News Severe high-speed train accident in Spain

[Quick_Nick]

Nobody says that it was a terrorist attack. All the people knew that it was a tipical train accident where the train goes off the rails...

Everything today is initially investigated as terrorism, even if that investigation is short-lived.

 

[Urwumpe]

Nobody says that it was a terrorist attack. All the people knew that it was a tipical train accident where the train goes off the rails...

It was initially repeated so often, that this was NO terrorist attack, that the conspiracies quickly grew... after all, how can a plain train crash cause so much damage?

 

[ale131296]

Everything today is initially investigated as terrorism, even if that investigation is short-lived.

It could be consider in your country but yesterday at 9:00 PM people of the place where the crash happened said that it was an accident not a terrorist attack but when people from other countries hear about a train in Spain that has an accident and there's fire and something like that they remember the terrorism attack in 2004 where the train exploded when it was lefting the train station... I think that's the cause but here nobody (I know) said it was a terrorist attack.

 

[Zatnikitelman]

Ok, I'm going to try and do my best to describe the various signaling systems, and why the one that was in use on the segment of the crash did nothing.

The most basic signaling system is purely informative, it only conveys information, usually about whether a section of track is occupied or not. Just like with road vehicle traffic lights, the only consequences to running through them are legal (employment) ones, a railroad driver (US calls them engineers, but I'll use the international term of driver) only faces being fired for running through a stop signal, or going through a restrictive signal (in between stop and clear) faster than they should. Of course, there are also potential legal consequences if they cause a crash. This is signaling system employed across most of the world.

A step up from this system, is called cab signaling. Whereas most systems only display the signal indication on wayside signals, cab signaling also transmits a display to the engineer of the signal he should be operating under, not the next signal. So if he passes a clear signal, his display would show a clear aspect. If he passes an approach signal (like the yellow light on roads) then his display would display the approach signal. But like with the pure-wayside system, cab signaling does not by itself enforce anything, it is still left to the driver to take the appropriate action.

The next step in signaling, is sometimes referred to as automatic train stop, or in the UK, the Train Protection and Warning System. As near as I can tell, this or a slightly more advanced version discussed next, is what was in place along the line of the derailment. This system has a lot of varieties, but basically, it uses some type of trip mechanism at signals that are set to stop, to apply the brakes. In some cases (New York City Subway is a good, modern example of this) the system is literally a mechanical mechanism, raised when the signal is set to stop (danger) and physically moves a valves to activate the brakes on the train, bringing it to a stop. However, this won't stop a train before the signal itself. The system normally requires power to keep the system inactive, so if there's a power failure, it's fail-safe and will still trip trains. The UK uses an electromagnetic system mounted between the rails that also requires power. This is what Gary was describing earlier.

Going further still, we get to systems that have some kind of enforcement for signals that are more restrictive than clear, but not set to stop. In the UK, they have the Automatic Warning System, which similar to TPWS, applies the brakes if the train passes a signal. The key difference is that when approaching a signal set to caution, or approach, all it does is require the driver to acknowledge it after which the train is free to pass the signal. If the drivers fails to acknowledge, the brakes are applied. This may also have been in place on the line where the derailment occurred, but would still not have made a difference.

The next step is speed enforcement. At least here in the US, different signal aspects generally have a speed associated with them. For example, approach may mean slow to 45mph, while approach limited may mean slow to 30, while restricting may mean slow to 15. Something like this STILL might not have prevented the derailment however. In a given section of railroad, there may be several curves and other speed restrictions, while the overall line has a given maximum speed. It wouldn't make sense to enforce a low speed for an entire signal block. However, there is at least one case here in the U.S. where the signal speed does enforce a lower speed through an S-curve. On the Northeast Corridor, approaching Elizabeth, NJ from the south, the s-curve is supposed to be taken at 50mph I believe. A number of years ago, an engineer got the bright idea to take it at 100mph. Fortunately, the train didn't derail through the track was messed up pretty badly. So now, Amtrak has an Approach Medium signal in front of the curve, which requires a speed of 45mph.

The most advanced systems however, will enforce all speed restrictions. This is usually implemented on top of an existing signal system with so-called positive enforcement as described immediately above. In this case, the train relies on knowing its position on the tracks to enforce a different speed. GPS is one way to do this, but it's inaccurate and because of that, has some issues on closely-spaced tracks. One way of knowing the position is through the use of transponders that the train talks to as it travels, this can be correlated with axle revolution counters and/or GPS to provide continuous updates. The information can also be transmitted right though the rails, which is system used on the Northeast Corridor in the U.S. Then there's also the "moving-block" system where all that matters is maintaining the proper speed for the track, and proper spacing from other trains. Notably, this system is used on the UK's Docklands Light Railway.

