensing is done through the tracks, rather than directly by the train cars.
You might be imagining something like the automated emergency braking that's used in automobiles, where radar is used to detect an imminent collision. But high-speed trains have stopping distances measured in miles, and it's not feasible for one train to detect another at such distances (especially e.g. on parallel tracks or around curves).
So instead the train positions have to be monitored and relayed by sensors in the tracks, which necessitates a coordination system. And it seems that that system is what broke down. The automated system should have been (and presumably was) fail-safe, but instead of stopping trains until it was fixed, the operators chose to override it and use a much more fallible manual signaling system.
> Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
I'm sure you're already aware that this is an irrational fear. As bad as this accident is, and as reprehensible as it was that it was allowed to happen, I'm pretty sure there have still been significantly fewer fatalities per passenger-km in Spain this year than there have been on US highways. It's just that we've become numb to the fact that 100 Americans die in car accidents every day.
Metro style trains all have it. It's just continental long distance systems that are sometimes lax about those things.
Train wheels are all solid metal so you can watch out for electrical faults between the left and right rails. You can, and this is in fact how many metro style trains operate, require the ground infra to be responding OK and report no faults in the next part of the rail for the train to enter a new section.
Reading other comments, looks like this Spanish system did have a German system that is more advanced that basic electrical fault based system, it was just switched off because it was broken. That's downright reckless, and it shouldn't be a normal behavior.
They don't advertise you how those things work, because it's useless information for most. Doesn't mean they never had such systems for the past ~150 years.
You're conflating multiple things – 1. train detection (which can be track circuits, as described by you, axle counters or on the most modern systems even train-based train detection), 2. how to transmit the stop/go information to the train (driver), and 3. how to ensure that the train (driver).
LZB (the "German system that is more advanced that basic electrical fault based system") does 2. and 3., but in its usual mainline implementations still needs a conventional train detection system.
> it was just switched off because it was broken. That's downright reckless, and it shouldn't be a normal behavior.
The Spanish line in question is actually equipped with conventional colour-light signalling (and the corresponding conventional train protection system) as a fall back, which is perfectly safe, too.
The only critical bit (which by the looks of it unfortunately failed here) is managing an unplanned transition between the two, because for reasons of cost, the fallback signalling utilises much longer block sections than the LZB signalling, so if the LZB fails unannouncedly, you can end up with multiple trains (each inside its own dedicated LZB block section) inside the same line-side signalling block section, so restarting the train needs to be safely managed by getting them out of the accidentally shared block section one at a time.
From the article in El País:
> “A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident,” government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control — and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
This is not the first time something broadly like that happens. In 2013 another train crashed because there was a section of the track where the operator had to manually adjust the speed, and he didn't.
One would think that the operation of these trains would be fully automated at all times, and with sufficient allowances to handle emergencies safely.
Point in case: Japan has not had a single death due to a crash of a high speed train, even though they have been operating an extensive network for decades.
The operation is fully automated until the point when the system breaks and the human controller orders manual overrides.
They could have waited for recovery etc. The issue is they switched to manual and then botched it. We don't know root cause yet (bad management, timetable pressure, lax work culture...?).
According to the available information, the failure of the automated system caused six trains to stop. They were then given manually the go-ahead to proceed at full speed (!!!). Six does not sound like a huge number of them to ensure that the train ahead is moving normally before the train behind is told to continue. This sounds like a massive failure in either the protocol or the operator's ability to follow the protocol. Mind boggling stuff, really.
As a Spaniard I am profoundly ashamed that these crashes are happening, when other countries like China, France and Japan seem to manage just fine with their extensive high-speed rail networks.
The safety system fails because the trains are no longer in a safe position. You need to have them in manual mode to move them to a safe position to be able to start the safety system again. The manual override is the recovery, if you want to wait, you are going to wait for eternity. However the issue this ties seems to be, that they did not place the system into manual mode, when they should have. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298796
A high-speed train collided with a stationary train. The title is misleading.
Both are high-speed trains regardless of whether they are in motion or not.
High-speed is a descriptor of the type of train, not their current speed.
Just like a racing cars is still such even when stationary.
"racing cars" actually would not be stationary. "Race cars" are the class of vehicle, which can be stationary. If the cars are racing, they are not stationary.
"High-speed" is ambiguous. It can be used to describe the class of vehicle, or it can be used to describe the state of motion of the vehicle.
Race cars are called racing cars in UK English, and maybe other places in the Anglosphere.
Yes, same in US English: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racing%20car
Am American, grew up as a NASCAR fan, I’ve never heard someone say “racing cars” as a noun
America is a big place. Common terminology in one place is unheard of in another, especially in the age before the internet.
I saw a discussion thread the other day about the word for a pile of blankets and pillows at a kids sleepover. Every Southerner knew the term “pallet”. Pretty much everyone else didn’t have a word for it at all, other than a “pile”.
10 deaths at last count. Amazing it's not 100% dead.
64 already. Those trains are quite long and sturdy. But there will be lots of severely wounded.
The trains being sturdy doesn't help much. The (de)acceleration alone is enough to kill, as is smashing against the seat in front of you.
That's also a possible factor in why those sitting in the rear half of the plane during a crash are more likely to survive - they have the front of the plane as the crumple zone.
