0. https://old.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1qe9ko2/ich_gl...
That entirely depends on which class of tracks we're talking about. And on top of that, remember that Europe is at war with Russia, railway sabotage has been attributed to Russia already in Poland [1] - and if you ask me, I don't believe for a single goddamn second that "cable thieves" were the cause behind the infamous 2022 attack on Germany's railways [2] either.
> And what systems are in place to actually detect this.
In Germany, dedicated railway cars called "RAILab" [3] that can measure track performance at up to 200 km/h perform the bulk of the work. In addition, each piece of infrastructure has something called an "Anlagenverantwortlicher", a person responsible for it - and that person has to walk each piece of infrastructure every two years at the very least, sections that have shown to be problematic get walked sometimes weekly.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gknv8nxlzo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...
The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this incident. They explicitly investigated the possibility of foreign sabotage, found the perpetrators, and concluded that it was just regular theft. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, even when there are zebras running around.
And yet, there are multiple different theories floating around on who bombed North Stream. The police and DA assume that Ukrainians were behind this mess, possibly under orders of back-then UA army chief Zaluzhnyi according to leaks and rumors, but official communication on that has been ... lacking and that's putting it mildly. It doesn't help that there are credible suspicions of Russia being behind it either, the only theory I'd move to the "conspiracy bin" is that it was a CIA operation.
When it comes to anything involving this war, there really is no reason to trust anyone.
> They explicitly investigated the possibility of foreign sabotage, found the perpetrators, and concluded that it was just regular theft. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, even when there are zebras running around.
I agree... but still, the timing is so incredibly close that it's just as possible that for once the cable thieves were capable of good OPSEC practices.
Most railways regularly inspect their tracks to detect issues before they turn into a disaster. The big question here will be: why wasn't this caught earlier?
As the article notes: the initial break left marks on the wheels of several previous trains. The final gap is big enough that no train could possibly make it past it, so it is pretty clear that the gap got larger as the incident progressed.
very
> And what systems are in place to actually detect this.
track circuit detection would pick up most cases I would have thought
Provided track circuit detection is even used, of course. I vaguely recall it not being compatible with either 25kV electrification or high-speed rail in general, and most modern tracks therefore using axle counters instead.
Track circuits aren't incompatible with that per se, but axle counters are simply easier to install and much more maintenance-friendly – no longer having to worry about
- mixing track circuit currents and traction return currents together
- having to keep the rails sufficiently isolated from the ground and each other to prevent the track circuits from falsely showing occupied
- insulated block joints
- having to use each bit of track once every twenty-four hours to prevent rust from falsely showing a track as clear
- extreme leaf fall and/or sanding potentially causing false clears, too
- length restrictions on the maximum length of a single track circuit, although that's only really a problem on more sparse trafficked lines with long block sections
In return, axle counters have the drawback that they
- don't detect broken rails (although it needs to be said that track circuits very much aren't perfect broken rail detectors, either)
- can be falsely reset (with more or less protections, depending on local operating practices)
- don't detect maintenance vehicles freshly placed upon a track until they enter the next axle counter section
but since most to almost all new installations seem to use axle counters, the trade-offs are apparently worth it to infrastructure operators.