Comment by Maken
15 hours ago
Both accidents involved Iryo, a Italian operator that started running high speed trains on Spain a few years ago. Given how small their fleet is, it's weird that they have been involved in every recent accident, but at least the Adamuz one was clearly the fault of the tracks and not the trains.
Spain's network liberalization is recent-ish, operators like Iryo exist since 2021.
Perhaps the synchronization between renfe and others is a weak point in the system. Decades of assuming that everything in the network is theirs, increased wear and tear, etc.
To be fair, what you're describing is literally an increase in inefficiency caused by liberalization. It's what large corporations solve by "vertical integration" or "in-housing".
If you operate a rail network you need to keep track (pun not intended) of the exact state of all parts of the infrastructure, maintain and update the schedules and routes to account for repairs or disruptions, observe utilization and demand changes (not all of which can be profitable due to externalities like the social benefit of connecting people in remote places even if they don't provide enough revenue) and of course you need to keep track of where your trains currently are and where they are going and need a system of signaling, failsafes and communication to prevent incidents like "rear-ending" a stopped train (which this looks like it was).
Once you start breaking this up into a separate companies (like Spain has done and other countries did in order to "liberalize" the natural monopoly of public transit) you create inefficiencies and misaligned incentives. If you then throw competitors in the mix (who of course only compete in the few profitable aspects like high-speed rail because they only exist to extract surplus value from the system by withdrawing more from it than they put in - that's the literal definition of "profit") the misalignment of incentives gets worse and at worst so does communication.
As a software developer, it's kinda like having to build a publicly document general purpose API for your server-client application so it can work with arbitary third-party clients while having your team at the same time be moved into separate organizational units with different managers. Yes, sure, you can do that, but you better hope this will be reflected by another digit being added to the budget because not only will it make the project a lot more expensive but the same goes for every change that needs to be made to it in the future (not to mention front-to-back performance optimization is pretty much off the table) - except the point here is cutting government expenses so you don't get a real budget and this isn't a greenfield project but a brownfield legacy codebase never intended to serve this use case.
But in this case Iryo seems the victim - it's train was stopped on the track and got hit from behind.
Because it failed to move forward when instructed, or so it seems.
That should never cause a crash. You don't let one train go onto a section of track unless you know that there's no other train on that section of track. If train A has failed to move when instructed, then train B waits for it to move.
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