Although for trains, it looks like the middle might be the safest (in case of a rear-end collision).
Well actually. Trains are designed now to not have "telescoping" crashes. If you think the trains being sturdy doesn't lead to a reduction in loss of life in these collisions.. Well it could be much, much worse.
I'm not familiar with all the safety features in design now, but there are quite a few. I wouldn't be surprised if they are designed to deflect and derail during collision now.
Another one.
The public minister of transport is still on his chair after the last ones. No responsability admited and blaming the far right for attacking him with media.
Is amazing how the current politic scene at spain has shittified, they get away with everything and ppl will still clap for them.
There are all kinds of isolated systems that trigger warnings but the thing that seems to be missing everywhere is a centralized simulation with all the data in it. Or perhaps a series of simulations each slightly further in the future. If any variable changes run it again until it reaches its time stamp.
For example, it shouldn't be possible in 2026 for a vehicle to get stuck on the crossing (with cameras) without the train driver getting a notification. You can even power down an entire track if it's obstructed. You might not want self driving, self breaking seems quite desirable.
Depending on where, there can be lots and lots of small crossings. The cameras themselves might not be that expensive, but keeping them in working order is very nontrivial.
Just pay for it? Look, the camera here works just fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsuyLs_0C0I
If you can prevent just one of those (and if we ignore injury, trauma and death) it should cover expenses for quite some time.
There is also the issue of recognition software that doesn't have too many false positives, and properly tuning it for each crossing, in all light situations. The amount of time and work needed can really be very large. I'm not against it though. Some pilot projects would be a good idea.
This is a very unfortunate event,
On another topic, I shall reconsider using bus over train for my trips.
Why are high speed trains often crashing in Europe??
You rarely hear of such in Japan.
The accidents/deaths in Europe have been dropping over the years. But I think the main difference is that while trains are extremely popular in Japan, in Europe it's been for decades under attack from governments who push roads and driving instead. This leads to underfunding and hollowing out of the train services.
Classic example seen all around Europe is partial privatization where it's often some state owned company that manages the expensive rails maintenance and unprofitable (but required) train lines while private companies get the profitable lines. This often leads to public opinion that trains are subsidized too much which leads to more decline of the services.
Another complication is that Japan is one country with one system where everybody speaks same language but trains in EU have to connect different systems together and it is hard to come to unified systems and laws around trains.
Japan is a good example of train privatization done right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_and_privatization_of_...
More precisely, there have been zero passenger deaths due to crashes or derailments on Japan's bullet train network since its inception in 1964.
How is this even possible in this day and age. It can be all automated, double and quad checked enroute ..
It's the second time this year too. In Spain. Same company.
apparently even the same line
It’s the main line, and Toledo is near Madrid.
Spectacular place. Look up pictures. It’s like a fairytale.
"In this day and age" means nothing when so many of these train systems are running on technology from the mid-1900s.
Spain didn't even have high-speed trains until the early 1990s so I don't think that's the case here.
The network started construction in the late 1980s so that's still 40 years ago. The 90s weren't as recent as we all think..
Still recent enough to have computers fully able to control everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
What this chart doesn't show you is how much more expensive it is to advance the grade of automation. Systems like the Docklands Railway are only safe because all their tracks are grade separated with exclusive track. They still need a person on board to be sure that nobody is stuck in the doors or wedged between the train and platform before the train starts moving.
"Have computers control everything" is four words to say, but it's millions or billions more in money, and adds years to the projects. London's Crossrail, for example, was years late due to the complexity of switching between 4 separate signalling systems (ETCS on the Heathrow branch, AWS on the GWML, TPWS on the GEML, and CBTC in their tunnel and exclusive track.)
We're still using TPWS on the ECML, for example, because:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_Protection_&_Warning_Sys...
> TPWS was developed by British Rail and its successor Railtrack, following a determination in 1994 that British Rail's Automatic Train Protection system was not economical – ATP would cost £600 million (equivalent to £1.2 billion in 2024) to implement, compared to value in lives saved: £3 – £4 million (£6 – 8 million in 2024), per life saved, which was estimated to be 2.9 per year.
TPWS is where a little light comes on saying it would be a good idea to brake now because you passed a signal at danger. Only very fancy versions of TPWS will actually apply the brakes for you.
And then we had the Southall and Ladbroke Grove crashes a few years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladbroke_Grove_rail_crash
> Both crashes would have been prevented by an operational automatic train protection (ATP) system, wider fitting of which had been rejected on cost grounds. The crash severely damaged public confidence in the management and regulation of safety of Britain's privatised railway system.
But even then, an inquiry asked to look specifically into ATP determined we were right to reject it, it was just Too. Fucking. Expensive.
> Since both the Paddington and Southall crashes had reopened public debate on ATP, a separate joint inquiry considering the issue in the light of both crashes was also held in 2000; it confirmed the rejection of ATP and the mandatory adoption of a cheaper and less effective system, but noted a mismatch between public opinion and cost-benefit analysis.
> "Have computers control everything" is four words to say, but it's millions or billions more in money, and adds years to the projects.
The delays, the reduced amount of infrastructure built, and passing on of those costs in ticket prices causes people to use other forms of transport that are less safe thereby causing more casualties than a slightly less safe rail system would.
