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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

While these events are statistically very rare, it is worth remembering that there have been two separate events in the past twenty years in Spain where high-speed trains have derailed leading to multiple fatalities [1][2]. In contrast, the Japanese Shinkansen has a spotless record since its introduction in the 1960s [3]. Not a single fatality due to a crash or derailment. And that's in a country with a much larger population and much higher passenger count per year.

What do they do differently?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_train_derailments

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record

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I am not sure what conclusion can we draw from, as you said, two very rare incidents over a long period of time.

Reminds me of when Malaysian airlines crashed two planes in a short period of time. It was a good time to get cheap flights from Europe to south east Asia as long as you can withstand relatives thinking you are literally going to die in their third crash.

Bit of an odd comparison, given that one of those flights (MH17) was shot down by a Russian Buk squad. That was not an issue attributable to the carrier in any way, and after the incident the likelihood of it happening again to Malaysia Airlines specifically was negligible.

It could be prevented by simply not flying over an active war zone, something airlines do all the times to prevent the exact same thing from happening.

Airlines started being more sensitive to this after the 2014 crash

Or Girkin not ordering the civilian plane full of people to be shot down. It was a civilian plane at 10km altitude with a transponder on. Really doesn't look like a jet on a radar.

And up to that point Russia wasn't known to supply the separatists with an anti air system and the crew to run it.

It would seem the air defense systems used could not reliably determine what you imply they should [1][2]. I’m not sure where you’re coming from, or why it would matter what one country was known or not known to do.

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/18/12951/how-can-a-...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/18...

> why it would matter what one country was known or not known to do.

It absolutely matters.

Flying over a war zone with known anti aircraft missiles is quite different to flying over a low level conflict that is using small arms only.

There was no war zone at that time.

> Flying over a war zone with known anti aircraft missiles is quite different to flying over a low level conflict that is using small arms only.

What was in the news at the time, and the news are still linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas#Escalation_in_Ma...

2 June 2014: "Luhansk airstrike"

14 June 2014: "A Ukrainian Air Force Ilyushin Il-76MD was shot down"

20 June 2014: "The insurgents [...] shot down a Su-25 bomber."

14 July 2014: "Ukrainian Air Force launched air strikes targeting insurgent positions across Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The Ukrainian government said that 500 insurgents were killed"

17 July 2014: "DPR forces shot down a civilian passenger jet, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17"

Doesn’t look like a F14 either but a US warship, rather than some guys in a field, still managed to pull that off and send 290 people to their graves.

But it did look like an F-14. There really was an F-14, just on the ground at an Iranian airbase. And the Vincennes was under armed attack at the time--Iran let a civilian jetliner overfly their own attack. Plenty of blame for them, also.

> But it did look like an F-14

It absolutely did not. The RCS of an F-14 v/s an Airbus A300 is an order of magnitude different (probably 2 or 3 orders).

> There really was an F-14, just on the ground at an Iranian airbase

There was, but that’s a red herring for the root cause. Each ship’s radar independently and correctly identified and tracked the Airbus separate from the Mode 2 targets, but when communicating the track information between ships, the tracks were mixed up.

Source: The US Navy’s own account: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/about-us/l...

> There was a combat camera team aboard the Vincennes, and the footage depicts considerable confusion and even ill-discipline amongst the crew (cheering, shouting, football game atmosphere) that contributed to one of the most tragic events in U.S. Navy history

The URL you linked to results in a 503 error (Service unavailable) and the Wayback Machine returns "Error code: 403 Forbidden" with "Looks like there’s a problem with this site", for all timestamps I tried, in 2025 or 2024.

I'm outside the US so that's probably the cause. Is such information available elsewhere?

I’m outside the US too and the link works for me

But this also works: https://archive.md/XsxT8

And also this: https://web.archive.org/web/20251208110440/https://www.histo...

The point is this is a fog of war situation. Mixing up who is who in combat is a very real issue where we have gotten better over time but have never truly solved.

I put the primary blame on Iran because they cleared a civilian plane to overfly combat they initiated. They set the situation up, a mistake happened.

