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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds
Helmut10001 wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
Could electrical resistance be measured in train tracks to monitor
sudden drops, such as fractures, before they cause loss of life?
beng-nl wrote 1 min ago:
A new mode for fluke meters is born: the train conductor
NamTaf wrote 20 min ago:
it is possible, track signals can be triggered by shorting between
two rails for example.
webburgos wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
A stupid journalist, opposed to the current government, read a date in
YY-MM-DD format as DD-MM-YY
tedggh wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
On Spainâs conventional and high-speed rail network, inspection
frequency is defined by ADIF rules and EU railway safety standards.
High-speed lines (AVE):
Visual and geometry inspections are performed daily to weekly using
inspection trains and onboard measurement systems. Ultrasonic rail flaw
detection is typically done every 1 to 3 months, depending on traffic
and tonnage.
Source: ADIF high-speed maintenance programs and EU interoperability
maintenance requirements.
diogenes_atx wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
An article published in Saturday's edition of the Mexican newspaper La
Jornada provides more details about the cause of the crash. The article
is in Spanish; here are some of the main points, translated into
English:
1. According to the CIAF, the break in the track was "practically
undetectable." The fracture on the track was not noticed by the trains
that passed over it, or by the technicians responsible for the
maintenance of the infrastructure.
2. The damaged train, which belongs to the Italian company Iryo, is
heavier than other trains running on the track; the additional weight
of the Iryo train may have been a factor, or possibly even one of the
causes, of the derailment.
3. The CIAF said that the notches registered in the wheels and the
deformation in the rail are "compatible" with the fact that the track
was broken before the Iryo train passed over it.
4. Spanish Transportation Minister Ãscar Puente rejected criticism of
the delay of the rescuers; according to the Minister, rescuers arrived
within "18 minutes."
The full article is available here:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2026/01/24/mundo/020n3mun
JumpCrisscross wrote 15 hours 32 min ago:
ââ¦not only did Iryo train's front carriages which stayed on the
track have "notches" in their wheels, but three earlier trains that
went over the track earlier did too.â
This sounds like something a camera mounted on a sample of trains
watching a wheel could catch.
NamTaf wrote 14 min ago:
More simply, you measure the impact for dangerous forces. No need to
overcook it.
kumarvvr wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
It would require a very high speed camera, and a floodlight, which
may be impractical.
zelphirkalt wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
The camera would probably only need to look at a very small section
at high speed. They could be specifically made to film the tracks
or the wheels of the train. Such cameras exist. Not cheap, but even
some YouTubers have similar ones, to film high speed impact videos
of things going much faster than trains. Might be worth it for
trains.
mkl wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
Japan, Germany, France, China, and the UK check their tracks at
high speed. I don't know if Spain does, but there are news
articles about them ordering such an inspection train in 2019: [1]
[2] [3] [4] [5]
(HTM) [1]: https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/adif-orders-hig...
(HTM) [2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
(HTM) [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
(HTM) [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320
(HTM) [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains
(HTM) [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
jdkrkekebeb wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
As a train wouldn't have the space??
NamTaf wrote 7 min ago:
Not necessarily, no. Train underframes can be quite crowded and
this equipment is very industrial.
christkv wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
We actually have had 4 train accidents and incidents in a week. [1]
It's clear some of them are probably caused by neglect in maintenance,
others are freak accidents.
It's pretty crazy the statistical probabilities involved for something
like this.
(HTM) [1]: https://people.com/train-collides-with-crane-arm-in-4th-rail-a...
hexbin010 wrote 15 hours 4 min ago:
5!
An Asturias CircanÃas train collided with debris from a collapsed
tunnel wall on Thursday afternoon in Olloniego. No injured though
shevy-java wrote 16 hours 8 min ago:
Quite a tragedy.
