Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds

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.

And the other one was, as far as I remember, likely deliberate based on the pilot’s flight simulation data.

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 incidents were 4 months apart, so considering the number of flights the odds were still pretty good on that bet.

> 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.

Yep, plus their network is pretty new anyways. Which generally needs less maintenance than older infrastructure.

This was a track laid a few weeks ago? I think that's the problem.

Soldered eh? No wonder then that it broke.

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.

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%.

Regardless of Cryptonomicon's utility in understanding Japan, the statement that "none of that book takes place in Japan" is not true.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

But yeah dude, we’re all Russian shills.

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.

At full speed!

We oftentimes take ridiculous risks to save only 1-5 minutes of our time. Although reading about the Spanish disaster, the driver was rather reckless.

That despite seismic activity they managed to avoid a catastrophe like ones in Spain

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.

[dead]

There are some lines that were originally built as regular narrow gauge railways and later converted to standard gauge supporting Shinkansen trainsets.

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.

The answer was almost certainly generated by an LLM.

"thing; thing, Japan" is a meme for a reason. I was wondering how long it would take to appear in this thread.

> 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.)

> France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.

At least in France, high speed trains on older tracks won't go as fast as on the dedicated high speed 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.

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.

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.

> That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.

No, Japan more or less invented ATC in the 1960s for the purpose of running the Shinkansen safely.

ATC stops the train - this is actually an important plot point in both "shinaksen explosion" movies:

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Not necessarily, no. Train underframes can be quite crowded and this equipment is very industrial.

They can go at high speed:

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

Not necessarily, the measurement train my company develops can go up to 100 km/h and measure certain rail features every 5mm at that speed.

> 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...

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.

Next to the weld, if we're being pedantic. The weld itself is stronger than regular rail, but the welding process weakens the rail right next to it.

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.

if they are already doing a poor job maintaining their tracks, what gives you such confidence that they would maintain the barrier properly?

the more you build the more maintenance costs rise.

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.