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.
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.
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.
> [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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These events happening 4 times in 3 days are statistically nonexistent. Even less existent is them starting to happen right on the day before a major politician in Spain visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security and monitoring systems.
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.
Edit: someone down this thread pointed out the answer is likely written by AI. If you copy the whole post from GP into ChatGPT it will give you an answer very similar to the post I am replying to.
> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.
> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.
It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.
Spanish high speed lines are mostly separate from the legacy network as they have different gauges, there are a few parts of the railway with dual gauge tracks but it is that.
The Santiago accident was on the conventional rail.
Just a small clarification, Spain has two distinct track stems for normal trains (Iberian gauge) and high speed rail (international gauge). High speed rail is completely separate from the iberian gauge network which is primarly used for city and regional trains. Only a few cargo trains use the high speed network.
Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system.
The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
Minor correction: there are two Shinkansen lines in Japan that run trains partly on shared legacy track, namely the Akita and Yamagata "mini-Shinkansens". However, these sections operate at normal speed, not high speed.
> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured
The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.
All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.
> If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately.
Does the system automatically slow down the train, or does it notify the engineer? I would imagine that there are some scenarios where going over the speed limit is the correct choice.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Óscar Puente rejected criticism of the delay of the rescuers; according to the Minister, rescuers arrived within "18 minutes."
“…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.”
This sounds like something a camera mounted on a sample of trains watching a wheel could catch.
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.
On Spain’s 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.
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.
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.
AFAIK, one technique for monitoring cracks uses ultrasonic sensors. They send sound waves through the rails and detect cracks by analyzing reflected waves.
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).
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.
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 that’s 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.
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.
~4 'derailing' accidents within 3 days, starting right before the president of the province of Madrid visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security monitoring systems. Coincidence indeed.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_train_derailments
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record
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.
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.
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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.
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Spain basically does not do the required maintenance:
https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...
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.
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Specifically the fractured track was a soldered joint that joined a track from 1989 with a new one from a few weeks ago.
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> 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...
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.
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.
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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.
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There are probably better sources than those two. What's next, citations from Enoch Root?
> 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 it’s much denser.
earthquakes, tho? Maybe the constant state of necessary vigilance has something to do with it here.
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.
For comparison, the Japanese high speed rail track inspection trains run three times every month. A lot more frequent.
They run at full speed between regular train operations.
I saw one of them running on my last trip, which is said to be good luck.
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.
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.
2 questions one rail related, one societal.
1) Can you expand on your first sentence? When you say user owned what does that mean exactly?
2) If skilled labor is undervalued does that mean those with those positions live kind of meager lives? Or what is that like?
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Japan GDP PPP per capita is about USAs in 2012, so they aren't exactly impoverished.
High public competency and government capacity allows a lot to get done.
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.
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.
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Track maintenance?
Yep.
Which is the secret of preventing 99%+ of sudden mechanical failures of pretty much any type of infrastructure.
Perhaps there are less FSB agents blowing up sections of track with shaped charges in Japan.
Source?
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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.
Doctor Yellow.[1] Full rail inspection every ten days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
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> What do they do differently?
Accountability.
> Santiago de Compostela derailment
Hey that infrastructure looks perfectly fine and new, ahhh ok... they were going 180kmh where the speed limit was 80kmh..
Which is also exactly how the most deadly rail incident in the past half century in japan happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
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Which is a problem that would have been prevented had they not purposefully disabled the ERTMS signaling system to avoid delays.
> While these events are statistically very rare
These events happening 4 times in 3 days are statistically nonexistent. Even less existent is them starting to happen right on the day before a major politician in Spain visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security and monitoring systems.
Higher passenger count could imply ability to pass higher maintenance budgets?
I think even more important is the seismic activity in Japan asa risk factor here
Are you suggesting this leads to more inspections or better inspections or better build quality or what?
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Could weather or some other geographic/similar aspect be a factor?
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.
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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.
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Edit: someone down this thread pointed out the answer is likely written by AI. If you copy the whole post from GP into ChatGPT it will give you an answer very similar to the post I am replying to.
> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.
Not true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYol11bVoNw
https://ameblo.jp/nakamurapon943056/entry-12488005292.html
> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.
It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.
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Japanese high speed tracks get checked (and repaired/replaced, if required) every night. During the midnight-to-6am window.
That's why something like a fractured high speed rail track would never go undetected in Japan.
https://www.plassertheurer.com/en/today/stories/japanese-pre...
https://global.jr-central.co.jp/en/company/data-book/_pdf/20...
https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr61/16_21.html
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
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Spanish high speed lines are mostly separate from the legacy network as they have different gauges, there are a few parts of the railway with dual gauge tracks but it is that. The Santiago accident was on the conventional rail.