Spain needs to rethink the way it operates trains. I think Switzerland
handles this better, overall, though they probably also don't have
as many fast trains because there are so many mountains. But I refer
more to the intrinsic quality control and assumption made. If I recall
correctly in Spain, there was the other train also coming in. I am
sure they could have built the tracks differently. Granted, the issue
here is cost, and an attempt to keep the cost down, but if you then
accept disasters like that, it seems really awkward to me to want to
save money here. And now that we know the track was already damaged,
that just adds more validity to questioning whether the quality control
systems were overall proper.
hexbin010 wrote 14 hours 58 min ago:
I mean maybe something of merit in that, but Spain has nearly 4000km
of hitherto excellent and safe high speed rail and Switzerland around
200 km. Who should be giving lessons to whom? ;) Totally different
scale of operations
izacus wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
Your comparison is nonsense and using nonsense metric.
hexbin010 wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
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.
christkv wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
Some more info from Spanish media. The track that broke was from 1989
and had not been maintained properly.
kgwgk wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
No, the claim is that the broken rail was the new one but it happened
at the transition from old to new.
christkv wrote 15 hours 58 min ago:
Jupp you are right I had not read up on the news today.
hexbin010 wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Got a link?
And how does it accord with the many statements made early on about
the track being renewed recently?
fcatalan wrote 15 hours 47 min ago:
Apparently the weld that broke joined an old segment with a new one
installed last year as the tracks are renovated piecemeal.
Still the media in question, "El Mundo", is a mouthpiece for the
opposition parties, seeking to create indignation against the
government and scoring the head of the Transport Minister in
particular.
They also want to make a parallel with the situation of the former
President of the Valencian Community, from their party, who had to
finally resign one year after being unreachable for hours on a date
while hundreds of valencians drowned as his administration waffled
aimlessly.
Of course the government is ultimately responsible for the state of
the infrastructure, so the Minister well might have to resign after
all is said and done, but the innuendo in that piece is pure
politicking, not serious journalism.
christkv wrote 15 hours 57 min ago:
I have one in Spanish. Seems the latest info is that it broke where
the new rails meet the old rail.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2026/01/25/697635e8fc6c83c...
iwwr wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
AFAIK continuously welded tracks (like those used in high speed rail)
are also slightly tensioned, so a break in a single point could make it
look like a whole section of track is missing, as tension is released.
Sharlin wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
CWT is laid in such a way that it has net zero stress in a "neutral"
temperature, which naturally depends on the climate. Both extreme
heat and extreme cold can cause damage, buckling and
fracturing/embrittlement respectively, and choosing the neutral
temperature is balancing act. But even if completely cut, track
cannot shrink longitudinally much at all, it's the job of the
sleepers and the ballast to keep it anchored in place. And if the
track is laid on a concrete slab rather than ballast, it isn't moving
anywhere.
Fun fact: the reason modern concrete or composite sleepers (e.g. [1])
have a slightly concave profile is to better resist lateral forces
(i.e. buckling) than traditional straight-profile wooden sleepers.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.romicgroup.com/permanent-way/concrete-railway-sl...
sva_ wrote 17 hours 22 min ago:
I wonder how common it is for train tracks to fracture? And what
systems are in place to actually detect this. There was recently a post
on a German subreddit where the OP found a fracture in the German
rail[0], albeit much smaller.
0.
(HTM) [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1qe9ko2/ich_glau...
crote wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
Rare, but not unheard of. See for example the Hatfield disaster in
2000, or the 2021 Ghotki rail crash.
Most railways regularly inspect their tracks to detect issues before
they turn into a disaster. The big question here will be: why wasn't
this caught earlier?
dv_dt wrote 15 hours 5 min ago:
Fractures could happen with ground shifting - perhaps recent flooding
could have contributed
bahmboo wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
Nice find. The gap in the Spanish track is massive. I donât know
enough to speculate on technical reasons but it seems quite odd.
crote wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
The rail fractured into pieces during the derailment. You can see
some of those pieces lying around in the photographs.
As the article notes: the initial break left marks on the wheels of
several previous trains. The final gap is big enough that no train
could possibly make it past it, so it is pretty clear that the gap
got larger as the incident progressed.
laurencerowe wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
Rails expand and contract according to the temperature (11mm per
degree C per km). They are continuously welded together and
installed under tension and heated to a neutral / median
temperature for the location. It was around 0C that night in an
area that gets up to 47C (and rails might get hotter under the sun)
so there was at least 300mm of contraction per kilometre of rail.
blibble wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
> I wonder how common it is for train tracks to fracture?
very
> And what systems are in place to actually detect this.
track circuit detection would pick up most cases I would have thought
crote wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Yes, but it would be shown as a false "block occupied" signal.
Which could also have plenty of other causes, such as broken
cabling or defective track circuit equipment, and as the Weyauwega
disaster taught us it wouldn't detect a partial break.