> They still need a person on board to be sure that nobody is stuck in the doors or wedged between the train and platform before the train starts moving.
Why do they need someone?
Skytain in Vancouver is fully automated and driverless with no attendant on board. Grade separated, doors automatically close, and there are sensors that trigger if someone enters the guideway.
That's a "nobody's dead yet" scenario. Safety standards require full platform doors at all stations for attendant-free operation, i.e. the platform has wall-to-ceiling barriers, the train arrives perfectly aligned (which means zero variation in train configuration, which rules out almost all mainline stations that accept different operators services), and the platform doors open and close in sync with the train doors.
Anything less is begging to get someone wedged in there as the train drives off, even if it's just a limb or a trailing bag strap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_screen_doors
> In June 2023, the operator of the Vancouver SkyTrain, TransLink announced a feasibility study into installing platform screen doors on the Expo and Millennium lines. Such installation was previously deemed infeasible, due to SkyTrain's diverse fleet and different door positions. However, with the acquisition of the Alstom Mark V trains, which will replace the ageing Mark I, the door positions allow for a feasibility study to proceed.
EDIT: I found some SkyTrain stats for you. 2016-2025, 1 fatal train-passenger interaction on the platform, 36 fatal in the guideway. Most were intentional suicide attempts.
https://www.technicalsafetybc.ca/technologies/railways/skytr...
I am aware, iirc the rate doubled after covid with most being self harm which is why the platform door discussion has started again. Primarily to prevent suicides and the resulting system shutdowns as the number of unintentional major injuries or deaths has been pretty low over its 40 years of no drivers or attendants and being the 4th busiest in canada/usa. The two new lines currently under construction right now will also not have platform doors.
So despite being fully automated is comparable with most other major metros/train systems that have a driver/attendant with the only metro's performing significantly better being the ones with platform doors - hence my comment of asking "why is an attendant needed for automation?" when it doesn't significantly improve safety in the same way doors would.
in the end we still may not end up with platform doors even thou the study can proceed now as the cost will be astronomical and always with safety systems there might not be the appetite for it.
So in the end it comes down to cost-benefit.
As Skytrain has no attendants, there's a certain level of risk of passenger injury and death no matter how good the sensors are. If Skytrain had platform doors, there would likely be less, but probably never zero, and TransLink baulk at the cost (for now).
Other systems, e.g. the Docklands Light Railway, which has attendants that can also drive if needed, are OK with paying those attendants (for now). I presume they've done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that it's cheaper to keep paying humans to ensure every train departs safely, and to operate the manual controls if the automation fails, than it is to upgrade the system to the point that doesn't require them and is also considered safe.
Skytrain is from the 1990s. However elevators have been fully automated since before I can remember (1960s is my guess, but that is a guess if you care to look it up I'll stand corrected)
> TPWS is where a little light comes on saying it would be a good idea to brake now because you passed a signal at danger. Only very fancy versions of TPWS will actually apply the brakes for you.
You're confusing AWS and TPWS – AWS is the older system (based on pre-WW II technology but only deployed nationwide after WW II) which sort of roughly fits your first sentence, while TPWS will actually stop you if you're trying to pass a signal at danger (with the caveat that most automatic signals on the plain line aren't fitted on the basis that a train will relatively rarely actually have to stop at one – statistically that's absolutely sensible if you only have a limited amount of money and want to cover the higher risk signals first, but unfortunately the recent Elstow train crash did manage to hit that particular gap in the system…).
> But even then, an inquiry asked to look specifically into ATP determined we were right to reject it, it was just Too. Fucking. Expensive.
But you did eventually get TPWS which does deliver a quite large fraction of the safety benefits of ATP at a significantly smaller fraction of the costs.
The word "computers" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I would think that the software is the weakest link in the chain.
It's been reported that the automated system had failed, so trains were being routed and instructed manually.
In Oslo, Norway, we have train signaling errors all the time it feels like. It leads to a lot of delays and things. But I think that when these systems are not working, it is better to slow down everything even going as far as to put some trains on hold for some time, to avoid human errors in manual instruction and routing leading to crashes and deaths.
"Signalfeil" (signal error) does not actually always mean that there is an error with the signaling! Happened to read up on this while stuck on a train due to signal error!
It is means that they have gotten a signal that there is an error somewhere, which might be the signaling system, but also loads of other things! [1]
The term is super confusing thought, should probably have been "error signal" instead
[1] https://www.banenor.no/nyheter-og-aktuelt/bane-nor-forklarer...
Oh interesting, TIL :) Thanks!
But then you increase the risk of (suspected) sabotage disrupting the Dutch railway network. Which obviously is better than an deadly accident, but...
Isn't speed under verbal authorization limited to like 30-40 km/h?
In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's.
But Toledo-Madrid it's a special high speed network with thousands of daily users heading Madrid to work, which is just 1h away from Toledo.
Still, I will always be pro-train because they can mass deliver goods at much higher ratio than by truck.
"In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's."
That's patently false, as Spain has the largest High-speed rail network in the world after China and it has seen constant expansion for the last 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Spain
Maintenance and expansion are two different things. Governments of the day tend to favour big announcements for shiny new things, while simultaneously deferring maintenance whenever they can to redirect money to various other priorities.
I'm from Spain, I know it well. Just check what happened with short-distance trains.
