Yet another Hacker News

Spain train crash: What we know after two trains crashed with dozens feared dead

31 points ZeljkoS 2 hours ago 34 comments

ktallett 1 hour ago | parent

I can't imagine what every passenger who survived and the families of those who passed are going through. Such a catastrophic incident with multiple human failures is so tragic and so needless. From the controller to the driver, every single one of them should have said hey we shouldn't just ignore a signal and should investigate why it's on first. For this to be such a quick decision suggests it's not a one off. I would be extremely interested to see how many near misses or ignored signals there has been across Spain. The crash earlier this year was due to inexperienced workers and it seems as if significant training improvements and protocols are needed.

jplrssn 58 minutes ago | parent

If as a driver you get told by the control centre to get the train moving again at maximum line speed, surely you should be able to trust that it is safe to do so?

I don't see how this would fall on the drivers at all.

gpvos 50 minutes ago | parent

My thoughts as well. It appears that such signal failures happen so often that the controllers regularly let trains run through red under verbal authorization. I don't know the exact protocols, but I would expect a driver to ask for confirmation, as happened here, and then trust the control centre. However, there is clearly a huge systemic problem, with added complexity for the controllers, and there should at least be double checks in the control centre.

crote 1 minute ago | parent

Trust but verify. You wouldn't drive your car into a lake just because your satnav tells you to, would you?

As we also know from the aviation industry, controllers are human and therefore will make mistakes. A controller shouldn't issue a wrong order, but a driver also shouldn't accept an order they aren't certain about, and there should be technical systems backing both sides of that up.

It doesn't "fall" on the driver, but it doesn't "fall" solely on the controller either. It's a systemic issue, and many pieces have to fail for a disaster to happen.

dutchbart 54 minutes ago | parent

The even more insane thing to me is that the controller knew that there was another train in that block, knowing it was no signal failure. The driving train should’ve never been commanded to continue on full speed by the controller.

cedws 38 minutes ago | parent

Trains shouldn’t even be manually driven in 2026. We have self driving cars now which is a way harder problem to solve. Relying on a system of signals and driver attentiveness is archaic.

delta_p_delta_x 33 minutes ago | parent

> Trains shouldn’t even be manually driven in 2026

Potentially, but the point is that signallers should physically be unable to allow trains to proceed, and drivers should physically not be able to override them. British signalling from the 1800s has physical interlocks; this isn't a matter of manual versus automatic train operation. It is clearly systemic.

1718627440 16 minutes ago | parent

We do not have self-driving cars in all environments that clear the necessary security regulation! Also the socially accepted number of deaths due to trains is way below that for cars. The current accident is just a Tuesday for car traffic. (Spain recorded 1785 road deaths in 2024[1], that's 4.9 per day) Detecting objects (and future objects!) on a train track is still a hard problem.

The current system is basically that the train is driven both automatically and by a professional attentive driver at the same time. Changing it to just the automatic system is going to reduce safety. Also the real world is way to messy to reach acceptable availability rates with only automatic systems.

[1] https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/spain-road-safe...

bigDinosaur 51 minutes ago | parent

To have had this many incidents compared to other HSR networks around the world gives all the signs of a classic case of normalisation of deviance.

Sadly we'll probably watch a lot of individuals being blamed/scapegoated for systemic issues, but hopefully even Spanish politics can organise a proper investigation after this many deaths in a single year.

1718627440 28 minutes ago | parent

> From the controller to the driver, every single one of them should have said hey we shouldn't just ignore a signal

A train driver has zero insight in what is going on and where other trains are. They do need to trust the orders they get, if you want to question every order you will never start to drive.

AdrianCX 4 minutes ago | parent

The train driver's job is to say: "it's red, I'm no moving, not my problem, you make it green if you want me to go"

That's why it's a union job

Also he's the first person to die on accident so it's that and the safety of everyone else

They do not 'need' to follow others, they just need to refuse unless all safe and green.

If they never start to drive it's the companies problem to deal with angry non-dead customers

schnitzelstoat 52 minutes ago | parent

It's incredible the minister didn't resign after the January crash and I doubt he will now either. I understand that perhaps the problem started in the control centre but surely at the end of the day the minister is responsible - they don't get paid a fortune just to pass the blame on to the workers.

agarsev 36 minutes ago | parent

I fail to see how the two accidents, which seem to have very "down to earth" explanations (maintenance failure by workers, protocol override by operators) are being assumed to be a political responsibility so quickly by some and asking for the minister resignation. Now, two in a row seem to point to systemic issues. Is this responsibility of Adif or Renfe? maybe those state companies have to be thoroughly revised. is it due to lack of funding? maybe taxes should be raised, or money diverted from somewhere else (though seeing the spanish budget, it's hard to tell where from, both teachers and doctors are currently protesting for lack of funding). Maybe it is, in the end, a political directive that should have responsibilities declared in the executive. But seeing so many interested parties jumping to that conclusion literally hours after the crash means it's not done out of any reasoning but political animosity

Xenoamorphous 30 minutes ago | parent

> are being assumed to be a political responsibility so quickly by some and asking for the minister resignation

It sucks but that's how it is over here. It's "my" party the one in power when a catastrophe like this happens? It's not the politicians, it's someone else. Is it the other party? Surely the politicians are ultimately responsible.

This reflects on the news media as well.

Xenoamorphous 34 minutes ago | parent

> they don't get paid a fortune

Salary for ministers is around 80k euros per year. Yes significantly more than the minimum salary but hardly a fortune.

