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.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.
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.
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.
He says that around 8:30am this morning, the LZB controlling system failed due to communications issues, leaving no coverage for just over 60km of the track, which in turn triggered an automatic stop for six trains on that stretch.
But around 8:36, the Adif control centre issued a manual instruction to override the warning and let the traffic resume.
He heavily suggests that this “inexplicable” decision should not have been made, as trains should have remained under strict orders not to move.
Just be cautious that the info is from the same minister who apparently*-incorrectly blamed Iryo for the Adamuz crash at first.
*: the report into Adamuz is late & not yet published.
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.
Yikes someone didn’t sleep well that night.
Apparently not. The line is equipped with the German LZB system and a similar accident got very close to happening in Germany for reasons that had nothing to do with cost cutting.
Tagging @nomad@infosec.pub as well.
The usual suspect would be lax security measures due to corruption.
Or another russian-israeli crime to hurt the government
I fucking loathe the Russians and Israelis, but this ain’t that.
Another russian-israeli crime?? what in the fuck kind of mental gymnastics is this? You really think the world is black and white, jedi vs sith don’t ya huh
and of course you’re one of the jedi, right?
Newsflash buttercup, real life ain’t so simple as it is in the movies. You’re maybe too young to remember that Russia directly supported the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, but you should at least be aware of Russia’s current deep alliance with Iran.
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.
I can’t imagine how violent that must’ve been. Such heavy objects colliding, causing thirty people (so far) to lose their lives in the event. 🥺
They are sayin 50 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.
It’s the third major train accident in a year if you include the train derailment that happened two days after the Adamuz disaster
At least the causes were very different. The Adamuz accident took place because of a rail breaking. And it broke in a way that would be difficult to cause using explosives or tools, but rather simply because of not having been checked often enough.
This one was the LZB train protection system’s computers crashing, which caused 8 trains to be stopped by the protection system. The train dispatcher then did not follow the procedure for ordering the trains to return running: They were supposed to drive their first couple of kilometres with a reduced speed, but they were ordered to proceed at full speed. 7 did, 1 stayed still. And then one of the seven moving trains collided at a very high speed with the one that was standing. The LZB computers crashing is apparently a relatively common occurrence, and happens in the home country of the LZB system, Germany, as well. It could have been a “foreign entity” (heh, guess which one), but actually there’s good reason to believe it was a “regular” software mishap. However, what is sure is that the resulting disaster took place because of dispatcher error, and that cannot have been because of any foreign influence.
Apparently the crashing driver blindly followed the order of retaking full speed with no regards to a red light that should have been denoting an occupied track, so either two humans failed in a row or the protocols are severly flawed. Investigations must clarify this.
Somebody elsewhere in Internet had a theory that the driver might have accelerated after seeing a green pre-signal. The Iryo had stopped right in front of the signal, so the next block was free of trains and its signal would therefore show green. And that means, so does the pre-signal on the previous block.
There is nothing super spectacular against passing a red signal with oral instructions from the dispatcher. The instruction typically has to include the identifying number of that specific signal, so you need a separate instruction for each red signal that you pass. This also includes a reduced speed limit, typically around 40 km/h. But, in some places in Spain, it might be as high as 100 km/h. If that was the case here (there’s no proof it was!), then the driver has had some maybe two kilometres of time to accelerate from 100 km/h until the crash site. That translates to maybe one minute of full-power acceleration from 100 km/h. If the assumption of 100 km/h limit when passing red lights with oral instructions is correct, then the train driver may have followed the procedure completely correctly. Of course, since the first wagon of that train has pretty much disappeared, you cannot ask the driver many questions. You can see 7 wagons of the 8-wagon-long train in the El Pais photos but the 8th wagon is nowhere to be seen. Except that in the last wagon of the Iryo train, you can see a little bit of the letter V from the AVE logo on the AVE train, so apparently the AVE train’s first wagon has penetrated the full length of the Iryo train’s last wagon and is simply hiding inside the red walls of the Iryo train.
The crash took place after a curve to the right. In a video made from a train’s driver cabin some years ago, it took 7 seconds from the spot where the accident site becomes visible to the train passing that site. A train doesn’t slow down very much in 7 seconds.
Low, but not zero. Failures happen, and disaster news gets clicks, so it gets reported on more widely.
Funny enough, I was writing about that yesterday.
Exactly. What’s the point of reporting this outside of Spain, other than generating clicks and engagement? I think it’s irresponsible, makes people wary of travelling by train. Meanwhile more people die on the Spanish roads every 2 weeks (daily in the US).
https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/spain-road-safety.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
You might really like my post from yesterday.
I really did like it! Thanks for bringing it up, the more people read it, the better.
yeah I wouldn’t put it past the fsb one bit to create this chaos
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This must be hard.
After events like these Anyone who is invested in the private company and not below the poverty line should be held criminally liable for the deaths. The more invested the more liable.
ADIF is not a private company but a state bureau.
Seems more like a systemic fault… There should be sooo many detectors and warning systems in place to make sure this just can’t happen without gross negligence
Those things cost money and don’t directly improve efficiency… So anyone invested in said company was directly or indirectly involved in not having those protections in place so they could get more money.
Those were in place, but the computer systems crashed. That caused all eight affected trains to be stopped by the protection devices you are referring to. The train dispatcher then has to follow a certain procedure to reset the situation, but he did not. He told all 8 to proceed at full speed, although the correct procedure calls for all trains to clear the affected area at a reduced speed, after which the protection system will return to normal use, allowing for full speeds.
Dispatcher is a part of the security system. If what you write was the case, then this was still the security system failing and it seems like because of a design flaw. How can one person just authorize full speed in such situation? Why would it even be possible to run the trains at the full speed with protection devices not working?
But I’ll wait for some proper report…
There was a bad close-call in Finland, where a train drove over a 80 km/h switch at 160 km/h because the driver had forgotten to turn on the train protection device and was expecting to read the speed limit on its screen. The train’s other side actually fully lifted off the rail, but luckily landed back on it instead of the train rolling over. At that point they changed it so that in order to drive full speed without the train protection, the driver has to go through some extra hoops first. There can be situations where that is a useful feature, but it should be made much more difficult than it’s now.
But, as it stands, in almost any train protection system it is assumed that when the system is off-line, railway workers are competent enough to keep things rolling anyway.
The train protection system in question is a German one, BTW. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung
