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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that if someone wants to use a bomb to derail a train it may be easier to place the bomb on or near the tracks, which obviously bypasses any security onboard.

This was attempted on the TGV during the terrorist wave of the mid-90s in France but, fortunately, it did not detonate.

That being said, I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.

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I'm so glad that terrorists are largely unimaginative and/or incompetent. There are so many targets, including trains, that they're ignoring that would be so much easier to hit.

I think what many people seem to be missing is that you don't need to kill 3000 people. If you kill 1000, spread out across 10 cities, you're going to cause a lot of fear and chaos.

> I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.

Nope.

Spain has security checks at their major stations for high speed trains including to go to France, but France does not

There are so many widely open train stations in France that securing only some of them would be a huge waste of time and energy while securing them all would be nearly impossible.

And I really don’t want to live in a country where boarding a train is as painful as boarding a plane. Millions of people are using train to commute, adding security checks would totally kill the train.

For what’s it’s worth it’s more of a bag scan rather than a full security check like at the airport. Certainly the full security check is not something I want to deal with but it wasn’t too bad. They only do it at the main stations in Spain and only if you’re riding the high speed trains, so I imagine if France did it then it would only be at TGV stops which are not so numerous

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