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.
[–] NoLinkToMe 21 hours ago
[–] renehsz 15 hours ago
Human lives matter in absolute numbers, and we should strive to increase safety wherever possible with reasonable effort. Railways in some countries still have some very low-hanging fruit!
The aviation industry has shown that safety as the number one priority does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Layers of redundancy, excellent training, and very good investigations and changes based on their recommendations are what keeps the flying public safe.
Accidents still happen in aviation, but we're at a point of diminishing returns where increasing safety is getting quite difficult. When an aircrew encounters a problem, they can't just stop the plane mid-air to figure things out. The plane has to land, no matter what. That is inherently more risky.
Contrast that with a train, which can more or less just stop wherever it is when something goes wrong. This allows for building a lot of fail-safe/passively safe systems. When there's a problem, just halt operations and take your time to figure things out. Good procedures and adherence to them are still absolutely necessary, but at least there's usually no actual time pressure (only perceived) and malfunctions rarely pose an actual risk if handled correctly.
What aviation has also shown us is that accident investigations need to be 100% honest about underlying causes. "This guy made a mistake, too bad" is never ever an acceptable reason. We have to dig deeper.
People will always make mistakes. But how was such a simple mistake allowed to have such dire consequences? Were there not enough layers of redundancy? Was the training inadequate? Were the rules and procedures inadequate, underspecified, or unclear? Was there a company culture of bending the rules to get the job done? Was there a general lack of safety culture and incident management? Etc.pp.
> All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place
I had guessed that was the case, but didn't want to state it definitively, as I'm not familiar with the rules in Spain specifically. But that then raises the question of why the rules weren't followed.
> the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed
As I explained earlier, "there's been a misunderstanding" is not good enough, I'm sure the report will dig deep to find the underlying causes and will issue plenty of recommendations to prevent this in the future.
I will refrain from speculating on what those causes are though, as there are far too many possibilities. But it's almost certainly a combination of multiple unfortunate factors that led to this horrible accident.
There was no excuse at all in my post, not sure what you're replying to.
It was only pointed out that despite failures in train systems, it's still safer than driving a car.
> One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.
All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place, but overruled. The protocol wasn't followed. The driver was supposed to go at 40, it's the protocol, but the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed. The normal speed on that track is 200km/h by the way.