By now, I'd ask which short-distance trains...
With short-distance trains…
to pueblos with 50 people…
But sure, keep twisting the truth to suit your political agenda.
I think you have to talk about how this is measured. Their network is huge, but frequencies are low and the maintenance costs per KM of track are very high relative to ridership. If you just think about the metric of KM of high-speed track, it's true, Spain has a larger network than, for example, Japan. But Japan is sending high-speed trains down some of its lines every 3 and a half minutes! Nothing remotely like that is happening in Spain.
This was my immediate thought -- this is such a tragic unforced error. It seems impossible for this to happen.
This route is the last of the Spanish high speed lines that still has an older train protection system. There has been a similar accident in 2002 in Germany where LZB was also used: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienf%C3%B6rmige_Zugbeeinflu... . Now after 24 years you might think they had mitigating procedures in place...
2006 subway accident in Valencia had a similar context, they used the FAP system, cheaper than ATP, which would have prevented the accident.
The railroads in the USA were trying to push back and delay improvements to automated safety systems until the 2015 Amtrak 188 crash https://youtu.be/-mzaavmtT9M
Only was finally fully rolled out in I think 2020 5 years after the accident.
Delaying/avoiding spending money on safety seems to be common around the world.
As long as vision zero is considered more of a gross infringement on personal freedums than a laudable goal, making trains as safe as they are uniquely fit to become is not exactly a great way to allocate funds to maximize impact. Trains are already very safe. Even where they currently lack 4 layers of fail-safe systems operated at a level where that still permits reliable&punctual service. The same money on making them shine could be spent on improving car infrastructure (or even removing some car infrastructure!) for greater expected harm reduction.
Massive disaster!
I still wonder how this adds up against the constant daily carnage of automobile transportation?
EU statistics say that per km traveled there are 28x more deaths when traveling by car then by train. With trains you basically don't get passenger deaths except those which end up in media. Also in the train related deaths almost everything are not passengers but people on tracks or level crossing users.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271032
Atlas Shrugged in real life
The incompetence in the world that is likely the underlying cause for this, is a serious cancer that is ruining our society. We need to speak out even against what seems like lesser issues, because we normalize that behaviour until it perverts everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Your point being ?
you question indicates what the parent warned against
Incompetence on whose part?
So incompetent we don't even know who to blame
The only way to achieve higher levels of competence is to enforce higher levels of accountability. Over the last couple of years Spain has suffered major infrastructural catastrophes without any leadership being held accountable at all. It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
> or even capital punishment
You lost me at that part. It is entirely unreasonable to consider that in the vast majority of the world, where state-sanctioned killing of citizens has been abolished.
The OP wrote:
> capital punishment for such gross negligence
"gross negligence" is a very specific legal test.
> Gross negligence is a lack of care that demonstrates reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others, which is so great it appears to be a conscious violation of other people's rights to safety. Gross negligence is a heightened degree of negligence representing an extreme departure from the ordinary standard of care. Falling between intent to do wrongful harm and ordinary negligence, gross negligence is defined as willful, wanton, and reckless conduct affecting the life or property or another.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/gross_negligence
Your viewpoint sounds good in argument on forums, and I'm sure it scores you points.
But there's a reason they used to execute people in the public square.
But that reason wasn't good.
And people flocked to watch executions - for entertainment.
Capital punishment has never been about deterrence, nor has it ever been an effective deterrent.
It has never been an effective deterrent? You really believe that?
Not even once?
Oh, I'm sure it might have been marginally effective in some very specific circumstances.
But that was far from the norm. In the hope that you might actually go and educate yourself somewhat on the topic, here is the Times report on the last public execution ever carried out in England, that of Michael Barrett on 26 May 1868.
https://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Timeline/Execution.htm
It certainly sounds like it had the effect you claim it does, doesn't it?
Tell that to the relatives of the dead. What you said was true and today is true. But will it be true tomorrow?
its not only in spain where this type of issues have been on the uptick. people not getting jailed can be indicative also of the whole story not being told.
At least the people responsible for wasting about a quarter billion euros on trains that are too wide for Spains train tunnels seem to have resigned.
Is resignation a true restitution for wasting a quarter billion euros? Is the tax payer made whole?
The history was a little more complex than that. The trains were not too wide, they were the right legal size where ordered.
The problem is while the trains were being built, the laws changed, requiring now extra space between trains and tunnels to evacuate people.
The only solution would be to dump all the trains and start from scratch in a new design for narrower trains that still keep the same comfort and safety levels. This is not realistic.
If you order a car that has legally given the green light to be built in 2026, the government can't say in 2027 that your car must had measured 1m less. Would be unfair for buyer and maker. Unless the government can show a very solid reason, they must accept the car model for the expected years of car life. This is why we still can drive legally cars with no airbags, and with toy seat belts. Cars that no way would be accepted to be built today.
Who ordered the trains was doing everything right, the problem was created by who changed the specifications in the middle of the process.
> It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
It is entirely unreasonable to consider capital punishment.