Fog of war isn't like in a video game where it's just whether you can see something--in the real world by far the biggest factor is identifying what you see rather than simply seeing it.

That’s not the point, though.

Don’t fly a commercial passenger jet over an active known war zone. Then you don’t even really have to think about whether the separatists below you know whether your signature looks like a fighter jet or not lol.

Never leave your safety to the vagaries of Russian incompetence or malice, surely.

Russia is active war zone. Russians are flying commercial passenger jets over active war zone and then shooting them. Embraer E190 was the latest victim of Russians. Russia is the problem.

I never said Russia isn’t the problem. But intentionally flying your 777 over an active war zone is asinine regardless, is it not?

Yep, Russians does that intentionally, while Malaysian and other airlines are just following rules and air corridors.

I remember seeing video of the guys behind it seeing the wreckage and saying something like 'shit it was an airliner'. I think they shot thinking it was a military aircraft.

I'm not sure why Girkin would want to shot down an airliner?

And the other one was, as far as I remember, likely deliberate based on the pilot’s flight simulation data.

That one doesn't reflect well on the airline IMO. There should be systems in place to help employees cope with mental health issues so that they don't end up hijacking their own plane.

Also odd considering the other crash (MH370) was almost certainly a pilot suicide. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I’m not sure what they could have possibly done to prevent it.

Thankfully the aviation industry and related agencies are not so quick to dismiss human factors as unmitigateable.

imagine thinking the same way after the first crash, just

as long as you can withstand relatives thinking you are literally going to die in their second crash,

and then you die in their second crash.

The incidents were 4 months apart, so considering the number of flights the odds were still pretty good on that bet.

Spain basically does not do the required maintenance:

https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...

From the linked article:

> [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected on January 7.

The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?

The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless without context.

> [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy,

They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.

Yep, plus their network is pretty new anyways. Which generally needs less maintenance than older infrastructure.

Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's full of faults.

> The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?

Spanish officials are very good at deflecting blame and playing politics. Nobody wants to be held accountable for a catastrophe. Also see the 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging, but zero accountability.

So while inspection standards might be inadequate, I would take anything a senior official says with a pound of salt.

But he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny. The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age of track, not percentages of the total budget.

> 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging

sigh

Of course you're right

Specifically the fractured track was a soldered joint that joined a track from 1989 with a new one from a few weeks ago.

Soldered eh? No wonder then that it broke.

English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.

As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)

Heh, that would be a funny misunderstanding to have as well as the opposite, when you get back something soldered when you expected it to be welded.

Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.

English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients).

Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.

Schweissen und löten. Has nothing to do with Switzerland (Schweiz) ;)

Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it written. German is a language that I will happily use but don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably need exponential notation to represent the number of errors.

As a matter of fact schweissen is only correct spelling in Switzerland.

In Germany it would be schweißen.

Czech uses "Pájení" (derived from "joining") vs "Svařování" (derived from "boiling".

So, also different with different etymology in a language from a different group (although these things were probably influenced by German)

Yeah - the Czech wording is quite clever:

* the first one makes it clear a something (a different material) is used to join things together

* the second one implies you melt/boil the things to join them together

This was a track laid a few weeks ago? I think that's the problem.

> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data.

Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...

After reading Shogun, Cryptonomicon and watching plenty anime and documents about Japan (including Japanese rail system - still using the "pointing and naming" method I've learned from them) I would risk saying that Japanese do literally everything differently.

A list consisting entirely of fictional works (one by an American who has never lived in Japan even) is not a good basis for claiming to understand a culture.

Seriously, Cryptonomicon is a bizarre thing to put on this list. I like the it a lot, but none of that book takes place in Japan and the closest intersection is Japanese soldiers during World War II, with a brief participation of a single fictional Japanese company in the modern section of the book.

Well I have watched the show adaptation of Shogun, which features authentic Japanese language, and enjoy the occasional Omakase (in Brooklyn), so I’d say I’m pretty qualified to comment on Japanese rail over the past sixty years.

I've managed to draw the Japan flag in middle school one time. Add me to the list of reputable sources.

I’ve read the Wikipedia article about Japan and had a friend living there. Beat that!

