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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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"
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.
> [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.
> 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.
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". :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would they do that though? Like if people start associating "support Ukraine" with "get randomly attacked" then perhaps carrying out attacks could get them to reduce their support. But if the public don't think it's related, then what is the benefit to Russia? Do the Spanish government secretly know and it's a pressure tactic on them?
The recent tactic is to spread distrust to own government by any means necessary - seemingly random failing infrastructure is hardly attributable to some foreign actor, yet it has implications on who gets in the government after next elections, especially europarliament. And as you can observe, most of the "anti-system" parties are pro-russian, openly or by agenda.
edit: I'm not saying this accident looks like sabotage. The spread of propaganda after it happened it's a different story.
You won't be the first or last asking why Russia does the thing it does.
Russia is world's Dog in the Manger, why wouldn't we give it a bit of credit, though?
Out of all the EU countries Russia would be likely to sabotage (Germany and the UK come immediately to mind), you think the Russians would do this in… Spain which, to my knowledge, doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion on anything and is only in the news when they have heat waves, flash floods, or some public transport mass casualty accident like this one.
Ok so, devils advocate view here. Russians could do this exactly because Spain is on the fence and they would rather they were more antagonistic. They actually want war with Europe, so they can do whatever they like and claim it is Europe's fault for being aggressive. Don't forget, they don't really believe that they are losing the war in Ukraine. They could also be hoping to get Europe embroiled in its own conflicts.
It sounds unreasonable sure, but tbh I am not convinced that the Russian government is reasonable.
The Russian government isn’t reasonable (nor is it particularly competent), but neither is blaming the Russians for every bad thing that happens in the world. Sometimes trains derail. A track buckling due to shit maintenance is the Occam’s Razor most likely answer here.
You can call out the Russians for being pieces of shit without making them the boogeyman for literally everything. Doing the latter just makes you seem like a conspiracy theorist.
If it was a sabotage, we could indeed think with such a perspective. But even then, it sounds hard to believe because I am unaware of any specific grievance or animosity that Russia has towards Spain. If it was Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany, UK, Poland, some of the Baltics country etc. it would be easier to agree with you. (If it was indeed sabotaged). I am reminded of a politician's speech in my country - "They says that everything wrong in the state is my and my party's fault. Somewhere an accident happens in our state, they say we are to blame. When a natural tragedy happens, and people are hurt or die, they say it is because of us. When someone falls down, they say we are to blame. Brothers and sisters, tomorrow when one of their worker has a child unexpectedly, don't be surprised if they claim that we are responsible for that too!".
A large number of roads in my country developed potholes a few weeks ago. I bet it was the FSB sabotaging our infrastructure, and not the extreme frost and snow causing damage!
Russia is already doing enough damage and causing enough fear as it is. Let's not help them by baselessly give them credit for every single thing that ever happens.
The mention of FSB is downvoted is because it was near-immediately clear that this was not the cause. It's total amateurs doing wild speculation for who knows what reason - some stupid upvotes on a website or because it makes their life more exciting to feel like they're whistle-blowing some international conspiracy?
This is roughly on par with every celebrity death over the last 4-5 years being followed by idiots commenting "vaxxed?!"
They do seem to come out of the woodwork quickly. Tbf I remember even before the current war, HN had a lot of Russian users - I'm not entirely surprised they would naturally defend their country, even if they aren't oblivious to what is happening.
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]
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.
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.
Edit: someone down this thread pointed out the answer is likely written by AI. If you copy the whole post from GP into ChatGPT it will give you an answer very similar to the post I am replying to.
> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.
> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.
It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.
There are some lines that were originally built as regular narrow gauge railways and later converted to standard gauge supporting Shinkansen trainsets.
I tried asking ChatGPT if Japanese high speed rail has level crossings and it correctly identified the line I used as my counterexample (Yamagata Shinkansen). I think GP is just plainly misinformed in a more boring way.
If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment. Also, "Finally, ..." and "it's not A, it's B" is a good tell.
Damn, I tried doing what you did and got a similar response too, down to exact wordings like "short answer, long answer" and "conservative maintenance". I will admit i was too quick to dismiss the accusation in my previous reply.
> If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment.
But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?
A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.
A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!
> Short answer: Japan treats high-speed rail as a tightly controlled system, not just fast trains on tracks.