Provided track circuit detection is even used, of course. 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.
mschuster91 wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
> I wonder how common it is for train tracks to fracture?
That entirely depends on which class of tracks we're talking about.
And on top of that, remember that Europe is at war with Russia,
railway sabotage has been attributed to Russia already in Poland [1]
- and if you ask me, I don't believe for a single goddamn second that
"cable thieves" were the cause behind the infamous 2022 attack on
Germany's railways [2] either.
> And what systems are in place to actually detect this.
In Germany, dedicated railway cars called "RAILab" [3] that can
measure track performance at up to 200 km/h perform the bulk of the
work. In addition, each piece of infrastructure has something called
an "Anlagenverantwortlicher", a person responsible for it - and that
person has to walk each piece of infrastructure every two years at
the very least, sections that have shown to be problematic get walked
sometimes weekly. [1] [2]
(HTM) [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gknv8nxlzo
(HTM) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...
(HTM) [3]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
crote wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
Copper theft has been a recurring problem in multiple European
countries for well over a decade. Railway outages caused by damaged
cabling increased as the copper price rose, and decreased as police
cracked down on scrap dealers accepting railway cabling without
proper provenance. Damaged aluminum and fiber cables are also
common, as thieves usually aren't exactly the smartest people.
The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this
incident. 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.
iSnow wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
In November, a bigger missing part of a train track was due to
sabotage:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp85g86x0zgo
dmix wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
Thatâs pretty far from Spain
red75prime wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
It happened near Polish-Ukrainian border and officials were vocal
about sabotage.
david-gpu wrote 17 hours 43 min ago:
While these events are statistically very rare, it is worth remembering
that there have been two separate events in the past twenty years in
Spain where high-speed trains have derailed leading to multiple
fatalities [1][2]. In contrast, the Japanese Shinkansen has a spotless
record since its introduction in the 1960s [3]. Not a single fatality
due to a crash or derailment. And that's in a country with a much
larger population and much higher passenger count per year.
What do they do differently? [1] [2]
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailmen...
(HTM) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_train_derailments
(HTM) [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record
numpad0 wrote 28 min ago:
Japanese rails are all built on commuter style architectures and the
tracks are generally owned by its users. So train operators are
strongly incentivized to keep them in good shape.
Also, Far East right now is also massively cash poor yet labor rich
relative to the rest of the world. Everything is crazy undervalued
and there are clear gaps between amounts of money changing hands vs
work being done. Skilled-labor-intensive tasks are going to be much
easier when cheap skilled labor is just perpetually available.
Ekaros wrote 4 hours 31 min ago:
My understanding is that Shinkansen that is high speed rail in Japan
is grade separated system. That is tracks are only used by high speed
rail. In Europe generally tracks are shared outside few specific
links.
This means that Shinkansen tracks are designed and build to much
higher standard.
evan_a_a wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
In Spain the high speed network is separate from the traditional
network too. There is some inter connectivity to allow for high
speed trains to call at traditional stations, but the high speed
network is for high speed trains only.
m4rtink wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
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.
chakintosh wrote 4 hours 38 min ago:
> What do they do differently?
Accountability.
NewJazz wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
Different soil? Different climate/weather patterns.
Japan having to build to earthquake standards, so being more robust
overall? Or to specific failure modes, at least.
Animats wrote 10 hours 20 min ago:
Doctor Yellow.[1] Full rail inspection every ten days.
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
wvbdmp wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
At full speed!
legitronics wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
> And that's in a country with a much larger population and much
higher passenger count per year.
These are actually points making the Japanese system easier to
maintain. Because of smaller surface area itâs much denser.
tjwebbnorfolk wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
earthquakes, tho? Maybe the constant state of necessary vigilance
has something to do with it here.
userbinator wrote 15 hours 49 min ago:
Japan has a culture of perfection.
prmoustache wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
But every culture has its exceptions. 2 words: Tataka airbags.
wafflemaker wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
After reading Shogun, Cryptonomicon and watching plenty anime and
documents about Japan (including Japanese rail system - still using
the "pointing and naming" method I've learned from them) I would risk
saying that Japanese do literally everything differently.
komali2 wrote 11 hours 50 min ago:
Japanese people are just people. They have a unique culture... Like
literally every other identifiable culture on earth.
I love Cryptonomicon but it engaged in that distinctly American
brand of orientalism when it got into Japanese soldiers killing
themselves and whatnot.
herewulf wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
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.