Yokolos 47 minutes ago | parent

So based on this, the safest place to sit is presumably the middle carriage?

swiftcoder 42 minutes ago | parent

The level of human negligence here is astounding. The system did exactly what it was supposed to (lock the train down if the track can't be confirmed clear), and then a human controller ordered the crew to override the system, and ordered them to proceed at an unsafe speed towards a similarly disabled train?

1718627440 32 minutes ago | parent

Sorry, but ordering trains to drive manually after the system locks itself down, is the proper procedure. Of course you are still supposed to only send trains to free sections, but the error is in that step, not that they ordered a train to drive on it's own.

Also the fallback procedure is also aided by automatic systems and a sizable number of accidents in the past were caused by that information being faulty.

_trampeltier 30 minutes ago | parent

Yes, but just with max. 40km/h

wafflemaker 25 minutes ago | parent

So that's why my train slowed to 40kmph when the Norwegian Telecom died for a few hours 3 weeks ago.

_trampeltier 12 minutes ago | parent

Yes, 40km/h is for driving on sight in most Europa. I think in France it's even 30km/h.

1718627440 11 minutes ago | parent

Depends. For example German Zs1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_signals_in_Germany#Zs1...) would give them the full clear outside of stations.

julik 12 minutes ago | parent

It is the proper procedure, and it does come (in a lot of countries, AFAIK) with a lot of guardrails:

There will be a so-called "train order" allowing passage of a specific section ignoring the safety system warnings, which has strict validity limits both in time and in the area where it applies, usually denoted by specific hectometric mileposts

When cab signaling is involved (LZB is one of these) and it malfunctions, the entire system normally changes to "driving on sight only" - which indeed limits the train to 40, 30, 20, sometimes - 15 km/h (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marche_%C3%A0_vue) or the line gets switched to lineside signaling - if it is available.

I don't know how you could violate all of those rules - both from the driver's side and from the traffic control side - but it sounds absolutely horrible. Like an override of at least 2 (if not 3) very explicit safety margins.

AdrianCX 12 minutes ago | parent

Why is that?

I remember a long time ago I was stuck in a train in a field a considerable time because of a similar failure and conductor just wouldn't move unless green

I was expecting the same here, conductor is the first to die so just refuse until the idiots fix their system

wjnc 27 minutes ago | parent

I would argue that we should look at systems-level explanations. The human factor is so glaring we can get caught up in it. There are what, 50?, high speed trains in movement in Spain at the same time. Even GPS + Starlink + 1 monitor (is that 50k€?) could have prevented this. But it happened, and the question is what is going on with train security in Spain in general for people to (be able to) make such decisions.

1718627440 7 minutes ago | parent

Trains are still not able to assess properly where they are, even using satellites and inside train sensors. Of course there is research on that, but it's still an unsolved problem. (Current alternative is to put markers in the track, but that's also expensive at scale.)

Pragmata 2 minutes ago | parent

Yeah and that's fucking ridiculous and a damning indictment of the glaring incompetence of train companies.

If I can have reasonably accurate gps readings of my phone while I'm on the train, there is zero reason for train companies to not have systems that are at least as accurate.

crote 9 minutes ago | parent

Whose negligence, though? "The system" isn't just the LZB equipment - the train dispatcher is just another cog inside the same system, and should be expected to occasionally fail just like every mechanical part.

This isn't a game of Hot Potato where the last person touching it goes to jail for gross negligence. You have to look at it through a Swiss Cheese model: every individual safety layer can and will have holes, but a disaster can only occur when all of those holes align.

Why did the LZB system fail? Why did the train dispatcher use the wrong backup procedure? Why did a backup procedure with zero safety checks even exist? Why did the train operator accept this backup procedure? Why did the train allow high-speed driving under those unsafe conditions?

It does indeed seem like the train dispatcher made a big mistake, but that was far from the only thing that went wrong, and it would be myopic to use him as the scapegoat for a far larger systemic issue.

notenchange 33 minutes ago | parent

Reading the text it seems to me this is due to a very widespread issue in Spain and other southern European countries: people don’t care about the warnings because there are too many false positives.

That’s why people here, when they hear the fire alarm they just wait for it to go off: the probability that it is actually a fire is minuscule… but the alarm triggers a lot.

Not sure how to actually solve this… but I’m also not making excuses for what happened. High speed trains is not the same as a fire alarm in some office building, the people in charge should be held responsible somehow.

1718627440 30 minutes ago | parent

It just means that a false positive rate is a as dangerous as a false negative rate. Just issuing a warning doesn't come for free when you are designing a security system.

karmakurtisaani 27 minutes ago | parent

This is very well illustrated in the fable Boy who cried false positive.

coopykins 22 minutes ago | parent

Something similar is happening in my region after the flood that happened two years ago: The alarm was raised late; Now, even mild rain is triggering an alert.

Guess whats the consequence of that? Less and less people pay attention to the alerts.

pelagicAustral 19 minutes ago | parent

> That’s why people here, when they hear the fire alarm they just wait for it to go off

This literally happened to me last night, I was having dinner at my apartment, and suddenly I start hearing a smoke alarm, but not quite inside the apartment, I just kept having dinner thinking "bah, someone probably burned a toast".

Then it wont stop, I walk to door and hear people talking, still don't bother enough, wait a few minutes, then go out and my neighbor said "there are three fire trucks down there, I think it's a real one" hahhaha

The hallway was kind of hazy and smelled like burnt food, for sure... so I just grabbed my laptop and went out hahaa.