Is exactly what a text bot would say. Eloquent, but when you think about it, is just nonsense. Which operator treats HSR as "fast trains on tracks" and which does not treat it is a "tightly controlled system"?
That's nitpicking, IMO. It's still 99% true. There are just two "Mini-Shinkansen" lines, they only run once or twice per hour, are shorter than non-Mini-Shinkansen, and only a relatively short part (distance-wise) of their journey is spent on the slow tracks. There are non-Shinkansen trains on the Mini-Shinkansen portion of their journey, but not very many. (Also the word "shinkansen" implies new tracks.)
> It added that three trains that had gone over the tracks at 17:21 on Sunday, 19:01 and then 19:09 had similar notches "with a compatible geometric pattern".
Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.
I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.
We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.
Spanish high speed lines are mostly separate from the legacy network as they have different gauges, there are a few parts of the railway with dual gauge tracks but it is that.
The Santiago accident was on the conventional rail.
Just a small clarification, Spain has two distinct track stems for normal trains (Iberian gauge) and high speed rail (international gauge). High speed rail is completely separate from the iberian gauge network which is primarly used for city and regional trains. Only a few cargo trains use the high speed network.
Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system.
The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
I have lived in Spain for the last two years and observed the luck of maintenance in a lot of things.
For example, people typically pay for house/apartment insurance. But insurance companies never send a person to check for things like leaking pipes or whatever. Rather they simply wait until an accident happens and dispatch an emergency crew and cover a lot of damage that could be easily prevented. Then people tolerate non-trivial damage to homes/apartments like leaky roof not reporting it to insurance companies for weeks.
Then with cars people often do not follow the maintenance schedule and insurance companies do not ask for that. Typically people drive until damage happens due to a minor accident or maintenance are forced by state required technical inspection once in few years. The car companies even offer free maintenance checks as a part of guarantee but people skip even that.
Yet when someone spends efforts to complain, thinks do gets done. For example there a city service to remove graffiti on public areas. If one files a complain, they react and remove the graffiti. However sometimes one needs to send a complain twice.
I think you are describing how the entire world works. I have lived in 3 western European countries through my life, and they all work this way.
Never I had the pipes in my home inspected, even now that I live in areas where it freezes regularly.
Never has anyone (not even my insurance) forced me to follow any particular maintenance schedule (albeit I'm quite sure somewhere in the fine print it will read that if the accident is because of poor maintenance they'll just ignore the claim).
Here the city service to remove Graffiti is almost overnight, and works better than many other public services...
Minor correction: there are two Shinkansen lines in Japan that run trains partly on shared legacy track, namely the Akita and Yamagata "mini-Shinkansens". However, these sections operate at normal speed, not high speed.
> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured
The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.
All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.
For context: the aforementioned crash in Japan was not on a high-speed / Shinkansen line but a normal commuter train. Both the 2013 accident in Spain and the recent one were high speed trains.
I’m not sure these are
comparable, high-speed rail needs much tighter tolerances as the risk is orders of magnitude higher. As the parent comment stated there have been zero major crashes on the japanese shinkansen lines.
The second train crashed on a non-high speed part of the network.
There is also no reason to treat speed limits on high speed and normal trains differently. There are plenty of speed related crashes on low speed lines. If anything the stakes are even higher on commuter trains because they tend to carry more people, many of which will be standing, and are more likely to crash into another structure as was the case in the Japanese incident mentioned.
Your comment is down thread of a comment containing a link to a Wikipedia page of a Japanese train crashed caused by speeding. I do not understand how can you think this is impossible in Japan.
> If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately.
Does the system automatically slow down the train, or does it notify the engineer? I would imagine that there are some scenarios where going over the speed limit is the correct choice.
In the movies terrorists place a bomb on board and the train crew has to maintain a minimum speed or the bomb explodes (this is where that american movie with a bus got the idea). And they have to manipulate the ATC or else it will stop the train when they enter sections of the track with lower minimum speed, or else ATC stops the train and the bomb explodes.
I'm curious what scenarios your imagining. Because I can't think of a single situation where a track limit should not be applied automatically, at least to trains with passengers on them.
I realize that this may not be an appropriate comparison, but I was thinking of cars; there are absolutely scenarios in which driving faster than the speed limit is the correct decision (i.e. trying to get someone to a hospital).