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima_Incident
jacquesm wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
There are probably better sources than those two. What's next,
citations from Enoch Root?
Arainach wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
A list consisting entirely of fictional works (one by an American
who has never lived in Japan even) is not a good basis for claiming
to understand a culture.
Seriously, Cryptonomicon is a bizarre thing to put on this list. I
like the it a lot, but none of that book takes place in Japan and
the closest intersection is Japanese soldiers during World War II,
with a brief participation of a single fictional Japanese company
in the modern section of the book.
egl2020 wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
Regardless of Cryptonomicon's utility in understanding Japan, the
statement that "none of that book takes place in Japan" is not
true.
tyre wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
Well I have watched the show adaptation of Shogun, which features
authentic Japanese language, and enjoy the occasional Omakase (in
Brooklyn), so Iâd say Iâm pretty qualified to comment on
Japanese rail over the past sixty years.
andrecarini wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
I've managed to draw the Japan flag in middle school one time.
Add me to the list of reputable sources.
gambutin wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
Iâve read the Wikipedia article about Japan and had a
friend living there. Beat that!
herewulf wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
I grew up playing all the Mario games and wrote a
dissertation on an Internet forum, so now I have a PhD in
both Japanese and Italian culture!
shevy-java wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
Yeah. Japan really has better quality standards here overall.
Now - Japanese mentality is strange to me, but the quality standards
and thought process, are convincing.
masklinn wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
A component here is the highly unfortunate timing of two trains
crossing one another as one of the trains derailed. Both trains look
like rigid HSRs, and usually when these derails they stay very stable
and rarely have fatalities.
baq wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
Perhaps there are less FSB agents blowing up sections of track with
shaped charges in Japan.
hexbin010 wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
Source?
hibikir wrote 17 hours 19 min ago:
They are two very different accidents: The second was
insufficient/poor maintenance: Supposedly the train that checks for
this had passed 2 months before, and someone will have to wonder
whether it's just not passing often enough, or if the inspections are
just poor in general.
The first was purely a matter of not upgrading the signaling in a
very low speed section: The crash could have happened with regional
trains too. Every engineer knew that it was unsafe and one
distraction was enough to get someone killed, but Spain is still well
in the middle of track expansion, so it's all the horrors of
politicking. Unless you have a crash, not upgrading those signals
costs nothing, but, say, the very expensive connection to Asturias
was worth a lot, so iffy tradeoffs were made.
Hopefully better engineering-driven tradeoffs are made regarding
track maintenance, but hey, this is Spain, not a place where we are
good at efficient, reliable safety processes: See the failures in
Valencia for the DANA, where the chain between the meteorologists
seeing a risk that led to recommending evacuation, and the actual
order of evacuation was so slow, so we ended up with 229 deaths.
pibaker wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
I am not sure what conclusion can we draw from, as you said, two very
rare incidents over a long period of time.
Reminds me of when Malaysian airlines crashed two planes in a short
period of time. It was a good time to get cheap flights from Europe
to south east Asia as long as you can withstand relatives thinking
you are literally going to die in their third crash.
MaxikCZ wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
imagine thinking the same way after the first crash, just
as long as you can withstand relatives thinking you are literally
going to die in their second crash,
and then you die in their second crash.
schiffern wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
The incidents were 4 months apart, so considering the number of
flights the odds were still pretty good on that bet.
Freak_NL wrote 17 hours 8 min ago:
Bit of an odd comparison, given that one of those flights (MH17)
was shot down by a Russian Buk squad. That was not an issue
attributable to the carrier in any way, and after the incident the
likelihood of it happening again to Malaysia Airlines specifically
was negligible.
tyre wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
And the other one was, as far as I remember, likely deliberate
based on the pilotâs flight simulation data.
kijin wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
That one doesn't reflect well on the airline IMO. There should
be systems in place to help employees cope with mental health
issues so that they don't end up hijacking their own plane.
pibaker wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
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.
wafflemaker wrote 15 hours 46 min ago:
Or Girkin not ordering the civilian plane full of people to be
shot down. It was a civilian plane at 10km altitude with a
transponder on.
Really doesn't look like a jet on a radar.
And up to that point Russia wasn't known to supply the
separatists with an anti air system and the crew to run it.
avazhi wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Thatâs not the point, though.
