Comment by qeternity

17 hours ago

There is something deeply broken with Spanish rail.

The Adamuz train crash was a maintenance issue, or lack of checks after the maintenance jobs, as some sources say that part of the line was very recently renewed. Today's crash seems to be a human failure from ADIF train control.

  • This one is the kind of thing that's not supposed to be able to even happen (one train running into the back of another) if positive train control is implemented properly.

    People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC but their system is very simple and it works (it throws the train into emergency if it passes a red signal by physically knocking out the air).

    • Exactly, this can't happen. You need to put measures on this.

      Both the maintenance issue and bad systems that lead to human error creating this crash need to be taken responsability by the public system and fix them.

      4 replies →

    •   People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC 
      

      Who does this? The US barely has PTC because freight companies continue to fight it tooth and nail. You only need to look at the Amtrak Cascades crash to see how subpar even modern rail infrastructure is in the US. Neither is PTC a panacea as anyone who is old enough to remember when Thales' craptastic train control system sent a Muni train the wrong way down the wrong tracks in San Francisco.

      1 reply →

  • It's also a maintenance issue. The automatic control systems were offline and that's why they were manually controlling the trains.

    • Which is a valid fallback, but only with lower speeds. If someone made the call to go manual and continue at speeds over 30 km/h…

  • The human failure appears to be mistake number 3 or 4.

    1. Automated system fails 2. Decision is made to run the system manually 3. Iyro train fails to move on when instructed (Comms failure?, train failure?) 4. Controller uses imprecise language when instructing following train.

    To say this is totally down to 4 is to scapegoat the last link in the chain.