I wonder how common it is for train tracks to fracture? And what systems are in place to actually detect this. There was recently a post on a German subreddit where the OP found a fracture in the German rail[0], albeit much smaller.
> I wonder how common it is for train tracks to fracture?
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.
Copper theft has been a recurring problem in multiple European countries for well over a decade. Railway outages caused by damaged cabling increased as the copper price rose, and decreased as police cracked down on scrap dealers accepting railway cabling without proper provenance. Damaged aluminum and fiber cables are also common, as thieves usually aren't exactly the smartest people.
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.
> The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this incident.
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.
Rare, but not unheard of. See for example the Hatfield disaster in 2000, or the 2021 Ghotki rail crash.
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?
Rails expand and contract according to the temperature (11mm per degree C per km). They are continuously welded together and installed under tension and heated to a neutral / median temperature for the location. It was around 0C that night in an area that gets up to 47C (and rails might get hotter under the sun) so there was at least 300mm of contraction per kilometre of rail.
The rail fractured into pieces during the derailment. You can see some of those pieces lying around in the photographs.
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.
Yes, but it would be shown as a false "block occupied" signal. Which could also have plenty of other causes, such as broken cabling or defective track circuit equipment, and as the Weyauwega disaster taught us it wouldn't detect a partial break.
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.
> 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.
AFAIK continuously welded tracks (like those used in high speed rail) are also slightly tensioned, so a break in a single point could make it look like a whole section of track is missing, as tension is released.
CWT is laid in such a way that it has net zero stress in a "neutral" temperature, which naturally depends on the climate. Both extreme heat and extreme cold can cause damage, buckling and fracturing/embrittlement respectively, and choosing the neutral temperature is balancing act. But even if completely cut, track cannot shrink longitudinally much at all, it's the job of the sleepers and the ballast to keep it anchored in place. And if the track is laid on a concrete slab rather than ballast, it isn't moving anywhere.
Fun fact: the reason modern concrete or composite sleepers (e.g. [1]) have a slightly concave profile is to better resist lateral forces (i.e. buckling) than traditional straight-profile wooden sleepers.
An article published in Saturday's edition of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada provides more details about the cause of the crash. The article is in Spanish; here are some of the main points, translated into English:
1. According to the CIAF, the break in the track was "practically undetectable." The fracture on the track was not noticed by the trains that passed over it, or by the technicians responsible for the maintenance of the infrastructure.
2. The damaged train, which belongs to the Italian company Iryo, is heavier than other trains running on the track; the additional weight of the Iryo train may have been a factor, or possibly even one of the causes, of the derailment.
3. The CIAF said that the notches registered in the wheels and the deformation in the rail are "compatible" with the fact that the track was broken before the Iryo train passed over it.
4. Spanish Transportation Minister Óscar Puente rejected criticism of the delay of the rescuers; according to the Minister, rescuers arrived within "18 minutes."
“…not only did Iryo train's front carriages which stayed on the track have "notches" in their wheels, but three earlier trains that went over the track earlier did too.”
This sounds like something a camera mounted on a sample of trains watching a wheel could catch.
The camera would probably only need to look at a very small section at high speed. They could be specifically made to film the tracks or the wheels of the train. Such cameras exist. Not cheap, but even some YouTubers have similar ones, to film high speed impact videos of things going much faster than trains. Might be worth it for trains.
On Spain’s conventional and high-speed rail network, inspection frequency is defined by ADIF rules and EU railway safety standards.
High-speed lines (AVE):
Visual and geometry inspections are performed daily to weekly using inspection trains and onboard measurement systems. Ultrasonic rail flaw detection is typically done every 1 to 3 months, depending on traffic and tonnage.
Source: ADIF high-speed maintenance programs and EU interoperability maintenance requirements.
What are the some of the ways that tracks are monitored for fractures like this? It must have been pretty substantial in order to be described as "complete lack of continuity". Makes me think of literally electronic continuity tests -- are those ever used in this context? Or how about cameras mounted on trains using image processing? Or drones?
It seems a shame that a few other trains passed beforehand with this anomaly in place and yet it went undetected.
There are special trains with measurement equipment on board, but yes, it sounds to me like every train should be equipped with some basic sensors for anomaly detection.