* an eye for an eye solves nothing - it doesn't bring dead people back to life, it just results in another person killed
* it's not an effective deterrent, it won't change how people act more than the risk of jail-time will
* it's unethical. It sounds like 'justice' if your idea of justice is simple retribution, but it completely undermines the concept of redemption - it advocates treating people as unfixable and unable to atone for their 'sins' and instead of limiting the pain and suffering - it spreads pain to more people
* no system is perfectly and inevitable you will end up punishing somebody with death based on faulty / flawed evidence that only later comes to light as being flawed/faulty. You can't bring a dead person back to life and say "sorry we got it wrong"
* finally - and perhaps most critically - tragedies such as these are almost the result of failures across an entire system with 10s, 100s, sometimes 1000s of people each culpable to varying degrees with many 'sliding doors' moments where such a tragedy could have been avoided had a different decision been taken. Sure you can always simplify things and point to the symbolic figurehead and say they are ultimately accountable and should take the ultimate responsibility for the group's failure (bonus points if in doing so you highlight how well paid they are to take on such a responsibility). But what you'll arrive at isn't justice and higher standards - instead you'll just have another dead person, killed in cold blood and the generic hope that somehow that additional death will act as a stronger driver of change than the already very real deaths that occurred in the tragedy itself.
We don't tolerate capital punishment as society, keep walking cowboy.
Could it be cultural? I remember after the Asiana Airlines crash, the experts were saying part of the problem was due to culture.
I was just listening to the EconTalk podcast, and the guest was a Spanish demographer that specifically said that Spanish train system was being starved for funding in the past 10 years or so. This is because the population is aging, and all of the growth in the economy is being directed towards pensions and health care for the rapidly growing number of retirees.
Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.
Why don’t you like AS?
Won’t speak for the poster, but in my experience the incompetence of the average person is only exceeded by the incompetence of the ownership class. The people Ayn Rand lauded are usually the largest obstacle to actually Getting Shit Done.
What is your experience of the incompetence of the ownership class?
Competence in what, is the question. Obviously they are competent in making money. The biggest scammers are also competent in making money too, though.
Look at the current US President, for instance. He is richer than any of us will ever be, but what exactly is his competence?
Look at the world around. Look at the train crash.
Do any great companies have poor executive direction/leadership?
The Library of Congress rated it the second most influential book of all time, after the Bible.
That's why I read it.
It's very cool, especially on HN, to say how terrible it is. But, as we used to say in rebuttal: scoreboard!
I was incredulous, I wondered what sort of LoC does book rankings like it's Buzzfeed, I thought "Maybe it's the LoC after a Trump-infestation or DOGE", but (1):
> In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible.
The fact that you equate a survey result (who knows who heard of the survey, or if there was a campaign to skew the results) to the LoC giving it a rating, and "that's why I read it", and you think this is a good rebuttal, reveals to me a lot about you.
(1) https://www.atlassociety.org/post/ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged-p...
Regardless of how that one survey was done AS ends up on many best US fiction book lists. The 90s may have also been one of the AS peaks, as I recall being told to read from multiple people (family and teachers). From your own link:
The novel made the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books of the Century in 1996, and Radcliffe Publishing ranked it 92 out of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. In 1999, Atlas Shrugged was number 37 in the list of 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians. A Harris poll placed Atlas Shrugged on America’s Top 10 Favorite Book List in 2008, and The Modern Library ranked it the number one best novel published in the English language in 2009. The novel is listed as number six on Boston Library’s list of 100 Most Influential Books of the Century, and it ranks number five on the list of the 20 Most Inspirational Books ever written. Atlas Shrugged has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese (2007).
From a story perspective, I found AS too long and preferred The Fountainhead. Were they influential to my younger self? Sure, much like the Bible was to me as an atheist. A story with both good and bad ideas to draw from.
Uh okay, but I read it on the library of Congress website.
I read the novel about 24 years ago. I was a teenager, and I read a lot of books. Seemed like a good enough reason at the time.
I can understand a lot of the dislike of that novel, but her description of how the United States slowly falls apart due to culturally-reinforced incompetence is worth appreciating.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
Expand, I'm interested in this take
From what I can remember (of reading the book 25 years ago), it predicted an increasing suspicion and resentment of excellence and competence, coinciding with a rise in socialist sentiments. The net result is that various aspects of society would begin to break down as the total amount of competence in the culture vanishes.
I think she attributed too much of the symptoms merely to socialism; obviously the world is more complex than that. But we've got this train crash, the ongoing issues with Boeing airplanes, several multi-billion dollar public infrastructure projects across America that have stalled and will likely never be completed (like the California high speed rail system), the list goes on.
To me it seems the opposite is happening: the push for higher profits by the Capitalists is overriding the competence of rank and file, resulting in these disasters. And all these profits just shoring up wealth that is accruing unequally to those same Capitalists is what is inciting socialist sentiments.
To me Ayn Rand's writings always seemed like an Economics Horror story: effective at instilling dread in its readers, but of some highly unrealistic boogeyman.
Did capitialism cause this train crash? I suppose it is too early to say what exactly happened.
Right, we don't know about this one, but typically there are some corners being cut somewhere or some other money motive lurking in the background, like the Boeing one OP mentioned.
When I said that the world is more complex than that, I meant that she oversimplified it. To say that the opposite has happened is also an oversimplification.
It's a more correct oversimplification than the other one though ;-)
Like I'd be really curious to see evidence of people saying, either directly or indirectly, that "we should be suspicious of competence and excellence."