Donât fly a commercial passenger jet over an active known
war zone. Then you donât even really have to think about
whether the separatists below you know whether your signature
looks like a fighter jet or not lol.
Never leave your safety to the vagaries of Russian
incompetence or malice, surely.
oneshtein wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
Russia is active war zone. Russians are flying commercial
passenger jets over active war zone and then shooting them.
Embraer E190 was the latest victim of Russians. Russia is
the problem.
aunty_helen wrote 14 hours 18 min ago:
Doesnât look like a F14 either but a US warship, rather
than some guys in a field, still managed to pull that off and
send 290 people to their graves.
LorenPechtel wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
But it did look like an F-14. There really was an F-14,
just on the ground at an Iranian airbase. And the
Vincennes was under armed attack at the time--Iran let a
civilian jetliner overfly their own attack. Plenty of
blame for them, also.
digitalPhonix wrote 9 hours 30 min ago:
> But it did look like an F-14
It absolutely did not. The RCS of an F-14 v/s an Airbus
A300 is an order of magnitude different (probably 2 or 3
orders).
> There really was an F-14, just on the ground at an
Iranian airbase
There was, but thatâs a red herring for the root cause.
Each shipâs radar independently and correctly
identified and tracked the Airbus separate from the Mode
2 targets, but when communicating the track information
between ships, the tracks were mixed up.
Source: The US Navyâs own account: [1] > There was a
combat camera team aboard the Vincennes, and the footage
depicts considerable confusion and even ill-discipline
amongst the crew (cheering, shouting, football game
atmosphere) that contributed to one of the most tragic
events in U.S. Navy history
(HTM) [1]: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhh...
edwcross wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
The URL you linked to results in a 503 error (Service
unavailable) and the Wayback Machine returns "Error
code: 403 Forbidden" with "Looks like thereâs a
problem with this site", for all timestamps I tried, in
2025 or 2024.
I'm outside the US so that's probably the cause. Is
such information available elsewhere?
peyton wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
It would seem the air defense systems used could not reliably
determine what you imply they should [1][2]. Iâm not sure
where youâre coming from, or why it would matter what one
country was known or not known to do.
[1]
(HTM) [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/18/12951/ho...
(HTM) [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/20...
lostlogin wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
> why it would matter what one country was known or not
known to do.
It absolutely matters.
Flying over a war zone with known anti aircraft missiles is
quite different to flying over a low level conflict that is
using small arms only.
kubanczyk wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
> Flying over a war zone with known anti aircraft
missiles is quite different to flying over a low level
conflict that is using small arms only.
What was in the news at the time, and the news are still
linked from [1] 2 June 2014: "Luhansk airstrike"
14 June 2014: "A Ukrainian Air Force Ilyushin Il-76MD was
shot down"
20 June 2014: "The insurgents [...] shot down a Su-25
bomber."
14 July 2014: "Ukrainian Air Force launched air strikes
targeting insurgent positions across Donetsk and Luhansk
oblasts. The Ukrainian government said that 500
insurgents were killed"
17 July 2014: "DPR forces shot down a civilian passenger
jet, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17"
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas#Esca...
fluder_tw wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
There was no war zone at that time.
jojomodding wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
Airlines started being more sensitive to this after the 2014
crash
lifestyleguru wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
> Santiago de Compostela derailment
Hey that infrastructure looks perfectly fine and new, ahhh ok... they
were going 180kmh where the speed limit was 80kmh..
pibaker wrote 17 hours 7 min ago:
Which is also exactly how the most deadly rail incident in the past
half century in japan happened.
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
lifestyleguru wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
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.
cromka wrote 17 hours 26 min ago:
I think even more important is the seismic activity in Japan asa risk
factor here
avazhi wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Are you suggesting this leads to more inspections or better
inspections or better build quality or what?
cromka wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
That despite seismic activity they managed to avoid a catastrophe
like ones in Spain
dinkblam wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
Spain basically does not do the required maintenance:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...
rob74 wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion)
a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any
other country. However, the vast majority went to new
infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance,
renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent
by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less
extensive, according to the Commission data.
Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new
infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much
inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and
overall) railway track would be much more informative...
Findeton wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
Specifically the fractured track was a soldered joint that joined a
track from 1989 with a new one from a few weeks ago.
LorenPechtel wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
This was a track laid a few weeks ago? I think that's the
problem.
jacquesm wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Soldered eh? No wonder then that it broke.
exidy wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and
Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings.
Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder"
(soldado) for both.
yread wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
Czech uses "PájenÃ" (derived from "joining") vs
"SvaÅovánÃ" (derived from "boiling".
So, also different with different etymology in a language
from a different group (although these things were probably
influenced by German)
m4rtink wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Yeah - the Czech wording is quite clever:
* the first one makes it clear a something (a different
material) is used to join things together
* the second one implies you melt/boil the things to join
them together
jacquesm wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in
German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.
English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing',
then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of
soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas
what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen
(which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the
ingredients).
Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I
think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and
(arc) welding.
myrion wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
Schweissen und löten. Has nothing to do with Switzerland
(Schweiz) ;)
jacquesm wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by
the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it
written. German is a language that I will happily use but
don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably
need exponential notation to represent the number of
errors.
duskwuff wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both
(çæ¥), and the standard English translation is "welding".
This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers
start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)
jacquesm wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
Heh, that would be a funny misunderstanding to have as well
as the opposite, when you get back something soldered when
you expected it to be welded.
david-gpu wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
From the linked article:
> [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected
on January 7.
The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection
standards are inadequate?
The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless
without context.
> [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to
new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance,
renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent
by France, Germany and Italy,
They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will
be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget
if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.
imiric wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
> 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.
raverbashing wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
> 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy,
followed by a whole lot of mud slinging
sigh
Of course you're right
db48x wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
But he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new
construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny.
The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age
of track, not percentages of the total budget.
anon7000 wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
Yep, plus their network is pretty new anyways. Which generally
needs less maintenance than older infrastructure.
pixl97 wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's full of
faults.
throwaway743950 wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
Could weather or some other geographic/similar aspect be a factor?
bflesch wrote 16 hours 27 min ago:
The geographic aspect of russian agents being in vincinity of the
traintracks. Week before supply trains in Germany also derailed, as
they do once per month.
N19PEDL2 wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
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.
amenghra wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
Higher passenger count could imply ability to pass higher maintenance
budgets?
vlovich123 wrote 17 hours 43 min ago:
Track maintenance?
bell-cot wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Yep.
Which is the secret of preventing 99%+ of sudden mechanical
failures of pretty much any type of infrastructure.
amelius wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
My gut feeling says a lot of fatalities could have been prevented with
a physical barrier between both tracks. Shouldn't this be mandatory
with high speed trains?
xcskier56 wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
Pure economics. In Minneapolis the railroad demanded a crash wall to
separate the light rail trains from their trains. It runs 1 mile and
somehow cost nearly $100 million. This is a 5x increase from the
original estimate but still $20 million for a 1 mile wall is a heck
of a lot of money
curiousObject wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
Thank about the change in airflow. The train would use more energy
because of having to push air that is trapped by the barrier
Also the issues other comments described, including that any fault in
the barrier means a new safety hazard
bsder wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
You happened to have an opposing train at exactly the point where the
train derailed.
That's simply really, really rare bad luck.
Practically anything you can think of is going to be a more effective
use of safety resources than trying to contain a derailing high-speed
train.
bombcar wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
More practical but still probably unnecessary is having the planned
âpassesâ be where the tracks are separated by some distance.
But that requires the trains mostly always being on schedule.
ThePowerOfFuet wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
The 20-ton bogie was flung 300m. What do you expect the weight of a
whole car to do to such a wall?
wasmitnetzen wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
There was a switchover which made the derailed cars of the first
train move into the track of the second one, you can't have a wall
there anyway.
peddling-brink wrote 17 hours 35 min ago:
Iâd rather they spent the money ensuring no trains ever left their
tracks rather than halving the destruction if they do.
woodruffw wrote 17 hours 35 min ago:
I think the physics of the situation don't make a barrier feasible: a
derailed train going >100 mph is going to transfer a lot of energy to
any kind of barrier it impacts, which in turn might exacerbate the
situation (by spreading debris).
I think these kinds of accidents are largely mitigated by rail defect
monitoring. I know rails in the US are equipped with defect detectors
for passing trains; I'm surprised that a similar system doesn't exist
for the rails themselves. Or more likely, one does exist and the
outcome of this tragedy will be a lesson about operational failures.
direwolf20 wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
In principle only, if a barrier could keep a train on its side of
the barrier, scraping along the barrier for a long distance instead
of smashing headfirst into it, the energy could be dissipated over
a long period of time, preventing fatalities. But what kind of
barrier can withstand a train?
lurking_swe wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
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.
