Comment by mschuster91

> 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