On the other hand, you already mentioned concrete evidence of money-seeking causing disasters: Boeing.
How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'? How do you remediate it? More draconian, individualized worker surveillance?
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
The reality is very different: https://www.railway.supply/renfe-rejects-drivers-union-claim...
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.
Incompetence and laziness are very different things. You can have very hard working, engaged, active people that are still incompetent for the job they are supposed to do.
We could return to basing hiring decisions on merit.
Whoa. Let's not go crazy here.
Help me understand a historical period when this was ever the case.
Social historians have been debunking the thought-terminating cliche that we ever had a trend of merit-based hiring since time immemorial:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-meritocracy-r...
https://archive.org/details/meritocracymyth0000mcna_n6g9
https://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rh...
Huge assumptions there
What’s it based on now?
The incompetence isn't necessarily with the workers, it can be coming from those at the top.
Yes. Modern levels of reliability and safety don't come from workers trying harder or caring more, it requires systems, procedures, controls, redundancy, fail-safes.
> This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
It's both. The nihilism (see France riots for ex) and general incompetence that many of us see in the workplace or in our dealings with, for example, government agencies, and in our dealings with others is obviously there too and needs to be rooted out.
How do you deal with incompetence? In Europe I have no idea because of labor laws. In America we should probably be aggressively firing bad workers and grifters, and at the same time increasing wages and benefits and providing for items like safety and proper rest for those who actually want to show up and get things done.
lol this is spain dude. these people are not working long hours
Let me fix this for you. People in Spain work exactly the same than in other European countries.
You think all people in all European countries work exactly the same amount of hours?
You think that people in Spain work a lot less than other European countries?
Well people in Spain have a lot less working hours than in other European countries such as Greece, Poland, and Malta. Whether work hours means doing actual work or just loafing around is harder to measure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
From your own link, of all the EU nation states Spain is pretty much middle-of-the-pack for per-worker hours.
Another counterpoint: higher work hour countries have higher rates of death per kilometer of active track [0]
Greece (highest in the EU for work hours) = 22.3 rail deaths per 1k kilometer of track followed by Portugal (another high work hour ranking) with 6.2, Portugal (about 200 more hours than Spain annual) at 6.2, and Hungary (at about 100 more hours) at 5.8.
The only two countries with less deaths per 1K KM of track and more work hours are Ireland and Estonia. All the rest (Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Slovenia, Luxembourg) have less annual work hours than Spain.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
No, I don't think all people in Spain work the same number of hours. Also, I think "other European countries" are not a homogenous group, average number of hours worked differs per country.
List european countries with summer provision for friday half off
Probably none, as those are exclusive decisions of each company and vary wildly between different activities.
Workers that toke half of the Friday agreed with their companies to start Monday-Friday one hour earlier, so what's the problem exactly?
without a doubt someone made a lot of money by arguing against the regulations required to prevent this.
we need to eliminate profit-based motives for safety critical areas.
> How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'?
I think it has to start with daylight: all of the relevant info accessible to the public.
Adversaries can/will counter with fake data, narratives, etc, but if there's a trustable source of that daylight data that is a huge start.
Why do worker accept to work in such conditions? Its like driving tired every day. Eventually you fuck up. Where was the union?
Autonation is the only true way out of incompetence.
Eventually everyone will come around e/acc.
Automation of a bad process or security measure is not a way out of the incompetence of people who designed it. Automation of garbage only brings more garbage.
Why would anyone automate a bad process.
When Waymo automates self-driving it isn't automating bad drivers. So are robots on Amazon warehouses
Because the people with automation targets are not the same people responsible for the quality of the process and you get what you measure. Been there, done that.
You meant "automation", right?
For a moment there my first tought was that "autonation" might be something like the concept of a nation made by the individual itself or something like that.
We need to create a word for typos/autocomplete errors that have a positive result like this on the reader.
no clear cause has yet been named. it can be many things and ultimately they will always blame human error because it gives away the least information about what really happened.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
Once upon a time I did root cause analysis professionally, and a trainer told us if you attributed the root cause to people without finding malice you were just being lazy. At the very least I doubt anyone to blame here was actually involved in the accident, but someone who decided it was not in the budget to put an automated system in place faster.
They had an automated system, it had failed earlier in the day in that section causing trains to be signalled to stop. Then they had a manual go-slow human backup protocol which appears to also have not been observed - some drivers were given clearance to continue as normal. Swiss cheese of compounded failures, with tragic results.
And what are the systemic practices in place that led to people not following the official protocol?
Because if the system punished compliance and rewarded such behavior, you now have a systemic issue underlying the "people are lazy".
> And what are the systemic practices in place that led to people not following the official protocol?
I guess we'll find out. Apparently one of two drivers who were given the go ahead for normal operations requested additional confirmation because he or she (rightly) thought go-slow was the expected response for transit resumption under the fallback protocol. Some incompetence in the control authority Adif, then, but I'm sure that'll be the focus of the inquiry they will no doubt have.
To be fair, train crashes happen rarely enough that the safety procedures are in place and work (at least most of the time).
In Spain they appear to happen rather frequently
I'm so fucking tired of you people constantly trying to reduce human accountability after accidents like this that claim lives. It's always the fault of the system and never the fault of any people. As if we are all just cogs in a machine that is controlled by no-one. It is your fatalistic worldview that is directly causing accidents like this. How many more people have to die before we can fix things? Just stop.