100 km/h is slow compared to passenger train (even non-high-speed ones). Depending on how packed the schedule is, it might not be possible to analyse track during the day without causing backups.
AFAIK, one technique for monitoring cracks uses ultrasonic sensors. They send sound waves through the rails and detect cracks by analyzing reflected waves.
You can look at the Wikipedia page on railway defect dectectors [0].
Under "rail break monitors" it mentions both electrical continuity and time-domain reflectometry can be used, and are most frequently used on high-speed tracks.
In addition, there are vast array of other detectors using acoustic sensors, strain gauges, accelerometers, cameras in the visible and infrared spectrum or laser measurement, that potentially could have detected an anomaly (i.e. damage to the wheels of other trains before the incident).
Wheel impacts are the main way. But hardware can be bulky and trains can be surprisingly cramped.
We squeezed some track condition monitoring hardware into some locos but it was single-driver operations locations and we cannibalised some of the room that would have otherwise been occupied by the second driver.
I suppose that counts/was caused by a fracture but almost a half meter of gap in the track is nuts. Like describing a limb that’s totally removed as a bone fracture.
Though conceivably the break was very small and a train impacting the slightly lifted rail just caused a good chunk of it to explode.
> Though conceivably the break was very small and a train impacting the slightly lifted rail just caused a good chunk of it to explode.
The crown (top) of the rail seems to be missing after the gap. The crown-less section then continues ~3 meters before it disappears behind the investigator on the left. IDK what that might indicate.
Yes, the “fracture” (the problem was actually at a joint) was there for a while. The missing segment of rail was still there when the train arrived - the derailment affected only the last cars.
The "fracture" being referred to is a weld that somehow failed. The gap you are seeing is because an enormous, heavy train travelling at 200km/h hit that fracture and the rear half of the train derailed, tearing up sleepers and kicking all manner of debris around including ballast and, in this case, parts of newly-fractured (and therefore weakened) track.
No, that gap was created after the rail broke and the train derailed as a result.
The crack was in the weld, causing one side to sink and the wheel to hit the start of the next section of rail which was no longer welded to it, causing stress fractures to form in the rail which later caused that 40cm piece to break off.
~4 'derailing' accidents within 3 days, starting right before the president of the province of Madrid visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security monitoring systems. Coincidence indeed.
Apparently the weld that broke joined an old segment with a new one installed last year as the tracks are renovated piecemeal.
Still the media in question, "El Mundo", is a mouthpiece for the opposition parties, seeking to create indignation against the government and scoring the head of the Transport Minister in particular.
They also want to make a parallel with the situation of the former President of the Valencian Community, from their party, who had to finally resign one year after being unreachable for hours on a date while hundreds of valencians drowned as his administration waffled aimlessly.
Of course the government is ultimately responsible for the state of the infrastructure, so the Minister well might have to resign after all is said and done, but the innuendo in that piece is pure politicking, not serious journalism.
My gut feeling says a lot of fatalities could have been prevented with a physical barrier between both tracks. Shouldn't this be mandatory with high speed trains?
I think the physics of the situation don't make a barrier feasible: a derailed train going >100 mph is going to transfer a lot of energy to any kind of barrier it impacts, which in turn might exacerbate the situation (by spreading debris).
I think these kinds of accidents are largely mitigated by rail defect monitoring. I know rails in the US are equipped with defect detectors for passing trains; I'm surprised that a similar system doesn't exist for the rails themselves. Or more likely, one does exist and the outcome of this tragedy will be a lesson about operational failures.
In principle only, if a barrier could keep a train on its side of the barrier, scraping along the barrier for a long distance instead of smashing headfirst into it, the energy could be dissipated over a long period of time, preventing fatalities. But what kind of barrier can withstand a train?
This collision happened precisely because of unfortunate circumstance that break in the rail and derailment happened just before the switch leading to the opposite track. Without the "help" of the switch, carriages of the first train likely wouldn't have invaded the second track.