Let me throw a disclaimer here at the end. Particularly in regards to the system used along the site of the derailment, I don't know for sure how it works. Very little information is available in English. As to the other systems, the variations, and details vary so widely sometimes from railroad to railroad within the same area that details of actual systems may not be 100% correct, but that wasn't my goal here. This is just a high level overview of some of the signaling methodologies in use throughout the world today.

 

[Hielor]

Santiago train derailment: 222 people onboard, 80 deaths (and possibly still more), 142 injuries.

Asiana Flight 214: 307 people onboard, 3 deaths, 181 injuries.

Europe can keep their high-speed rail. I think I'll stick to travelling by air.

 

[Zatnikitelman]

Good luck trying to fly from Seattle to Tacoma.

 

[Codz]

Driving is always an option.(Though probably more unsafe than rail and air travel combined...)

 

[Urwumpe]

Europe can keep their high-speed rail. I think I'll stick to travelling by air.

Lets increase the sample data:

Eschede was 287 passengers, 101 deaths and 88 injuries. Happened at mere 200 km/h, the french TGV travels at almost 320 km/h without ANY fatality in history now.

Just stay away from trains without articulated cars or Jacobs bogies - like the train today.

 

[MJR]

I think another thing to take into consideration is the frequency of crashes of planes and trains alike. If I can recall, not many. I have been on a plane many times in the US, Europe, and SA. I have also been on trains in Germany. I am here though. It just so happened to have been an unfortunate event that nobody could have predicted. After so many "samples" for instance, there is an expected outcome. Right?

 

[MattBaker]

Tenerife airport disaster, 1.9 747's wiped out.

You know, there are so many flights and trains or even cars that I wouldn't consider any to be particular dangerous. The technology only gets dangerous when someone screws up and since you don't know if you get to travel with the screw-up...

 

[MJR]

Exactly. Technology is considered to be much more "infallible" than the average human. Say you are presented with a fully functional program. Then you open the source code and delete even the slightest semi-colon, thus in turn, causing the once pristine program to be junk. In this case, it is the engineers or operators of that train/train track who managed to cause this accident due to some kind of negligence. The train track just didn't go corrupt on its own, did it? Last I checked, inanimate objects cannot perform any such action. Rather, it is the people who are supposed to MAINTAIN them that attributed to this. All I can say is just practice, practice, practice and inspect, inspect, inspect.

 

[garyw]

Spain train driver 'on phone' at time of deadly crash

The train driver in last week's crash in Spain was talking on the phone when it derailed, investigators say.

The train was travelling at 153km/h (95mph) at the time, investigators at the Court of Justice of Galicia said.

Francisco Jose Garzon Amo was speaking to members of staff at the state-owned railway company, Renfe, they added.

Crash investigators had opened the train's "black-box" data recorder to find the cause of the crash, which left 79 people dead.

Moments before the accident the train was travelling at a speed of 192km/h (119mph), the court said in a statement.

Investigators say the brakes were activated shortly before the crash.

The speed limit on the sharp bend where the train derailed was set at 80km/h (49mph).

"Minutes before the train came off the tracks he received a call on his work phone to get indications on the route he had to take to get to Ferrol. From the content of the conversation and background noise it seems that the driver consulted a map or paper document," a court statement said.

Mr Garzon is suspected of reckless homicide, but he has not yet been formally charged.

He was released from custody in Santiago de Compostela, where the crash occurred, on Sunday but remains under court supervision

He must appear before a court once a week and was not allowed to leave Spain without permission.

His passport has been surrendered to the judge and his licence to drive a train has been suspended.

Under Spanish law, his legal status is that he is suspected of being involved in 79 counts of reckless homicide but has not been formally charged.

But officials said he had admitted negligence by being careless when rounding a bend too fast.

All eight carriages of the train careered off the tracks into a concrete wall as they sped around the curve on the express route between Madrid and the port city of Ferrol on the Galician coast.

On Monday, a mass was held in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, along with the heir to the Spanish crown, Prince Felipe, and his wife Princess Letizia, joined the grieving families and local residents in the cathedral as the city's archbishop prayed for the dead.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23507348