Obviously individual people can be at fault, but it is this further process of asking _why_ individual people fail—pointing to systems, procedures, cultures—that has (in part) contributed to the extraordinary safety of aviation.
So I would say on the contrary, it is that systems worldview that actually leads to lasting improvements. Because human nature is not changing in a hurry.
Systems and procedure are created by people.
Culture is literally just “how people collectively behave”.
It’s people all the way down!
If you update the artefact without replacing its creator, they’ll just “fix” it to their taste again when you leave.
I feel that mixing up best picture Oscars was a watershed moment...It sort of spoke to me that the whole world is going to shit....
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
Who wants to design a basic cryptographic p2p lock between trains that limit their speed 30km/h if they're not able to get proof they're alone on a track; when the alternative is to debate endlessly about whom to blame, and which billion-dollar conglomerate has the technical prowess to sit on the committee to debate the specs for a much worse system.
Of course HN wants to fix train crashes with a "cryptographic p2p lock". On a blockchain, presumably.
I could have been more precise, but it's the same ideas underpinning HTTPS and git - long before blockchain became a hype.
Did you instead want to build some central hub that grounds all train traffic if unreachable, or create a bunch of semaphores that anything can overwrite by accident or on purpose?
I'm genuinely curious here.
I can understand being intimidated by concepts outside your wheelhouse, but if you have a simpler solution you'd feel safe with i'm all ears.
I'm not saying this is all there is too it, but I am saying all the other design choices like recovery modes, operator experience, etc - should build around cryptography between tracks and trains.
We can call them cryptographic semaphores if that makes your brain turn on again.
I don't know anything about trains so I can't really propose a solution. I just thought your proposal was funny in that it was very "HN flavored" in a domain that is somewhat far from typical HN domains. Not saying if it's good or bad, just saying I thought it was funny.
At this moment, may be incompetence, but I wouldn't discard still a sabotage that go out of hand.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why. The proprietary automatic brake system of Siemens was working fine for 30 years, but it was too old, maybe too expensive and being replaced by a different system (non proprietary?). This shouldn't had caused any problem, as stopping the trains when a problem happens in the railway is the by-default security protocol.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why this person didn't saw that light in the screen, or why in the age of mobile phones and internet, he/she was unable to warn about the second train.
And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near a train station before to crash into the Italian train, in a perfectly sunny day. It does not make any sense and, seemly, it goes directly against the security protocol.
We don't know still if the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or didn't even tried to stop the train (maybe suffered a dismay or a heart attack?). Survivors say that they didn't noticed a decrease of speed before the impact. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
For foreign journalists, to paint Spain as a third world country is practically a sport, and they love to write the word 'siesta' for some strange fetish, but the reality is that this is one of the most modern high-speed train systems in the planet, and worked like a charm for more than 30 years until now.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war, including strange delays and strange train accidents all around Europe in the last two or three years (Poland, France, etc). We can safely assume that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this another added source of chaos happened suspiciously close to the November Spanish elections with plenty of strikes and riots that happened to occur overnight.
Taking the whole context, the probability of all of that happening by chance at the same time before the elections, is basically zero.
It wouldn't be the first time in history sabotage by "Russians" resulted in the collision of opposing forces near Toledo.
And wouldn't be the first also that "Russians messing with elections" meant exactly: Russians messing with elections.
If you have a better explanation by all what is happening in Europe just right now, with perfectly coordinated teams of people seeding chaos and unrest, I will hear it with maximum interest.
And yes, I know that Trump is not exactly a friend of anything latino related unless he can take advantage of it, and is specially unfriendly with the Spanish president.
My bet is that all of this will suddenly stop after Russia collapses by the self-destruction of their economy triggered by a chain of Putin's unhinged decisions
> And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events
Update. A second security system should had stopped the train automatically in the next red semaphore (or reduced the velocity to 40Km/h) without machinist intervention. That system was down also. And control had 17 minutes to warn the incoming train and to talk directly with the Italian train, but they apparently failed to do it.
So at least there are two different automatized computer security systems that failed on a row, plus a control center that acted in a strange way, plus a machinist that may, or may not, had tried to pull the brakes and she is missing.
And now they are saying that a former minister of employment was traveling in that train and she is also missing.
> Update. A second security system should had stopped the train automatically in the next red semaphore (or reduced the velocity to 40Km/h) without machinist intervention. That system was down also.
No, it wasn't, from the way things have presumably played out, the scenario has simply hit an inherent design limitation. Namely LZB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung) is the primary signalling and train protection system, but as a fallback, conventional colour-light lineside signalling together with the corresponding conventional train protections system (ASFA) has also been provided.
As a fallback system however, the lineside signalling has been set up with much longer signalling sections than the LZB, i.e. one conventional signalling section comprises multiple LZB signalling section. As such, it is still perfectly safe and serviceable, with the only immediate drawback that capacity will be significantly reduced due to the longer signalling sections (and also slower running speeds – the lineside signalling is limited to 200 km/h max).