Pure economics. In Minneapolis the railroad demanded a crash wall to separate the light rail trains from their trains. It runs 1 mile and somehow cost nearly $100 million. This is a 5x increase from the original estimate but still $20 million for a 1 mile wall is a heck of a lot of money
Spain needs to rethink the way it operates trains. I think Switzerland
handles this better, overall, though they probably also don't have
as many fast trains because there are so many mountains. But I refer
more to the intrinsic quality control and assumption made. If I recall
correctly in Spain, there was the other train also coming in. I am
sure they could have built the tracks differently. Granted, the issue
here is cost, and an attempt to keep the cost down, but if you then
accept disasters like that, it seems really awkward to me to want to
save money here. And now that we know the track was already damaged,
that just adds more validity to questioning whether the quality control
systems were overall proper.
I mean maybe something of merit in that, but Spain has nearly 4000km of hitherto excellent and safe high speed rail and Switzerland around 200 km. Who should be giving lessons to whom? ;) Totally different scale of operations
Spain having built 20x more HSR than Switzerland in absolute terms, and much more HSR in terms proportional to country size, does actually does give them the right not to be lectured on HSR by a tiny country with a well-known superiority complex - especially when it's a cheap, incoherent shot soon after a tragedy.
I could make a cheap shot about fires in bars...but I won't.
You seem to have some serious anger issue unrelated to the fact that you tried to use distance as the only proxy metric for relevance of experience of rail operators.
Distance isn't even remotely relevant to complexity of running safe operations.
Data like fatalities per 1 million kilometers driven is significantly more relelvant - all metrics at which Swiss railways significantly exceed any European rail despite operating at significantly larger density of traffic.
Spanish railways have lately killed a horrifying amount of passengers - perhaps instead of insulting more competent operators, it's time to look at what keep going wrong there? Any responsible person would call for experts and advice here - e.g. we commonly see thet in air safety where foreign safety experts are invited to investigate and provide their own reports and recommendations.
What you seem to be doing here is something directly opposed to it and very very toxic - nationallistically trying to insults others and save face, which is very contraproductive for future safety.
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
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.
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 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
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.
I'm outside the US so that's probably the cause. Is such information available elsewhere?
But this also works: https://archive.md/XsxT8
And also this: https://web.archive.org/web/20251208110440/https://www.histo...
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.
I'm not sure why Girkin would want to shot down an airliner?
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/18/12951/how-can-a-...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/18...
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.
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"
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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...
> [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.
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.
sigh
Of course you're right
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.
In Germany it would be schweißen.
So, also different with different etymology in a language from a different group (although these things were probably influenced by German)
* 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
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...
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.
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%.
I love Cryptonomicon but it engaged in that distinctly American brand of orientalism when it got into Japanese soldiers killing themselves and whatnot.
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
These are actually points making the Japanese system easier to maintain. Because of smaller surface area it’s much denser.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Answer 1 is still not clear to me. Can you contrast it with how Spanish track is managed?
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.
High public competency and government capacity allows a lot to get done.
This means that Shinkansen tracks are designed and build to much higher standard.
Which is the secret of preventing 99%+ of sudden mechanical failures of pretty much any type of infrastructure.
You won't be the first or last asking why Russia does the thing it does. Russia is world's Dog in the Manger, why wouldn't we give it a bit of credit, though?
But yeah dude, we’re all Russian shills.
It sounds unreasonable sure, but tbh I am not convinced that the Russian government is reasonable.
You can call out the Russians for being pieces of shit without making them the boogeyman for literally everything. Doing the latter just makes you seem like a conspiracy theorist.
Russia is already doing enough damage and causing enough fear as it is. Let's not help them by baselessly give them credit for every single thing that ever happens.
This is roughly on par with every celebrity death over the last 4-5 years being followed by idiots commenting "vaxxed?!"
I wonder if Dang has any tools to deal with that.
Japan having to build to earthquake standards, so being more robust overall? Or to specific failure modes, at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
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
Accountability.
Hey that infrastructure looks perfectly fine and new, ahhh ok... they were going 180kmh where the speed limit was 80kmh..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
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.
Now - Japanese mentality is strange to me, but the quality standards and thought process, are convincing.
> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.
Not true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYol11bVoNw
https://ameblo.jp/nakamurapon943056/entry-12488005292.html
> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.
It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.
This is called Mini-Shinkansen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Shinkansen
This comes with limitations, as the maximum track speed on these converted lines is apparently around 130 km/h.
None of the actual Shinkansen stadard lines have level crossings.
But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?
A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.
A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!
Is exactly what a text bot would say. Eloquent, but when you think about it, is just nonsense. Which operator treats HSR as "fast trains on tracks" and which does not treat it is a "tightly controlled system"?
