HN

Need help?
<- Back
What we know so far about Spain train crash

What we know so far about Spain train crash

ZeljkoS

Comments (263)

  • germandiago
    The main problem comes from under maintenance. I am spanish, we have known this for years.15 or 20 years ago when I took the train it worked well.Now there are more trains and they increased the traffic like by 70% if I am not wrong and the budget for railway infrastructure by only 17% and it seems to not scale well enough, for whatever reason I do not know all the details.There are a lot of railway tracks that are not in good state so speed must be lowered. There are incideents and delays routinely, all the time.This did not happen until like 10 years ago and it has gotten worse and worse since then, not only in high speed trains.The roads is a mess also: 52% of infrastructure for roads has bad or very bad defects in it.The thing is that we have a record in government incomings and the services, ALL of them (healthcare, roads, infrastructure...) slowly collapsing.Part of the money is not going to the right places. I think that nearly 40% of the budget goes for retired people. We have 9.5 million pensionists in Spain.We have to change that system and rationalize government spending and welfare or eventually everything will collapse.
  • swiftcoder
    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?
  • juliushuijnk
    It should not be possible for one person to make a mistake of this magnitude. In case of a disconnected/off main safety system, the train should be limited on a hardware level to not be able to go over 40km/h.
  • notenchange
    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.
  • electroweak
    I think aircraft are so safe in this regard because, essentially, they are required to use a single international collision avoidance system that is well defined. And modern cars have AEB systems built by vendors aiming for commonality to meet worldwide rules.But train traffic systems seem to be a hodgepodge of different systems, perhaps locally grown and driven by the local vagaries of politics and rulemaking.What a surprising inversion of expectations regarding safety.
  • Zigurd
    I'm totally not on the spectrum so I've only watched about 80% of the Plainly Difficult channel on YouTube, but if you want a painless and entertaining, if you're into that kind of thing, way of learning about train signaling and safety, and how safety systems have evolved, I highly recommend it.
  • iSnow
    >In one recording, the controller tells the driver of the Renfe train to disconnect and reconnect the LZB mechanism that monitors train speeds, and then resume the journey at normal speed.Wait, I thought Spain's high-speed rail network was all ETCS L1 or even L2?
  • dang
    Earlier thread:What we know so far about Spain train crash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50286197 - Oct 2026 (84 comments)
  • rimeice
    Off topic I know but, the BBC has adopted this clickbaity title pattern of “what we know so far about x” for the last year or so and it really jars me. Especially when x is very serious and involves people dying. It’s like an amateur tictoc’er is in charge of headlines at the moment.
  • anonymous2024
    I still don't know why the train drivers don't have a simple data: The distance to the train that is next in in that railway in its direction. With this information, that accident will have never happened.
  • dogscatstrees
    Is there an international consortium for best practices in high-speed train control? Surely there are countries that have good systems in place, or have benefited from knowledge-sharing. I have to believe these train systems were built with outside help and then organic improvement or the opposite. Spain, talk to them.
  • absoluteunit1
    This was a terrifying read because I initially read about this at the air port in Madrid after taking a Renfe train from Alicante; literally at the same time...just a different line
  • enriquto
    it's a matter of budget and political will. Spain simply cannot afford all these train lines, and the system fails. But hey, we have high speed train between Villacojón del Caudillo and Cagalera de la Reina, because they happen to be aligned to the center of the country (Madrit). These railways make no economical sense, they were built for political reasons, to support a "radial" concept of the country that does not really exist yet.Meanwhile no high speed rail between València and Barcelona, because that would somehow erode the power of the central elites.
  • Yokolos
    So based on this, the safest place to sit is presumably the middle carriage?
  • ktallett
    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.
  • ChrisArchitect
  • schnitzelstoat
    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.
  • pvaldes
    "the collision occurred after one train stopped on the line unexpectedly due to an Automatic Warning System fault causing it to brake. It was then hit from behind by the second train that had passed a red stop signal protecting the stationary train in front"- Not Spain. This was Bedford (UK) in June 2026.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Bedford_train_collisionThe train collided rear-end into the rear carriages of the other train and derailed, which also resulted in the three rear carriages of the first train to derail- This was Białośliwie train collision (Poland) in June 2026https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Bia%C5%82o%C5%9Bliwie_tra...One carriage was reported to have overturned and four more were derailed. 44 of the passengers were injured- And this was the Cleon Derailement (France) by sabotage in September 2026https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9on_derailmentIn this last case Police suspected sabotage after a 300 Kg piece of rail was found deliberately laid in the railway."A fire was detected in the rear cabin of the high-speed train. Following safety protocols, the 283 passengers on board have been evacuated"This was an AVE passenger train in the line Madrid-Barcelona, in October 2026. Most probably another case of sabotage.
  • aerodog
    [dead]
  • vagab0nd
    Tell your travel agent:"Add a global memory. Whenever I'm in Spain or planning to go there, remind me of this: <story url>, and plan to avoid it."
  • whycome
    Why isn't there basically adsb data for trains?! They can broadcast speed and position. Other trains can then see things ahead on their track. This seems like a solved problem so I must be missing something obvious.
  • steelframe
    This event was pretty chilling for me because I just took the Renfe line from Seville to Madrid a couple of weeks ago while visiting Spain. I generally like to think that I have a pretty good instinct on relative risks and make reasonable decisions based on that. This time around, between the incident earlier this year and this most recent incident, depending on how you interpret and apply the statistics (of course that's always up for healthy debate), it looks like it would have actually been safer driving between Seville and Madrid. That's a pretty low bar in terms of safety!I set my favorite agent on the task (Opus 5.5 in the Kagi Assistant), and given the two rail crashes in Spain this year, these are the stats it came up with for "chances of dying" via various modes of transportation between Seville and Madrid:* EU high-speed rail, long-run average: ~1 in 36 million* This rail line, counting both 2026 crashes: ~1 in 400,000 to 1.2 million (prior to the most recent crash it was 1–3 million; now ~2.5× higher)* Flying with a European airline: ~1 in 80 million* Driving: ~1 in 1 million or worseOf course this is hindsight. Heightened awareness of risks, higher propensity to overreact to anomalies or alarms, procedural changes, and so forth in the wake of this second crash might push high-speed rail in Spain to be higher than the European average in the future.