"The disaster occurred after years of multiple warnings from the train drivers' official union, while the current government was passing legislation that would make drivers' ability to strike or take industrial action for safety concerns unlawful."
"Three weeks before the crash, the rail workers' union had raised concerns over problems with the administration of the rail network which could put the passengers in danger."
So far it seems that at 8:30 a computer system called LZB was shutdown to some infra issues. Immediately the trains stopped in that line. At 8:36, someone said it was okay to let the trains continue over that rail at full speed as it was "all clear". At 8:53 there was the collision. So far 68 deaths.
That's not really fair though. Almost all pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided the accident if they were observant and took responsibility for their own safety. People just walk out in front of cars, assuming they will stop, buried in their phone with earplugs in.
I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.
If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.
You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.
Then lets crash 10x more trains, it will still be safer than cars. The point is not to be safer than cars, the point is to not die while taking my daily commute in a form of transportation I have no control over whatsoever. Especially if its easy to mitigate like in the case of trains.
The relative safety of various transportation modes varies a bit by country. In the USA at least, commercial airliners and buses are marginally safer than trains. (All of those are much safer than passenger cars.)
Normal publications rarely publish good news. At most, news are often neutral, but mostly bad. One has to go out of their way to read actual good news.
My feeling is there is a serious psychological manipulation campaign going on against the west and allies via social media.
Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy", "Russia is better than our own government, the UK is a failure".
As far as I can tell, the idea that rail is the safest form of transit is just false. At least looking at recent Europe-wide data, and even if you make the _very_ favorable decision to include only occupant fatalities, modern commercial aviation has meaningfully lower fatalities per passenger-km than modern rail.
Aviation is generally used for longer journeys, and most of its risk is in the take-off / landing (so per-trip instead of per-mile). I wonder what happens if you compare fatalities-per-passenger-trip (or per-passenger-mile) on typical-length trips where aviation and HSR are competitive?
Ah but the good news thing is actually nothing to do with Spain and everything to do with news in this era. It’s a problem everywhere that news is like 95% bad, and not because the world is getting any worse either.
As someone from the US I have repeatedly heard that Spain's economy is doing reasonably well. And I just looked it up, unemployment is approximately the lowest it has been in two decades. Considering the post 2009 era of economic turmoil that Spain went through, that economic momentum seems like a real positive.
In June Goldman Sachs put out an article noting how well Spain's economy is doing, which included this employment comparison (showing Spain's outperformance versus its peers):
The jobs being created are tending more toward high value, high productivity jobs that pay better than average. That's no doubt helping diversify Spain's economy further away from tourism, which should provide greater long-term economic strength and stability. Overall it might be a really good decade coming up for the people of Spain.
I would also add how greatly improved living in Spain has been. The change in last 15 years is dramatic. Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga even Madrid are top of the list of best liveable cities. I am not sure how (probably local politics) but almost no other cities in europe managed to become so great.
Some days ago I actually traveled on these high speed trains to Madrid (the same route Madrid - Seville). I paid extra to be able to select a middle car seat because of similar disaster that happened in Spain only in January this year:
Because rail is quite non line of sight and quite infrastructure defined pathing.
The automatic coordination system hit a fail condition; they neglected the fallback protocols that had rules for spacing determined to work reliably without the computer keeping real time supervision; they crashed.
This is in the way more like the Washington D.C. helicopter plane mid-air where some normalization of deviance got people to ignore automated protection systems.
If most involved had known the fallback protocols they would have refused to move/continue while the protocols were utterly neglected. At least with a robust safety culture active, ofc.
I always thought there is a system of rail signals which should prevent accidents like this always in place, like dividing railroad into sections, turn on red light if the next section is occupied, yellow before that and so on...
Did it fail somehow which lead to this accident? I think such systems must be redundant enough to survive even without power/computers?
- A fault in the signaling system caused an Iryo and a Renfe train to stop -- the Iryo train was in front.
- For some reason, the control center authorized the Renfe train to proceed at full speed, despite the cab signaling showing it should stop. It then hit the Iryo train that was stopped in front of it.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the main issues that caused this are likely:
- Poor / improper maintenance causes the primary signaling/communication system to frequently fail. The standard "correct" behavior in this case is to manually authorize stopped trains to proceed slowly (at approx 10 mph so they can stop if they see another train) to the next station and wait for the system to be restored.
- Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear.
- That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.
When LZB drops out, does the fallback to ASFA plus verbal authorization actually enforce block separation, or is it basically just driver discipline at 300 km/h?
When on verbal authorization, controller discipline is probably more important than driver discipline. And I really hope they don't do that at 300 km/h.
> El Mundo is reporting that the Iryo train flagged a failure in its LZB signalling system 10 minutes before the crash, but the train behind did not receive the information due to a potential human error.
> Investigators believe the AVE high-speed train travelling behind crashed into the stationary Iryo service.
> A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident, government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control - and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
Some further points:
- Apparently some of the drivers involved were in training
- Infra maintenance is abysmal. Budgets are poor and or misspent
- Second time this happens, in 9 months
PS. They knew or should have known that the AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) train was ordered (manually) to continue forward, when it should not have. There was at least one known train blocking the track. The LZB system had failed - as reported by drivers systemwide. The Control Center at Atocha station decided for trains to move forward. According to the Transportation Minister this is inexplicable - even further, trains did not follow protocols beyond this: They are supposed to engage in "marcha a la vista" (very very slow, cautious, line-of-sight only traversal to the nearest destination) when in any doubt. This was not ordered, but "normal" further travel.-
Witnesses report, riders that use that same line every day, that trains were also frequently stopped yesterday - reasons unknown. But there were warning signs.-
64 Km. were affected by a "computer failure" at 08:30 local. 08:36, the "decision" was taken from Atocha to continue operations. 25 Km. later, the crash takes place.-
I was in Spain a year ago and it felt like the high speed trains weren't running as smoothly as they were when I was last there a decade earlier. At the time I chalked it up to false memories and not to judge based on vibes, but I guess my spidey senses were accurate. It also felt like a contradiction as there was a decent amount of expansion construction that I saw.
A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay
The accidents/deaths in Europe have been dropping over the years.
But I think the main difference is that while trains are extremely popular in Japan, in Europe it's been for decades under attack from governments who push roads and driving instead. This leads to underfunding and hollowing out of the train services.
Classic example seen all around Europe is partial privatization where it's often some state owned company that manages the expensive rails maintenance and unprofitable (but required) train lines while private companies get the profitable lines. This often leads to public opinion that trains are subsidized too much which leads to more decline of the services.
Another complication is that Japan is one country with one system where everybody speaks same language but trains in EU have to connect different systems together and it is hard to come to unified systems and laws around trains.
East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained
Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed
USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure
The United States actually possesses one of the most efficient, profitable, and advanced freight rail networks in the world with 140,000 miles of well maintained rail. Being optimized for freight the rails are designed for slower moving heavy cars instead of lighter fast moving passenger cars.
"racing cars" actually would not be stationary. "Race cars" are the class of vehicle, which can be stationary. If the cars are racing, they are not stationary.
"High-speed" is ambiguous. It can be used to describe the class of vehicle, or it can be used to describe the state of motion of the vehicle.
There are all kinds of isolated systems that trigger warnings but the thing that seems to be missing everywhere is a centralized simulation with all the data in it. Or perhaps a series of simulations each slightly further in the future. If any variable changes run it again until it reaches its time stamp.
For example, it shouldn't be possible in 2026 for a vehicle to get stuck on the crossing (with cameras) without the train driver getting a notification. You can even power down an entire track if it's obstructed. You might not want self driving, self breaking seems quite desirable.
This route is the last of the Spanish high speed lines that still has an older train protection system. There has been a similar accident in 2002 in Germany where LZB was also used: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienf%C3%B6rmige_Zugbeeinflu... . Now after 24 years you might think they had mitigating procedures in place...
The railroads in the USA were trying to push back and delay improvements to automated safety systems until the 2015 Amtrak 188 crash https://youtu.be/-mzaavmtT9M
Only was finally fully rolled out in I think 2020 5 years after the accident.
Delaying/avoiding spending money on safety seems to be common around the world.
In Oslo, Norway, we have train signaling errors all the time it feels like. It leads to a lot of delays and things. But I think that when these systems are not working, it is better to slow down everything even going as far as to put some trains on hold for some time, to avoid human errors in manual instruction and routing leading to crashes and deaths.
As long as vision zero is considered more of a gross infringement on personal freedums than a laudable goal, making trains as safe as they are uniquely fit to become is not exactly a great way to allocate funds to maximize impact. Trains are already very safe. Even where they currently lack 4 layers of fail-safe systems operated at a level where that still permits reliable&punctual service. The same money on making them shine could be spent on improving car infrastructure (or even removing some car infrastructure!) for greater expected harm reduction.
"In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's."
That's patently false, as Spain has the largest High-speed rail network in the world after China and it has seen constant expansion for the last 30 years.
The incompetence in the world that is likely the underlying cause for this, is a serious cancer that is ruining our society. We need to speak out even against what seems like lesser issues, because we normalize that behaviour until it perverts everything.
How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'? How do you remediate it? More draconian, individualized worker surveillance?
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.
> This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
It's both. The nihilism (see France riots for ex) and general incompetence that many of us see in the workplace or in our dealings with, for example, government agencies, and in our dealings with others is obviously there too and needs to be rooted out.
How do you deal with incompetence? In Europe I have no idea because of labor laws. In America we should probably be aggressively firing bad workers and grifters, and at the same time increasing wages and benefits and providing for items like safety and proper rest for those who actually want to show up and get things done.
Incompetence and laziness are very different things. You can have very hard working, engaged, active people that are still incompetent for the job they are supposed to do.
Once upon a time I did root cause analysis professionally, and a trainer told us if you attributed the root cause to people without finding malice you were just being lazy. At the very least I doubt anyone to blame here was actually involved in the accident, but someone who decided it was not in the budget to put an automated system in place faster.
They had an automated system, it had failed earlier in the day in that section causing trains to be signalled to stop. Then they had a manual go-slow human backup protocol which appears to also have not been observed - some drivers were given clearance to continue as normal. Swiss cheese of compounded failures, with tragic results.
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
Who wants to design a basic cryptographic p2p lock between trains that limit their speed 30km/h if they're not able to get proof they're alone on a track; when the alternative is to debate endlessly about whom to blame, and which billion-dollar conglomerate has the technical prowess to sit on the committee to debate the specs for a much worse system.
no clear cause has yet been named. it can be many things and ultimately they will always blame human error because it gives away the least information about what really happened.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
The only way to achieve higher levels of competence is to enforce higher levels of accountability. Over the last couple of years Spain has suffered major infrastructural catastrophes without any leadership being held accountable at all. It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
> It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
It is entirely unreasonable to consider capital punishment.
* an eye for an eye solves nothing - it doesn't bring dead people back to life, it just results in another person killed
* it's not an effective deterrent, it won't change how people act more than the risk of jail-time will
* it's unethical. It sounds like 'justice' if your idea of justice is simple retribution, but it completely undermines the concept of redemption - it advocates treating people as unfixable and unable to atone for their 'sins' and instead of limiting the pain and suffering - it spreads pain to more people
* no system is perfectly and inevitable you will end up punishing somebody with death based on faulty / flawed evidence that only later comes to light as being flawed/faulty. You can't bring a dead person back to life and say "sorry we got it wrong"
* finally - and perhaps most critically - tragedies such as these are almost the result of failures across an entire system with 10s, 100s, sometimes 1000s of people each culpable to varying degrees with many 'sliding doors' moments where such a tragedy could have been avoided had a different decision been taken. Sure you can always simplify things and point to the symbolic figurehead and say they are ultimately accountable and should take the ultimate responsibility for the group's failure (bonus points if in doing so you highlight how well paid they are to take on such a responsibility). But what you'll arrive at isn't justice and higher standards - instead you'll just have another dead person, killed in cold blood and the generic hope that somehow that additional death will act as a stronger driver of change than the already very real deaths that occurred in the tragedy itself.
You lost me at that part. It is entirely unreasonable to consider that in the vast majority of the world, where state-sanctioned killing of citizens has been abolished.
its not only in spain where this type of issues have been on the uptick. people not getting jailed can be indicative also of the whole story not being told.
At this moment, may be incompetence, but I wouldn't discard still a sabotage that go out of hand.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why. The proprietary automatic brake system of Siemens was working fine for 30 years, but it was too old, maybe too expensive and being replaced by a different system (non proprietary?). This shouldn't had caused any problem, as stopping the trains when a problem happens in the railway is the by-default security protocol.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why this person didn't saw that light in the screen, or why in the age of mobile phones and internet, he/she was unable to warn about the second train.
And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near a train station before to crash into the Italian train, in a perfectly sunny day. It does not make any sense and, seemly, it goes directly against the security protocol.
We don't know still if the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or didn't even tried to stop the train (maybe suffered a dismay or a heart attack?). Survivors say that they didn't noticed a decrease of speed before the impact. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
For foreign journalists, to paint Spain as a third world country is practically a sport, and they love to write the word 'siesta' for some strange fetish, but the reality is that this is one of the most modern high-speed train systems in the planet, and worked like a charm for more than 30 years until now.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war, including strange delays and strange train accidents all around Europe in the last two or three years (Poland, France, etc). We can safely assume that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this another added source of chaos happened suspiciously close to the November Spanish elections with plenty of strikes and riots that happened to occur overnight.
Taking the whole context, the probability of all of that happening by chance at the same time before the elections, is basically zero.
> And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events
Update. A second security system should had stopped the train automatically in the next red semaphore (or reduced the velocity to 40Km/h) without machinist intervention. That system was down also. And control had 17 minutes to warn the incoming train and to talk directly with the Italian train, but they apparently failed to do it.
So at least there are two different automatized computer security systems that failed on a row, plus a control center that acted in a strange way, plus a machinist that may, or may not, had tried to pull the brakes and she is missing.
And now they are saying that a former minister of employment was traveling in that train and she is also missing.
I was just listening to the EconTalk podcast, and the guest was a Spanish demographer that specifically said that Spanish train system was being starved for funding in the past 10 years or so. This is because the population is aging, and all of the growth in the economy is being directed towards pensions and health care for the rapidly growing number of retirees.
Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.
For a moment there my first tought was that "autonation" might be something like the concept of a nation made by the individual itself or something like that.
We need to create a word for typos/autocomplete errors that have a positive result like this on the reader.
Automation of a bad process or security measure is not a way out of the incompetence of people who designed it. Automation of garbage only brings more garbage.
It was no joke here either, the headline was inaccurate. There were not "two high-speed trains". One train stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to a to another signalling failure. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic.
It is distasteful and crass that one train correctly stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to another signalling failure, inattention or error. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic. The tragedy is that the system was left in such a dangerous state. The real world doesn't obey the laws of physics you wish for, it's full of external variables including careless, inattentive and greedy people who sometimes cause a lot of harm. My pointing out the system that caused the accident is not the same as saying I'm glad they're dead. Accusing me of being crass and distasteful smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude, or nobody understands suffering like I do. In short, I wasn't laughing.
A simple solution would be for all trains to have self recoding GPS which they probably all have and log their location on an internet map plus marking all the switches and allow open viewing to public and passengers to monitor their own train versus others. Ai can also be used to set the alarm.
The GPS location as well as track ID gets logged every few sec. They probably already have the info. Its not rocket science; that is how their systems probably work. They probably log the ID of previous and incoming switch too. They probably have all of this, just make it public.
This is just 2.5 years after the same thing happened in Greece, killing 57:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempi_train_crash
No not exactly an "accident".
This is just 9 months after another catastrophic railway accident in Spain. In Adamuz, january 18th of this year 2026. 46 confirmed dead.
Yes, same government. 0 resignations, 0 political consequences, 0 apologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
https://elpais.com/espana/2026-10-28/ultima-hora-del-choque-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/28/spain-high-speed-train-crash...
https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2026/10/28/toledo-tr...
https://www.reuters.com/live/spain-train-crash-live-deaths-i...
So far it seems that at 8:30 a computer system called LZB was shutdown to some infra issues. Immediately the trains stopped in that line. At 8:36, someone said it was okay to let the trains continue over that rail at full speed as it was "all clear". At 8:53 there was the collision. So far 68 deaths.
LZB is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung
It's become a real risk to take a train in Spain. Two severe accidents in the same year on what's typically considered the safest transport method.
I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
There were 222 pedestrian urban-area deaths in Spain in 2025.
There is a risk of just being outside. Usually due to cars.
That's not really fair though. Almost all pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided the accident if they were observant and took responsibility for their own safety. People just walk out in front of cars, assuming they will stop, buried in their phone with earplugs in.
I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.
If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.
You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.
Doing anything is a risk. The salient thing is relative risk. Even with record levels of train accidents it’s still the safest way to travel.
The bodycount sits around 100 this year for trains and 1775 last year for cars.
Even correcting for distance travelled it’s still way more safe.
Then lets crash 10x more trains, it will still be safer than cars. The point is not to be safer than cars, the point is to not die while taking my daily commute in a form of transportation I have no control over whatsoever. Especially if its easy to mitigate like in the case of trains.
Per capita ?
[dead]
its still probably the safest form of transport.
> I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
I hear comments like this from people from many countries.
The relative safety of various transportation modes varies a bit by country. In the USA at least, commercial airliners and buses are marginally safer than trains. (All of those are much safer than passenger cars.)
https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/ipsavage/436.pdf
Normal publications rarely publish good news. At most, news are often neutral, but mostly bad. One has to go out of their way to read actual good news.
My feeling is there is a serious psychological manipulation campaign going on against the west and allies via social media.
Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy", "Russia is better than our own government, the UK is a failure".
It's not healthy.
1 reply →
As far as I can tell, the idea that rail is the safest form of transit is just false. At least looking at recent Europe-wide data, and even if you make the _very_ favorable decision to include only occupant fatalities, modern commercial aviation has meaningfully lower fatalities per passenger-km than modern rail.
Aviation is generally used for longer journeys, and most of its risk is in the take-off / landing (so per-trip instead of per-mile). I wonder what happens if you compare fatalities-per-passenger-trip (or per-passenger-mile) on typical-length trips where aviation and HSR are competitive?
Safest for passengers, it seems so. Safest for everybody else? Who knows?
Ah but the good news thing is actually nothing to do with Spain and everything to do with news in this era. It’s a problem everywhere that news is like 95% bad, and not because the world is getting any worse either.
As someone from the US I have repeatedly heard that Spain's economy is doing reasonably well. And I just looked it up, unemployment is approximately the lowest it has been in two decades. Considering the post 2009 era of economic turmoil that Spain went through, that economic momentum seems like a real positive.
In June Goldman Sachs put out an article noting how well Spain's economy is doing, which included this employment comparison (showing Spain's outperformance versus its peers):
https://imgur.com/QqB74I6
Spain's unemployment rate has converged with Finland's, a remarkable improvement:
https://imgur.com/1cp6mL4
The jobs being created are tending more toward high value, high productivity jobs that pay better than average. That's no doubt helping diversify Spain's economy further away from tourism, which should provide greater long-term economic strength and stability. Overall it might be a really good decade coming up for the people of Spain.
I would also add how greatly improved living in Spain has been. The change in last 15 years is dramatic. Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga even Madrid are top of the list of best liveable cities. I am not sure how (probably local politics) but almost no other cities in europe managed to become so great.
Some days ago I actually traveled on these high speed trains to Madrid (the same route Madrid - Seville). I paid extra to be able to select a middle car seat because of similar disaster that happened in Spain only in January this year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
How come we have collision avoidance mandated and working in 3 and 2 dimensions (TCAS, AEB), but somehow do not have it in 1-dimensional motion?
There's not a sensor that can detect another train with enough warning to matter. Stopping takes miles, and turning isn't an option.
This is exactly the thought I always have.
It seems impossible to imagine that there are any layers of defense in depth involved here… Because it should be so easy to avoid.
Because rail is quite non line of sight and quite infrastructure defined pathing.
The automatic coordination system hit a fail condition; they neglected the fallback protocols that had rules for spacing determined to work reliably without the computer keeping real time supervision; they crashed.
This is in the way more like the Washington D.C. helicopter plane mid-air where some normalization of deviance got people to ignore automated protection systems.
If most involved had known the fallback protocols they would have refused to move/continue while the protocols were utterly neglected. At least with a robust safety culture active, ofc.
Already posted 3 hours ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271032
I always thought there is a system of rail signals which should prevent accidents like this always in place, like dividing railroad into sections, turn on red light if the next section is occupied, yellow before that and so on...
Did it fail somehow which lead to this accident? I think such systems must be redundant enough to survive even without power/computers?
Better article:
https://inews.co.uk/news/39-dead-two-high-speed-trains-colli...
- A fault in the signaling system caused an Iryo and a Renfe train to stop -- the Iryo train was in front.
- For some reason, the control center authorized the Renfe train to proceed at full speed, despite the cab signaling showing it should stop. It then hit the Iryo train that was stopped in front of it.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the main issues that caused this are likely:
- Poor / improper maintenance causes the primary signaling/communication system to frequently fail. The standard "correct" behavior in this case is to manually authorize stopped trains to proceed slowly (at approx 10 mph so they can stop if they see another train) to the next station and wait for the system to be restored.
- Since the system was frequently failing and proceeding at slow speeds causes severe operational slowdowns, the control center started allowing them to proceed at linespeed instead, possibly with some ad-hoc checks to make sure the track was clear.
- That got normalized, and whatever ad-hoc checks (if any) they were doing failed in this case.
Damn, I wonder if "control center" is just a bunch of software, not very reliable then!
1 reply →
How is it that Waymo can safely operate a car on public streets but accidents like this are still possible?
When LZB drops out, does the fallback to ASFA plus verbal authorization actually enforce block separation, or is it basically just driver discipline at 300 km/h?
When on verbal authorization, controller discipline is probably more important than driver discipline. And I really hope they don't do that at 300 km/h.
> El Mundo is reporting that the Iryo train flagged a failure in its LZB signalling system 10 minutes before the crash, but the train behind did not receive the information due to a potential human error.
> Investigators believe the AVE high-speed train travelling behind crashed into the stationary Iryo service.
> A human error by an [state-owned railway infrastructure company] Adif operator in response to a malfunction in the main signaling system is the likely cause of the accident, government sources said. This safety system is automated, but when it fails, it switches to manual mode. That is why the trains came to a stop when the automatic safety system failed, and service resumed under human control - and that is where the error occurred, according to initial analyses.
https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2026/10/28/6ae1c9a1e9cf4a372...
Some further points: - Apparently some of the drivers involved were in training - Infra maintenance is abysmal. Budgets are poor and or misspent - Second time this happens, in 9 months
PS. They knew or should have known that the AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) train was ordered (manually) to continue forward, when it should not have. There was at least one known train blocking the track. The LZB system had failed - as reported by drivers systemwide. The Control Center at Atocha station decided for trains to move forward. According to the Transportation Minister this is inexplicable - even further, trains did not follow protocols beyond this: They are supposed to engage in "marcha a la vista" (very very slow, cautious, line-of-sight only traversal to the nearest destination) when in any doubt. This was not ordered, but "normal" further travel.-
Witnesses report, riders that use that same line every day, that trains were also frequently stopped yesterday - reasons unknown. But there were warning signs.-
64 Km. were affected by a "computer failure" at 08:30 local. 08:36, the "decision" was taken from Atocha to continue operations. 25 Km. later, the crash takes place.-
550 souls involved. 68 fatalties. 90 wounded, 50 severe.-
I was in Spain a year ago and it felt like the high speed trains weren't running as smoothly as they were when I was last there a decade earlier. At the time I chalked it up to false memories and not to judge based on vibes, but I guess my spidey senses were accurate. It also felt like a contradiction as there was a decent amount of expansion construction that I saw.
Alas, maintenance isn't sexy for governments.
2 replies →
A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay
Why are high speed trains often crashing in Europe??
You rarely hear of such in Japan.
The accidents/deaths in Europe have been dropping over the years. But I think the main difference is that while trains are extremely popular in Japan, in Europe it's been for decades under attack from governments who push roads and driving instead. This leads to underfunding and hollowing out of the train services.
Classic example seen all around Europe is partial privatization where it's often some state owned company that manages the expensive rails maintenance and unprofitable (but required) train lines while private companies get the profitable lines. This often leads to public opinion that trains are subsidized too much which leads to more decline of the services.
Another complication is that Japan is one country with one system where everybody speaks same language but trains in EU have to connect different systems together and it is hard to come to unified systems and laws around trains.
East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure
The United States actually possesses one of the most efficient, profitable, and advanced freight rail networks in the world with 140,000 miles of well maintained rail. Being optimized for freight the rails are designed for slower moving heavy cars instead of lighter fast moving passenger cars.
A high-speed train collided with a stationary train. The title is misleading.
Both are high-speed trains regardless of whether they are in motion or not.
High-speed is a descriptor of the type of train, not their current speed.
Just like a racing cars is still such even when stationary.
"racing cars" actually would not be stationary. "Race cars" are the class of vehicle, which can be stationary. If the cars are racing, they are not stationary.
"High-speed" is ambiguous. It can be used to describe the class of vehicle, or it can be used to describe the state of motion of the vehicle.
10 deaths at last count. Amazing it's not 100% dead.
64 already. Those trains are quite long and sturdy. But there will be lots of severely wounded.
The trains being sturdy doesn't help much. The (de)acceleration alone is enough to kill, as is smashing against the seat in front of you.
1 reply →
There are all kinds of isolated systems that trigger warnings but the thing that seems to be missing everywhere is a centralized simulation with all the data in it. Or perhaps a series of simulations each slightly further in the future. If any variable changes run it again until it reaches its time stamp.
For example, it shouldn't be possible in 2026 for a vehicle to get stuck on the crossing (with cameras) without the train driver getting a notification. You can even power down an entire track if it's obstructed. You might not want self driving, self breaking seems quite desirable.
Massive disaster!
I still wonder how this adds up against the constant daily carnage of automobile transportation?
This is a very unfortunate event,
On another topic, I shall reconsider using bus over train for my trips.
How is this even possible in this day and age. It can be all automated, double and quad checked enroute ..
This route is the last of the Spanish high speed lines that still has an older train protection system. There has been a similar accident in 2002 in Germany where LZB was also used: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienf%C3%B6rmige_Zugbeeinflu... . Now after 24 years you might think they had mitigating procedures in place...
2006 subway accident in Valencia had a similar context, they used the FAP system, cheaper than ATP, which would have prevented the accident.
The railroads in the USA were trying to push back and delay improvements to automated safety systems until the 2015 Amtrak 188 crash https://youtu.be/-mzaavmtT9M
Only was finally fully rolled out in I think 2020 5 years after the accident.
Delaying/avoiding spending money on safety seems to be common around the world.
It's the second time this year too. In Spain. Same company.
apparently even the same line
1 reply →
This was my immediate thought -- this is such a tragic unforced error. It seems impossible for this to happen.
It's been reported that the automated system had failed, so trains were being routed and instructed manually.
In Oslo, Norway, we have train signaling errors all the time it feels like. It leads to a lot of delays and things. But I think that when these systems are not working, it is better to slow down everything even going as far as to put some trains on hold for some time, to avoid human errors in manual instruction and routing leading to crashes and deaths.
3 replies →
Isn't speed under verbal authorization limited to like 30-40 km/h?
"In this day and age" means nothing when so many of these train systems are running on technology from the mid-1900s.
Spain didn't even have high-speed trains until the early 1990s so I don't think that's the case here.
10 replies →
As long as vision zero is considered more of a gross infringement on personal freedums than a laudable goal, making trains as safe as they are uniquely fit to become is not exactly a great way to allocate funds to maximize impact. Trains are already very safe. Even where they currently lack 4 layers of fail-safe systems operated at a level where that still permits reliable&punctual service. The same money on making them shine could be spent on improving car infrastructure (or even removing some car infrastructure!) for greater expected harm reduction.
[dead]
In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's.
But Toledo-Madrid it's a special high speed network with thousands of daily users heading Madrid to work, which is just 1h away from Toledo.
Still, I will always be pro-train because they can mass deliver goods at much higher ratio than by truck.
"In Spain the train network was neglected so car and oil companies could earn tons of money since the 70's."