I grew up playing all the Mario games and wrote a dissertation on an Internet forum, so now I have a PhD in both Japanese and Italian culture!

Regardless of Cryptonomicon's utility in understanding Japan, the statement that "none of that book takes place in Japan" is not true.

You seem to be ignoring the important point: "The Pointing and Naming System".

While this protocol is not oriented toward maintaining equipment like tracks and wheels -- it does seem to be a good indicator that the Japanese deal with these systems and the safety concerns around them differently.

And their track record (pun intended) shows the result of this focus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

> Railways in Japan use a safety system called “pointing and calling.” This method of physically pointing toward an item to be checked while vocalizing its name was invented in Japan about 100 years ago. The combination of looking, acting, speaking and hearing reduces errors by as much as about 85%.

There are probably better sources than those two. What's next, citations from Enoch Root?

Japanese people are just people. They have a unique culture... Like literally every other identifiable culture on earth.

I love Cryptonomicon but it engaged in that distinctly American brand of orientalism when it got into Japanese soldiers killing themselves and whatnot.

I don't watch anime or really follow anything specifically Japanese, but I read Shogun as a teenager and then decades later (lately) I read about the Mishima Incident which attempted to restore the Emperor to power in 1970. Quite frankly the way the article was written and the events that transpired were extremely reminiscent of Shogun. The latter was written in 1975 but I am skeptical how much non-Japanese information was available about it leading up to 1975 when Shogun was published, considering this Wikipedia article has an obviously rough translation. Just the way the people involved relate to each other is quite unexpected from a Western perspective.

My tentative conclusion is that there is something really unique about Japanese culture and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima_Incident

> And that's in a country with a much larger population and much higher passenger count per year.

These are actually points making the Japanese system easier to maintain. Because of smaller surface area it’s much denser.

earthquakes, tho? Maybe the constant state of necessary vigilance has something to do with it here.

They are two very different accidents: The second was insufficient/poor maintenance: Supposedly the train that checks for this had passed 2 months before, and someone will have to wonder whether it's just not passing often enough, or if the inspections are just poor in general.

The first was purely a matter of not upgrading the signaling in a very low speed section: The crash could have happened with regional trains too. Every engineer knew that it was unsafe and one distraction was enough to get someone killed, but Spain is still well in the middle of track expansion, so it's all the horrors of politicking. Unless you have a crash, not upgrading those signals costs nothing, but, say, the very expensive connection to Asturias was worth a lot, so iffy tradeoffs were made.

Hopefully better engineering-driven tradeoffs are made regarding track maintenance, but hey, this is Spain, not a place where we are good at efficient, reliable safety processes: See the failures in Valencia for the DANA, where the chain between the meteorologists seeing a risk that led to recommending evacuation, and the actual order of evacuation was so slow, so we ended up with 229 deaths.

For comparison, the Japanese high speed rail track inspection trains run three times every month. A lot more frequent.

They run at full speed between regular train operations.

I saw one of them running on my last trip, which is said to be good luck.

A component here is the highly unfortunate timing of two trains crossing one another as one of the trains derailed. Both trains look like rigid HSRs, and usually when these derails they stay very stable and rarely have fatalities.

Japanese rails are all built on commuter style architectures and the tracks are generally owned by its users. So train operators are strongly incentivized to keep them in good shape.

Also, Far East right now is also massively cash poor yet labor rich relative to the rest of the world. Everything is crazy undervalued and there are clear gaps between amounts of money changing hands vs work being done. Skilled-labor-intensive tasks are going to be much easier when cheap skilled labor is just perpetually available.

2 questions one rail related, one societal.

1) Can you expand on your first sentence? When you say user owned what does that mean exactly?

2) If skilled labor is undervalued does that mean those with those positions live kind of meager lives? Or what is that like?

1) There are type 1/2/3 train operators that owns everything/borrows rails/owns just rails as Japanese laws classify them, but type 3 lines are mostly rural low-traffic branch lines. Most high-traffic lines are owned(+accesses leased to type 2s) by train operators. Some of regional Shinkansen lines are technically owned by government run JRTT agency and leased to local JR company, which are probably as unrelated as UK government and its Royal Mail are.

