Spain train crash: 'At least 10 dead' in high-speed collision
thetimes.com
thetimes.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempi_train_crash
"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."
Yes, same government. 0 resignations, 0 political consequences, 0 apologies.
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.
Its. Just. Good. Business.
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."
The primary reason is computer failure followed by the decision to run the system manually.
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)
Try a few weeks of German trains. Sometimes no trains leave on time for weeks.
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.
Passenger service with just verbal orders over a phone is simply unacceptable.
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.
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.
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.
If you can work remotely (or not at all), Spain has a lot going for it.
> "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-...
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
And this accident occurred a few weeks ago.
https://apnews.com/article/japan-train-accident-8759a27eaae8...
> 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...
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.-
Alas, maintenance isn't sexy for governments.
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.
I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
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):
Spain's unemployment rate has converged with Finland's, a remarkable improvement:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a risk of just being outside. Usually due to cars.
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.
> 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.
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.
Also cars are not highly predictable. Where I live you could have one driver that stops at every crossing, even when they don’t have a stop sign, which causes lots of confusion. There are also those drivers that will always stop for a pedestrian and others that will not. At the end of the day cars are an extension of their human, so if you are arguing that human without car is unpredictable, then it can also be argued that human with car is equally unpredictable.
You choose whether you trust a driver or not. Personally I choose to never trust them, and that's why I'm much less likely to be hit by a car. Because I do not put drivers in that position where they have to notice me and react in time in order to not hit me. I simply wait by the side of the road until I am sure that they have noticed me and are reacting in time.
When I said cars are predictable I meant cars are almost exclusively on the road. If you are not in the road you are generally safe from cars, if you walk into a road you need to watch out for cars. If a car is moving towards you at 30mph you can assume it will continue to do so, and so you should not walk in front of it until you see it slow down.
You can not assume it will always stop for you if you do walk in front of it. This is not unpredictability, this is you putting your trust in a stranger. It is predictable that the driver might not have seen you. It is predictable what happens if the driver does not see you.
You can't know whether a driver will see you and react in time. That's why I'm saying you should not trust that they will. You should assume that they're idiots and act accordingly, because a huge amount of drivers are idiots. Don't trust them. Make sure you are safe. Take responsibility for your own safety, don't put it in their hands.
And just for the record, even the best drivers may have accidents. Nobody's perfect. Shit happens.
Most airplane crashes lose all souls.
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.
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.
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.
Says the Spanish train crash in Jan of this year that killed 46 was the "same operators on the same line."
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.
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.
> “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.
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...?).
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.
Nice job, i won't get fooled again though.
There is merit to your arguments, but I still don't think it's the main issue in this case.
As of writing the article says 10. Other sources, sadly, indicate up to 39.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/european-...
Kaja Kalas EU official on russian sabotages : https://www.facebook.com/reel/1554741255960830
It seems impossible to imagine that there are any layers of defense in depth involved here… Because it should be so easy to avoid.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I don't know of any country where this is not the case
wastedpotenTial indeed...
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.
* 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.
ASFA is max 200 km/h btw but that doesn’t matter to how this went down.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's of course fine to automatically shut down a few trains per year if it doesn't create a dangerous situation in it self.
People would still blame Waymo, not the government, so there is not any gain unless you are a Waymo's competitor.
Did it fail somehow which lead to this accident? I think such systems must be redundant enough to survive even without power/computers?
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.
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.
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.
Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
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.
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.
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.
That should have read "how to ensure that the train (driver) follows the directions given by the signalling".
I still wonder how this adds up against the constant daily carnage of automobile transportation?
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.
"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.
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”.
Although for trains, it looks like the middle might be the safest (in case of a rear-end collision).
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.
On another topic, I shall reconsider using bus over train for my trips.
You rarely hear of such in Japan.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_and_privatization_of_...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I would think that the software is the weakest link in the chain.
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...
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.
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.
to pueblos with 50 people…
But sure, keep twisting the truth to suit your political agenda.
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.
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.
> 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.
But there's a reason they used to execute people in the public square.
Capital punishment has never been about deterrence, nor has it ever been an effective deterrent.
Not even once?
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?
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 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.
Look at the current US President, for instance. He is richer than any of us will ever be, but what exactly is his competence?
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!
> 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...
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 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 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 Ayn Rand's writings always seemed like an Economics Horror story: effective at instilling dread in its readers, but of some highly unrealistic boogeyman.
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
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...
Workers that toke half of the Friday agreed with their companies to start Monday-Friday one hour earlier, so what's the problem exactly?
we need to eliminate profit-based motives for safety critical areas.
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.
Eventually everyone will come around e/acc.
When Waymo automates self-driving it isn't automating bad drivers. So are robots on Amazon warehouses
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.
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.
Because if the system punished compliance and rewarded such behavior, you now have a systemic issue underlying the "people are lazy".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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
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
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
I know there have been other Spanish train crashes in recent years but does you're pointing to all of Europe. Source?
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
So thanks for giving me downvotes just because you use outdated news sources!
That leaves the Europe claims, as it stands your comparison would be Spanish railways vs Chinese.
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...
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
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.You must have an incredibly high P(h)...
French riots? Russia
Spain train accident? Russia
Right wing party wins? Russia
Rainy weekend? Russia