That's patently false, as Spain has the largest High-speed rail network in the world after China and it has seen constant expansion for the last 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Spain
5 replies →
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271032
Atlas Shrugged in real life
The incompetence in the world that is likely the underlying cause for this, is a serious cancer that is ruining our society. We need to speak out even against what seems like lesser issues, because we normalize that behaviour until it perverts everything.
How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'? How do you remediate it? More draconian, individualized worker surveillance?
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
The reality is very different: https://www.railway.supply/renfe-rejects-drivers-union-claim...
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.
The incompetence isn't necessarily with the workers, it can be coming from those at the top.
1 reply →
We could return to basing hiring decisions on merit.
4 replies →
without a doubt someone made a lot of money by arguing against the regulations required to prevent this.
we need to eliminate profit-based motives for safety critical areas.
Why do worker accept to work in such conditions? Its like driving tired every day. Eventually you fuck up. Where was the union?
> How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'?
I think it has to start with daylight: all of the relevant info accessible to the public.
Adversaries can/will counter with fake data, narratives, etc, but if there's a trustable source of that daylight data that is a huge start.
> This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
It's both. The nihilism (see France riots for ex) and general incompetence that many of us see in the workplace or in our dealings with, for example, government agencies, and in our dealings with others is obviously there too and needs to be rooted out.
How do you deal with incompetence? In Europe I have no idea because of labor laws. In America we should probably be aggressively firing bad workers and grifters, and at the same time increasing wages and benefits and providing for items like safety and proper rest for those who actually want to show up and get things done.
1 reply →
Incompetence and laziness are very different things. You can have very hard working, engaged, active people that are still incompetent for the job they are supposed to do.
lol this is spain dude. these people are not working long hours
7 replies →
Once upon a time I did root cause analysis professionally, and a trainer told us if you attributed the root cause to people without finding malice you were just being lazy. At the very least I doubt anyone to blame here was actually involved in the accident, but someone who decided it was not in the budget to put an automated system in place faster.
They had an automated system, it had failed earlier in the day in that section causing trains to be signalled to stop. Then they had a manual go-slow human backup protocol which appears to also have not been observed - some drivers were given clearance to continue as normal. Swiss cheese of compounded failures, with tragic results.
7 replies →
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
Who wants to design a basic cryptographic p2p lock between trains that limit their speed 30km/h if they're not able to get proof they're alone on a track; when the alternative is to debate endlessly about whom to blame, and which billion-dollar conglomerate has the technical prowess to sit on the committee to debate the specs for a much worse system.
1 reply →
no clear cause has yet been named. it can be many things and ultimately they will always blame human error because it gives away the least information about what really happened.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
The only way to achieve higher levels of competence is to enforce higher levels of accountability. Over the last couple of years Spain has suffered major infrastructural catastrophes without any leadership being held accountable at all. It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
> It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
It is entirely unreasonable to consider capital punishment.
* an eye for an eye solves nothing - it doesn't bring dead people back to life, it just results in another person killed
* it's not an effective deterrent, it won't change how people act more than the risk of jail-time will
* it's unethical. It sounds like 'justice' if your idea of justice is simple retribution, but it completely undermines the concept of redemption - it advocates treating people as unfixable and unable to atone for their 'sins' and instead of limiting the pain and suffering - it spreads pain to more people
* no system is perfectly and inevitable you will end up punishing somebody with death based on faulty / flawed evidence that only later comes to light as being flawed/faulty. You can't bring a dead person back to life and say "sorry we got it wrong"
* finally - and perhaps most critically - tragedies such as these are almost the result of failures across an entire system with 10s, 100s, sometimes 1000s of people each culpable to varying degrees with many 'sliding doors' moments where such a tragedy could have been avoided had a different decision been taken. Sure you can always simplify things and point to the symbolic figurehead and say they are ultimately accountable and should take the ultimate responsibility for the group's failure (bonus points if in doing so you highlight how well paid they are to take on such a responsibility). But what you'll arrive at isn't justice and higher standards - instead you'll just have another dead person, killed in cold blood and the generic hope that somehow that additional death will act as a stronger driver of change than the already very real deaths that occurred in the tragedy itself.
1 reply →
> or even capital punishment
You lost me at that part. It is entirely unreasonable to consider that in the vast majority of the world, where state-sanctioned killing of citizens has been abolished.
5 replies →
At least the people responsible for wasting about a quarter billion euros on trains that are too wide for Spains train tunnels seem to have resigned.
2 replies →
its not only in spain where this type of issues have been on the uptick. people not getting jailed can be indicative also of the whole story not being told.
We don't tolerate capital punishment as society, keep walking cowboy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Your point being ?
1 reply →
At this moment, may be incompetence, but I wouldn't discard still a sabotage that go out of hand.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why. The proprietary automatic brake system of Siemens was working fine for 30 years, but it was too old, maybe too expensive and being replaced by a different system (non proprietary?). This shouldn't had caused any problem, as stopping the trains when a problem happens in the railway is the by-default security protocol.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why this person didn't saw that light in the screen, or why in the age of mobile phones and internet, he/she was unable to warn about the second train.
