Information comes drop by drop.
Currently the government is trying to put all the blame in a single human error. But multiple systems that shouldn’t had fail in a well maintained system did indeed fail.
The problems with high speed trains in Spain are more than evident. Two massive fatal accidents are the most dramatic ones, but there are countless of non lethal problems every day.
The workers they are trying to pin the blame on are overworked to death, they doubled their responsibilities without giving them more people to balanced it. The workers had complain multiple times by formal letter that this amount of exhaustion and overwork was leading to security problems.
There is a systemic problem that has a lot to do with lack of funding. The reason of the lack of founding is more in the air, but the previous Transport Minister is going to jail for corruption, and the current one while currently has no open causes is close to too many corrupt politicians I don’t trust him not to have taken public money thar were supposed to go to train maintenance and keep it to himself.
This is incredibly sad, because it puts the country in a very hard situation. These corrupt politicians are the current alternative to the alt right. The alt right and the right (which is also alt at this point) is going to win by a landslide, but it’s very very hard to justify the vote for these people when these things keep happening.
For myself their current response is going to determine if I go to the polls on November or just go straight up to build resistance networks against the future fascist government. But if the Transport Minister keeps throwing under the bus overworked and understaffed workers, I’m not going to vote for them.
We’ve got the same funding on transport that we had on 2012. Austerity policies killed these people.
For anyone interested in some details, here are two videos demonstrating the braking ability of this type of train.
Firstly, here’s a video showing the place of the accident: https://youtu.be/2-dxeLSmMXs&t=2231s
At spot 37:28 the accident spot is passed. It’s only at 37:21 that the spot becomes properly visible well enough for the driver to understand the other train is on his track. So, he had some seven seconds to slow down.And here’s a video showing how that type of train decelerates in a full braking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJpg0EcS5M
The accident train was an export version of the German ICE3 train, and this video is about an ICE train. Check how much the train is able to slow down in 7 seconds from various speeds. For example, from 300 km/h it slows down to “only” about 275 km/h in those 7 seconds. If the train has been running a bit slower, then of course there were a couple more seconds of time to slow down, but that still doesn’t help super much.LZB is from the 60s, and the supposed replacement ETCS is an absolute nightmare mandate from the EU. There are lots of control systems, but you can’t get funding for a different non-ETCS from the EU. Similar outages have happened in Germany which have resulted in near misses.
In theory, they would have avoided an accident if all trains had started again, but that’s the very reason they shouldn’t have, or at least only at low speed. You cannot guarantee that will be the case. Stopped trains are really annoying, but they don’t crash, and everyone on those trains would’ve rather stayed.
ETCS is an absolute nightmare mandate
What makes it a nightmare mandate?
It’s been extremely slow to develop (30+ years) and it’s being forced by funding rules rather than trying to develop the best intercompatible standard on the open market.
It’s like the phones-must-have-USB-C mandate, where the EU mandates a specific technology rather than, say, a working group that picks the best standard. But in the case of USB-C, it already existed and was relatively easy to swap in for the incompatible standards with respect to price, manufacturing etc. So even though it is generally a bad idea to mandate a specific technology, it’s fine.
With ETCS, it’s not like they have banned competing technologies, but they have put their thumb on the scale in favour of ETCS in a way that makes it more economically attractive. But it’s an extremely slowly evolving standard, and it’s not better than competing systems, in fact part of the slow down is that it keeps getting updated to better compete, leaving a compatibility trail behind it. Essentially this increases red tape to any paths towards innovation or improvement, and a lot of places are just sticking with their aging systems… which may be a problem.
trying to develop the best intercompatible standard on the open market.
How would you, actually, achieve this? How would the open market develop a good intercompatible standard that then everyone would use?
This is the approach taken with the automatic cargo wagon couplers, the transition been going on for about four decades now and there are basically zero results. The open market cannot seem to achieve any results whatsoever. There’s always some company that does its own thing. Such as Apple was with phone chargers.it is generally a bad idea to mandate a specific technology
Why is it a bad idea? Can you give any examples of where it has been a bad idea? I can recognize a case where it was a very good idea: USB-C.
I assume the culprit is cost cutting as usual?
Human error. There was a train stopped in the railway (maybe because it had an issue, still to be cleared). The system knew of this, so it put a red light which was being respected by the other trains to avoid a crash.
The second train, was waiting in a red light but at a certain moment, a human operator told the train driver to ignore the red light and move. The train driver then started the train despite the red light and this is the end result.
Based on my experience with automated systems that sounds like a situation where the operator has to routinely ignore the red light because it doesn’t work correctly.
Any system in the modern day that relies on one person seeing a light or else 68 people die feels like it has some corners cut somewhere.
Like, roads?
A system than can not be overridden comes with it’s own problems. Also, updating such a system for an entire rail system every x years would cost a ginormous amount of money which means you’ll have to cut somewhere else.
which means you’ll have to cut somewhere else.
Or increase revenue by taxing wealthy and corporations more.
Horrible stuff. I don’t know what to say.
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — A high-speed train slammed into the rear of another train that had stopped, derailing two cars and killing at least 30 people on Wednesday in central Spain, according to local media.
It’s 30 people now.
What are the odds of two high speed deadly collisions in a single year in a single country? I’m not convinced this is an infrastructure issue, or even a training issue, it could be the result of a cyber attack. I hope they are taking that possibility seriously.
