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.

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)

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.

1: https://www.jreast.co.jp/recruit/career/diversity/propulsion...

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.

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.

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/ipsavage/436.pdf

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nice job, i won't get fooled again though.

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.

* 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.

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).

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.

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.

Alas, maintenance isn't sexy for governments.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Spain

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

https://www.abc.es

So thanks for giving me downvotes just because you use outdated news sources!

You must have an incredibly high P(h)...

French riots? Russia

Spain train accident? Russia

Right wing party wins? Russia

Rainy weekend? Russia