At least in France, high speed trains on older tracks won't go as fast as on the dedicated high speed tracks
That's why something like a fractured high speed rail track would never go undetected in Japan.
https://www.plassertheurer.com/en/today/stories/japanese-pre...
https://global.jr-central.co.jp/en/company/data-book/_pdf/20...
https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr61/16_21.html
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.
I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.
We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.
Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system.
The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
For example, people typically pay for house/apartment insurance. But insurance companies never send a person to check for things like leaking pipes or whatever. Rather they simply wait until an accident happens and dispatch an emergency crew and cover a lot of damage that could be easily prevented. Then people tolerate non-trivial damage to homes/apartments like leaky roof not reporting it to insurance companies for weeks.
Then with cars people often do not follow the maintenance schedule and insurance companies do not ask for that. Typically people drive until damage happens due to a minor accident or maintenance are forced by state required technical inspection once in few years. The car companies even offer free maintenance checks as a part of guarantee but people skip even that.
Yet when someone spends efforts to complain, thinks do gets done. For example there a city service to remove graffiti on public areas. If one files a complain, they react and remove the graffiti. However sometimes one needs to send a complain twice.
Never I had the pipes in my home inspected, even now that I live in areas where it freezes regularly.
Never has anyone (not even my insurance) forced me to follow any particular maintenance schedule (albeit I'm quite sure somewhere in the fine print it will read that if the accident is because of poor maintenance they'll just ignore the claim).
Here the city service to remove Graffiti is almost overnight, and works better than many other public services...
That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured
The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.
All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.
I’m not sure these are comparable, high-speed rail needs much tighter tolerances as the risk is orders of magnitude higher. As the parent comment stated there have been zero major crashes on the japanese shinkansen lines.
There is also no reason to treat speed limits on high speed and normal trains differently. There are plenty of speed related crashes on low speed lines. If anything the stakes are even higher on commuter trains because they tend to carry more people, many of which will be standing, and are more likely to crash into another structure as was the case in the Japanese incident mentioned.
No, Japan more or less invented ATC in the 1960s for the purpose of running the Shinkansen safely.
Does the system automatically slow down the train, or does it notify the engineer? I would imagine that there are some scenarios where going over the speed limit is the correct choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bullet_Train
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Train_Explosion
In the movies terrorists place a bomb on board and the train crew has to maintain a minimum speed or the bomb explodes (this is where that american movie with a bus got the idea). And they have to manipulate the ATC or else it will stop the train when they enter sections of the track with lower minimum speed, or else ATC stops the train and the bomb explodes.
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...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
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.
Fun fact: the reason modern concrete or composite sleepers (e.g. [1]) have a slightly concave profile is to better resist lateral forces (i.e. buckling) than traditional straight-profile wooden sleepers.
[1] https://www.romicgroup.com/permanent-way/concrete-railway-sl...
1. According to the CIAF, the break in the track was "practically undetectable." The fracture on the track was not noticed by the trains that passed over it, or by the technicians responsible for the maintenance of the infrastructure.
2. The damaged train, which belongs to the Italian company Iryo, is heavier than other trains running on the track; the additional weight of the Iryo train may have been a factor, or possibly even one of the causes, of the derailment.
3. The CIAF said that the notches registered in the wheels and the deformation in the rail are "compatible" with the fact that the track was broken before the Iryo train passed over it.
4. Spanish Transportation Minister Óscar Puente rejected criticism of the delay of the rescuers; according to the Minister, rescuers arrived within "18 minutes."
The full article is available here: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2026/01/24/mundo/020n3mun
This sounds like something a camera mounted on a sample of trains watching a wheel could catch.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
https://people.com/train-collides-with-crane-arm-in-4th-rail...
It's clear some of them are probably caused by neglect in maintenance, others are freak accidents.
It's pretty crazy the statistical probabilities involved for something like this.
An Asturias Circanías train collided with debris from a collapsed tunnel wall on Thursday afternoon in Olloniego. No injured though
High-speed lines (AVE): Visual and geometry inspections are performed daily to weekly using inspection trains and onboard measurement systems. Ultrasonic rail flaw detection is typically done every 1 to 3 months, depending on traffic and tonnage.