Just a small clarification, Spain has two distinct track stems for normal trains (Iberian gauge) and high speed rail (international gauge). High speed rail is completely separate from the iberian gauge network which is primarly used for city and regional trains. Only a few cargo trains use the high speed network.
Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system.
The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
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Minor correction: there are two Shinkansen lines in Japan that run trains partly on shared legacy track, namely the Akita and Yamagata "mini-Shinkansens". However, these sections operate at normal speed, not high speed.
>If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately
That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured
The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.
All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.
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> If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately.
Does the system automatically slow down the train, or does it notify the engineer? I would imagine that there are some scenarios where going over the speed limit is the correct choice.
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Please don’t post slop when people ask thoughtful questions.
Japan has a culture of perfection.
But every culture has its exceptions. 2 words: Tataka airbags.
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. https://old.reddit.com/r/drehscheibe/comments/1qe9ko2/ich_gl...
> 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] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gknv8nxlzo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
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.
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In November, a bigger missing part of a train track was due to sabotage: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp85g86x0zgo
It happened near Polish-Ukrainian border and officials were vocal about sabotage.
That’s pretty far from Spain
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?
Fractures could happen with ground shifting - perhaps recent flooding could have contributed
Nice find. The gap in the Spanish track is massive. I don’t know enough to speculate on technical reasons but it seems quite odd.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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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.
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.
[1] https://www.romicgroup.com/permanent-way/concrete-railway-sl...
Thanks for the clarification!
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 Óscar Puente rejected criticism of the delay of the rescuers; according to the Minister, rescuers arrived within "18 minutes."
The full article is available here: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2026/01/24/mundo/020n3mun
“…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.”
This sounds like something a camera mounted on a sample of trains watching a wheel could catch.
It would require a very high speed camera, and a floodlight, which may be impractical.
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: https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/adif-orders-high-...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_railways_CIT_trains
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
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.
As a train wouldn't have the space??
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More simply, you measure the impact for dangerous forces. No need to overcook it.
Too much processing. Accelerometer or even a microphone would do the job.
We actually have had 4 train accidents and incidents in a week.
https://people.com/train-collides-with-crane-arm-in-4th-rail...
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.
5!
An Asturias Circanías train collided with debris from a collapsed tunnel wall on Thursday afternoon in Olloniego. No injured though
On Spain’s 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.
Could electrical resistance be measured in train tracks to monitor sudden drops, such as fractures, before they cause loss of life?
A new mode for fluke meters is born: the train conductor
it is possible, track signals can be triggered by shorting between two rails for example.
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.
Measurement trains filled with cameras and LIDAR
For example, in the U.K.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
LIDAR is good, but as another commenter pointed out, Ultrasonic Flaw Detection (USFD) is the gold standard for crack/flaw detection.
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.
The measurement trains drive slowly in the night.
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AFAIK, one technique for monitoring cracks uses ultrasonic sensors. They send sound waves through the rails and detect cracks by analyzing reflected waves.
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]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Defect_detector
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.
Wheel Impact Load Detector.
It measures vertical forces in kips - (kilo-pounds-force, 1 KIP = 1,000 lbs)
They have these in the USA.
Those are for the opposite problem – detecting defective trains (overweight respectively otherwise faulty weight distribution as well as wheel flats).
TFA indicates a 40cm gap — huge!
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 that’s 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.
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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.
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~4 'derailing' accidents within 3 days, starting right before the president of the province of Madrid visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security monitoring systems. Coincidence indeed.
Some more info from Spanish media. The track that broke was from 1989 and had not been maintained properly.
No, the claim is that the broken rail was the new one but it happened at the transition from old to new.
Jupp you are right I had not read up on the news today.
Got a link?
And how does it accord with the many statements made early on about the track being renewed recently?
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.
I have one in Spanish. Seems the latest info is that it broke where the new rails meet the old rail.
https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2026/01/25/697635e8fc6c83c42...
Wow, that's a really big gap. No wonder it derailed
A stupid journalist, opposed to the current government, read a date in YY-MM-DD format as DD-MM-YY
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?
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.
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?
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I’d rather they spent the money ensuring no trains ever left their tracks rather than halving the destruction if they do.
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.
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
The 20-ton bogie was flung 300m. What do you expect the weight of a whole car to do to such a wall?
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.
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
More practical but still probably unnecessary is having the planned “passes” be where the tracks are separated by some distance.
But that requires the trains mostly always being on schedule.
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.
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
Your comparison is nonsense and using nonsense metric.
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