2) I mean, like, it's the place where the English loanword for "death by overwork" came from. Also, undervalued means things costing less than they are worth. Trash costing little isn't undervalued, that's more adequately valued.

Thank you, haha on answer 2 !!

Answer 1 is still not clear to me. Can you contrast it with how Spanish track is managed?

Shinkansen is built like a giant subway. Fixed transponders everywhere, mission control monitoring and coordinating everything, stations right on the main line etc etc. They even use the same callouts as intra-city trains and they've long been at almost GoA 2 levels in train people terms?

I admit that I was a bit uninformed about specifics of Spanish train system in that, the rails were in fact laid by then-Spanish national rail and the operator was then-national company, but still, they don't seem like built and maintained like the BART or the NYC subway that happens to go 200mph in straight sections. That Shinkansen architecture is unique, and that is also guaranteed to be more labor intensive than how everything in most HSRs are.

Japan GDP PPP per capita is about USAs in 2012, so they aren't exactly impoverished.

High public competency and government capacity allows a lot to get done.

My understanding is that Shinkansen that is high speed rail in Japan is grade separated system. That is tracks are only used by high speed rail. In Europe generally tracks are shared outside few specific links.

This means that Shinkansen tracks are designed and build to much higher standard.

In Spain the high speed network is separate from the traditional network too. There is some inter connectivity to allow for high speed trains to call at traditional stations, but the high speed network is for high speed trains only.

Yeah, the planned Czech high speed trains (VRT) have the same gauge but are expected to be used by the high speed trains almost exclusively, with a limited number of normal-speed passenger trains and AFAIK no cargo traffic at all.

Track maintenance?

Yep.

Which is the secret of preventing 99%+ of sudden mechanical failures of pretty much any type of infrastructure.

Perhaps there are less FSB agents blowing up sections of track with shaped charges in Japan.

Source?

Different soil? Different climate/weather patterns.

Japan having to build to earthquake standards, so being more robust overall? Or to specific failure modes, at least.

Doctor Yellow.[1] Full rail inspection every ten days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow

At full speed!

Which matters, because Doctor Yellow inspection trains can be put into the schedule with the regular trains. There's no need to shut down traffic while a slow inspection car chugs along.

BART recently got a full-speed inspection car.[1] They needed a specially built one because BART has a non-standard track gauge.

The Federal Railroad Administration has track inspection cars, but only six of them for the whole country. One was seen on CALTRAIN track.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHa1Si7CW8Q

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQcRHn9YiPg

> What do they do differently?

Accountability.

> Santiago de Compostela derailment

Hey that infrastructure looks perfectly fine and new, ahhh ok... they were going 180kmh where the speed limit was 80kmh..

Which is also exactly how the most deadly rail incident in the past half century in japan happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment

We oftentimes take ridiculous risks to save only 1-5 minutes of our time. Although reading about the Spanish disaster, the driver was rather reckless.

Which is a problem that would have been prevented had they not purposefully disabled the ERTMS signaling system to avoid delays.

> While these events are statistically very rare

These events happening 4 times in 3 days are statistically nonexistent. Even less existent is them starting to happen right on the day before a major politician in Spain visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security and monitoring systems.

Higher passenger count could imply ability to pass higher maintenance budgets?

I think even more important is the seismic activity in Japan asa risk factor here

Are you suggesting this leads to more inspections or better inspections or better build quality or what?

That despite seismic activity they managed to avoid a catastrophe like ones in Spain

Could weather or some other geographic/similar aspect be a factor?

The geographic aspect of russian agents being in vincinity of the traintracks. Week before supply trains in Germany also derailed, as they do once per month.

I'm not saying it couldn't have been the Russians, but it would be strange for them to target Spain, since it's the only NATO country that doesn't want to increase its defence spending.

Yeah. Japan really has better quality standards here overall.

Now - Japanese mentality is strange to me, but the quality standards and thought process, are convincing.

Japan has a culture of perfection.

But every culture has its exceptions. 2 words: Tataka airbags.

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