And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near a train station before to crash into the Italian train, in a perfectly sunny day. It does not make any sense and, seemly, it goes directly against the security protocol.
We don't know still if the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or didn't even tried to stop the train (maybe suffered a dismay or a heart attack?). Survivors say that they didn't noticed a decrease of speed before the impact. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
For foreign journalists, to paint Spain as a third world country is practically a sport, and they love to write the word 'siesta' for some strange fetish, but the reality is that this is one of the most modern high-speed train systems in the planet, and worked like a charm for more than 30 years until now.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war, including strange delays and strange train accidents all around Europe in the last two or three years (Poland, France, etc). We can safely assume that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this another added source of chaos happened suspiciously close to the November Spanish elections with plenty of strikes and riots that happened to occur overnight.
Taking the whole context, the probability of all of that happening by chance at the same time before the elections, is basically zero.
> And a Spanish train that should be moving slowly after such events
Update. A second security system should had stopped the train automatically in the next red semaphore (or reduced the velocity to 40Km/h) without machinist intervention. That system was down also. And control had 17 minutes to warn the incoming train and to talk directly with the Italian train, but they apparently failed to do it.
So at least there are two different automatized computer security systems that failed on a row, plus a control center that acted in a strange way, plus a machinist that may, or may not, had tried to pull the brakes and she is missing.
And now they are saying that a former minister of employment was traveling in that train and she is also missing.
It wouldn't be the first time in history sabotage by "Russians" resulted in the collision of opposing forces near Toledo.
1 reply →
Could it be cultural? I remember after the Asiana Airlines crash, the experts were saying part of the problem was due to culture.
I was just listening to the EconTalk podcast, and the guest was a Spanish demographer that specifically said that Spanish train system was being starved for funding in the past 10 years or so. This is because the population is aging, and all of the growth in the economy is being directed towards pensions and health care for the rapidly growing number of retirees.
I feel that mixing up best picture Oscars was a watershed moment...It sort of spoke to me that the whole world is going to shit....
Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.
The Library of Congress rated it the second most influential book of all time, after the Bible.
That's why I read it.
It's very cool, especially on HN, to say how terrible it is. But, as we used to say in rebuttal: scoreboard!
3 replies →
Expand, I'm interested in this take
6 replies →
Why don’t you like AS?
5 replies →
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
Incompetence on whose part?
So incompetent we don't even know who to blame
Autonation is the only true way out of incompetence.
Eventually everyone will come around e/acc.
You meant "automation", right?
For a moment there my first tought was that "autonation" might be something like the concept of a nation made by the individual itself or something like that.
We need to create a word for typos/autocomplete errors that have a positive result like this on the reader.
Automation of a bad process or security measure is not a way out of the incompetence of people who designed it. Automation of garbage only brings more garbage.
[dead]
[flagged]
64 people dead and counting, maybe not the time for stupid jokes?
[dead]
[flagged]
It does seem like you are making light of tragedy. Previous comment is also a joke.
One high-speed train, one stationary train collide near Toledo, Spain. Unlike in physics class this sadly did not result in two average speed trains.
This is no joke in Spain. Literally, it caused unbelievable harm to hundreds of families...
It was no joke here either, the headline was inaccurate. There were not "two high-speed trains". One train stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to a to another signalling failure. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic.
save these jokes to reddit.
60+ people died and you're making laughs over it. Distasteful and totally crass.
It is a tragedy that 60+ people died. Laughs can be a coping mechanism.
> Distasteful and totally crass.
That's culture-dependent. In some cultures it's not unusual to joke about tragedies (even when they are one's own).
It is distasteful and crass that one train correctly stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to another signalling failure, inattention or error. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic. The tragedy is that the system was left in such a dangerous state. The real world doesn't obey the laws of physics you wish for, it's full of external variables including careless, inattentive and greedy people who sometimes cause a lot of harm. My pointing out the system that caused the accident is not the same as saying I'm glad they're dead. Accusing me of being crass and distasteful smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude, or nobody understands suffering like I do. In short, I wasn't laughing.
A simple solution would be for all trains to have self recoding GPS which they probably all have and log their location on an internet map plus marking all the switches and allow open viewing to public and passengers to monitor their own train versus others. Ai can also be used to set the alarm.
how is GPS going to differentiate between two trains on a collision course vs. two trains on separate, but neighbouring tracks?
The GPS location as well as track ID gets logged every few sec. They probably already have the info. Its not rocket science; that is how their systems probably work. They probably log the ID of previous and incoming switch too. They probably have all of this, just make it public.
How did we not think of this earlier?!
Insane take. This has like 10x the number of failure modes than a proper signalling system with verifiable software design.
This is not run the system, it is a way to monitor and see if they are going to kill you!