Source: ADIF high-speed maintenance programs and EU interoperability maintenance requirements.
It seems a shame that a few other trains passed beforehand with this anomaly in place and yet it went undetected.
For example, in the U.K.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320
China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains
UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
> Line inspection is carried out at full speed, up to 270 km/h or 168 mph on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen and 285 km/h or 177 mph on the Sanyō Shinkansen
Under "rail break monitors" it mentions both electrical continuity and time-domain reflectometry can be used, and are most frequently used on high-speed tracks.
In addition, there are vast array of other detectors using acoustic sensors, strain gauges, accelerometers, cameras in the visible and infrared spectrum or laser measurement, that potentially could have detected an anomaly (i.e. damage to the wheels of other trains before the incident).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Defect_detector
We squeezed some track condition monitoring hardware into some locos but it was single-driver operations locations and we cannibalised some of the room that would have otherwise been occupied by the second driver.
It measures vertical forces in kips - (kilo-pounds-force, 1 KIP = 1,000 lbs)
They have these in the USA.
Though conceivably the break was very small and a train impacting the slightly lifted rail just caused a good chunk of it to explode.
The crown (top) of the rail seems to be missing after the gap. The crown-less section then continues ~3 meters before it disappears behind the investigator on the left. IDK what that might indicate.
ref pic: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/ecb4/live/53924...
edit: other angles of the same location here: https://youtu.be/DIQ4SrGSua0?t=1174
Ah, I see it now. The marks from contact with the ties should have clued me in earlier.
The crack was in the weld, causing one side to sink and the wheel to hit the start of the next section of rail which was no longer welded to it, causing stress fractures to form in the rail which later caused that 40cm piece to break off.
And how does it accord with the many statements made early on about the track being renewed recently?
Still the media in question, "El Mundo", is a mouthpiece for the opposition parties, seeking to create indignation against the government and scoring the head of the Transport Minister in particular.
They also want to make a parallel with the situation of the former President of the Valencian Community, from their party, who had to finally resign one year after being unreachable for hours on a date while hundreds of valencians drowned as his administration waffled aimlessly.
Of course the government is ultimately responsible for the state of the infrastructure, so the Minister well might have to resign after all is said and done, but the innuendo in that piece is pure politicking, not serious journalism.
https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2026/01/25/697635e8fc6c83c42...
I think these kinds of accidents are largely mitigated by rail defect monitoring. I know rails in the US are equipped with defect detectors for passing trains; I'm surprised that a similar system doesn't exist for the rails themselves. Or more likely, one does exist and the outcome of this tragedy will be a lesson about operational failures.
the more you build the more maintenance costs rise.
That's simply really, really rare bad luck.
Practically anything you can think of is going to be a more effective use of safety resources than trying to contain a derailing high-speed train.
Also the issues other comments described, including that any fault in the barrier means a new safety hazard
But that requires the trains mostly always being on schedule.
Spain needs to rethink the way it operates trains. I think Switzerland handles this better, overall, though they probably also don't have as many fast trains because there are so many mountains. But I refer more to the intrinsic quality control and assumption made. If I recall correctly in Spain, there was the other train also coming in. I am sure they could have built the tracks differently. Granted, the issue here is cost, and an attempt to keep the cost down, but if you then accept disasters like that, it seems really awkward to me to want to save money here. And now that we know the track was already damaged, that just adds more validity to questioning whether the quality control systems were overall proper.
I could make a cheap shot about fires in bars...but I won't.
Distance isn't even remotely relevant to complexity of running safe operations.
Data like fatalities per 1 million kilometers driven is significantly more relelvant - all metrics at which Swiss railways significantly exceed any European rail despite operating at significantly larger density of traffic.
Spanish railways have lately killed a horrifying amount of passengers - perhaps instead of insulting more competent operators, it's time to look at what keep going wrong there? Any responsible person would call for experts and advice here - e.g. we commonly see thet in air safety where foreign safety experts are invited to investigate and provide their own reports and recommendations.
What you seem to be doing here is something directly opposed to it and very very toxic - nationallistically trying to insults others and save face, which is very contraproductive for future safety.
Ad hominem so I'll discard most of your post. You lose when you try to insult my character.
> Spanish railways have lately killed a horrifying amount of passengers
Swiss bars have lately burned a horrifying amount of customers. Get your own house in order :)