The only problem comes in when you need to make an unscheduled transition from LZB to lineside signalling because of an LZB fault – while at first the trains will be safely braked to an immediate stop, you may now have ended up with multiple trains (all safely inside their own LZB block section) within the same lineside signalling block section. Which means that now there is no "next red semaphore" to prevent the second/third/… train from running into the train in front.
The proper procedure therefore is to untangle the trains by running them out of that accidentally shared block section one at a time and most likely at a reduced speed, too, but for some reason that procedure wasn't followed here…
more like 46 dead already
so much for European safety, now compare it to volumes on Chinese HSR and number of deaths there compared to Spain
edit: inconvenient truth for downvoters?
50 according one of the biggesr Spanish newspapers, just open the homepage, you can read 50 even in Spanish
https://www.abc.es
so thanks everyone for downvotes just because you use slow news sources or deny the truth EU high speed trains are extremely dangerous compared to China on deaths/volume
No you likely got downvotes for claiming the yet to be known number of deaths.
I know there have been other Spanish train crashes in recent years but does you're pointing to all of Europe. Source?
https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/spain-train...
also one of the 3 major czech stations reporting at least 46
https://tn.nova.cz/zpravodajstvi/clanek/660035-srazka-rychlo...
if you open one of the biggest newspapers in Spain they report already 50 dead
https://www.abc.es
So thanks for giving me downvotes just because you use outdated news sources!
The pompous snark likely won't help if you're concerned with down votes, but that's for the sources.
That leaves the Europe claims, as it stands your comparison would be Spanish railways vs Chinese.
> if you open one of the biggest newspapers in Spain they report already 50 dead
Which one, El Pais? ABC is American, not sure why you'd claim this is a Spanish newspaper. What Czech TV stations report also feels not so relevant.
Here you have an actual news article from an actual Spanish newspaper: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-10-28/at-least-10-peop...
To be fair, they linked to abc.es which is a Spanish site.
> ABC is American, not sure why you'd claim this is a Spanish newspaper.
I have no words for stupidity of some commenters here...
"ABC (Spanish: [aˈβeθe]) is a Spanish national daily newspaper. Along with El Mundo and El País, it is one of Spain's three newspapers of record."
"ABC was first published in Madrid on 1 January 1903[1][2] by Torcuato Luca de Tena y Álvarez-Ossorio.[3][4] The founding publishing house was Prensa Española, which was led by the founder of the paper, Luca de Tena.[4] The paper started as a weekly newspaper, turning daily in June 1905.[5] In 1928, ABC had two editions, one for Madrid and the other for Seville.[4][6] The latter was named ABC de Sevilla.[4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(newspaper)
"ABC is the longest-running national newspaper in Spain. With clear roots in its founding values, it constantly evolves, adapting to technological innovations and social changes to offer the best information offer"
https://www.abc.es/contacto/quienes-somos.html
It is also 4th biggest in Spain by circulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Spain
Don't forget that several countries such as russia are waging hybrid warfare against the EU, there have been frequent sabotage acts against rail lines and cargo shipments. China is currently not targeted by russian hybrid warfare, and the US does not have a functional high speed rail system at all.
Blaming Russia for a train crash in Spain is a level of psychosis I had never seen before.
Right? Clearly it was Israel.
Wait to you hear people claiming that Russia is invading Ukraine! Why would Russia murder women and children? Definitely psychosis!
What concrete evidence do you have that this crash, or the one earlier this year, was caused by the Russians?
You must have an incredibly high P(h)...
This Russian paranoia is more damaging than actual Russian operations at that point...
French riots? Russia
Spain train accident? Russia
Right wing party wins? Russia
Rainy weekend? Russia
Acela was pretty successful at locking pax in the toilets.
A simple solution would be for all trains to have self recoding GPS which they probably all have and log their location on an internet map plus marking all the switches and allow open viewing to public and passengers to monitor their own train versus others. Ai can also be used to set the alarm.
how is GPS going to differentiate between two trains on a collision course vs. two trains on separate, but neighbouring tracks?
The GPS location as well as track ID gets logged every few sec. They probably already have the info. Its not rocket science; that is how their systems probably work. They probably log the ID of previous and incoming switch too. They probably have all of this, just make it public.
Insane take. This has like 10x the number of failure modes than a proper signalling system with verifiable software design.
This is not run the system, it is a way to monitor and see if they are going to kill you!
And what are you going to do, pull the emergency brake "because an app told me to"?
The conductors and everybody else will be warned by the same app; passengers are going to pull the alarms. Collision is not fate!
How did we not think of this earlier?!
Just a few days ago Spain is still in riot mode. The next protest is going to be on 31th October apparently.
This is gonna add fuel to the fire, and as I lived in East Asia (Hong Kong to be specific) I'm kind of curious why it all happened around the eurozone lately.
France, Albania, Belgium, Spain, Greece, UK and Serbia recently (although it is not eurozone but closely related anyway as part of the great Balkans). What's left? Germany and Poland I guess?
Anyhow it really reminds me of the First World War
I can't see why you would think a train crash would "add fuel to the fire"
because it is symptom of Sanchez government, two high speed train crashes within a year, his minister not resigning, throw there high living expenses, no wonder Spaniards protest
Well said.
Failure of 'third way' liberalisation politics explain some of it. Serbia it's way more complicated than that though.
Spain is not in riot mode and the two violent riots are not related to political protests nor have political goals.