Gare wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
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.
kgwgk wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
The tracks are less than 3m from each other, a derailed car
doesnât need to get very far to be a risk to incoming
traffic.
montroser wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
What are the some of the ways that tracks are monitored for fractures
like this? It must have been pretty substantial in order to be
described as "complete lack of continuity". Makes me think of
literally electronic continuity tests -- are those ever used in this
context? Or how about cameras mounted on trains using image
processing? Or drones?
It seems a shame that a few other trains passed beforehand with this
anomaly in place and yet it went undetected.
NamTaf wrote 14 min ago:
Wheel impacts are the main way. But hardware can be bulky and trains
can be surprisingly cramped.
We squeezed some track condition monitoring hardware into some locos
but it was single-driver operations locations and we cannibalised
some of the room that would have otherwise been occupied by the
second driver.
dkbrk wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
You can look at the Wikipedia page on railway defect dectectors [0].
Under "rail break monitors" it mentions both electrical continuity
and time-domain reflectometry can be used, and are most frequently
used on high-speed tracks.
In addition, there are vast array of other detectors using acoustic
sensors, strain gauges, accelerometers, cameras in the visible and
infrared spectrum or laser measurement, that potentially could have
detected an anomaly (i.e. damage to the wheels of other trains before
the incident).
[0]:
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Defect_detector
djoldman wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
Wheel Impact Load Detector.
It measures vertical forces in kips - (kilo-pounds-force, 1 KIP =
1,000 lbs)
They have these in the USA.
direwolf20 wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
TFA indicates a 40cm gap â huge!
ThePowerOfFuet wrote 16 hours 26 min ago:
No, that gap was created after the rail broke and the train
derailed as a result.
The crack was in the weld, causing one side to sink and the wheel
to hit the start of the next section of rail which was no longer
welded to it, causing stress fractures to form in the rail which
later caused that 40cm piece to break off.
crote wrote 5 hours 59 min ago:
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.
buildbot wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
I suppose that counts/was caused by a fracture but almost a half
meter of gap in the track is nuts. Like describing a limb thatâs
totally removed as a bone fracture.
Though conceivably the break was very small and a train impacting
the slightly lifted rail just caused a good chunk of it to explode.
smcl wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
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.
kgwgk wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
Yes, the âfractureâ (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.
WarOnPrivacy wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
> 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:
(HTM) [1]: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/ecb4/live/5...
zidel wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
The rail is laying on its side in that picture, so what is
visible is the foot not the web.
edit: other angles of the same location here:
(HTM) [1]: https://youtu.be/DIQ4SrGSua0?t=1174
WarOnPrivacy wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
> The rail is laying on its side in that picture
Ah, I see it now. The marks from contact with the ties should
have clued me in earlier.
gambutin wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
AFAIK, one technique for monitoring cracks uses ultrasonic sensors.
They send sound waves through the rails and detect cracks by
analyzing reflected waves.
amelius wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
There are special trains with measurement equipment on board, but
yes, it sounds to me like every train should be equipped with some
basic sensors for anomaly detection.
1718627440 wrote 15 hours 4 min ago:
The measurement trains drive slowly in the night.
mkl wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
They can go at high speed:
Germany: [1] Japan: [2] France: [3] China: [4] UK:
(HTM) [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
(HTM) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
(HTM) [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320
(HTM) [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains
(HTM) [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
mitthrowaway2 wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
Indeed!
> Line inspection is carried out at full speed, up to 270 km/h
or 168 mph on the TÅkaidÅ Shinkansen and 285 km/h or 177 mph
on the SanyÅ Shinkansen
Azrael3000 wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
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.
lefra wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
100 km/h is slow compared to passenger train (even
non-high-speed ones). Depending on how packed the schedule is,
it might not be possible to analyse track during the day
without causing backups.
sigwinch28 wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
Measurement trains filled with cameras and LIDAR
For example, in the U.K.:
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
jen729w wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
user_7832 wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
LIDAR is good, but as another commenter pointed out, Ultrasonic
Flaw Detection (USFD) is the gold standard for crack/flaw
detection.
rokkamokka wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
Wow, that's a really big gap. No wonder it derailed
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