Comment by dinkblam
14 days ago
Spain basically does not do the required maintenance:
https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...
14 days ago
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.
> 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.
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.
> 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging
sigh
Of course you're right
Yep, plus their network is pretty new anyways. Which generally needs less maintenance than older infrastructure.
Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's full of faults.
Specifically the fractured track was a soldered joint that joined a track from 1989 with a new one from a few weeks ago.
This was a track laid a few weeks ago? I think that's the problem.
Soldered eh? No wonder then that it broke.
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.
9 replies →
> 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...