[added translation]: "The LZB safety system, which controls Spain's high-speed rail network, malfunctioned on Wednesday morning, causing about eight trains to come to a halt in the area. The control center then switched to manual control and ordered all trains to resume operation. However, the Iryo, for reasons that remain unclear, was unable to start and remained stationary. And that is where human error came into play, according to these initial hypotheses."
Honestly, to blame the controller after the automated system has failed is pretty low. The system does not run this way normally for good reasons, and whilst the controller maybe trained to handle the situation they won't be well practised at it.
The primary reason is computer failure followed by the decision to run the system manually.
When computers fail here in the Netherlands, trains are just stopped until they can be fixed.
In some cases, trains can be ordered to drive "at sight" -- slow enough (walking speed, basically) to stop if there's something visible on the tracks that shouldn't be there (train, car, person, cow, whatever)
Not just when computers fail. When union negotiations fail, when it's too cold, when it's too hot, when it snows, when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks, or whenever they come up with a new excuse.
Proper training focuses specifically on those exceptional situations (like it does for airplane pilots), with strong emphasis on always falling back on safe procedures. Even so, you can't cover 100% of possibilities.
Those override switches are dangerous enough to have tamper evident seals, or sometimes padlocks. And even if they are to be used, there just must be something mechanical to substitute those systems, most simply and least efficiently by physical tokens(tablets) assigned to each stations. Trains had those systems literally since late 19th century.
Passenger service with just verbal orders over a phone is simply unacceptable.
I think Spain needs a complete mindset change, to fully come to the 21st century. While there are truly many people who "take their job" seriously, the overall "world of work", and professional standards are very, very low in Spain. Yes, it's a generalization, but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard.
In short, Spain needs to re-invent its world of professionalism. I'm not saying that it should become like Swizerland overnight but the current mindset is incompatible with the 21st century's complexities. Portugal is currently further along that road.
>but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Sounds just like Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and any many other EU countries, including the EU itself, where there's "employment for life" guaranteed by the state or by strong unions, which makes them ripe for cronyism, complacency and incompetence to thrive unchecked until people inevitably die, and only then can audits and system reforms actually be done. The way it works, is that things need to get worse, before they are allowed to get better. I think this has been the case in politics since time immemorial.
>Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard. [...] Portugal is currently further along that road
From what I saw interviewing, Portugal has much lower earnings, and earnings aren't something the government can control. What the government CAN DO to stimulate high earnings to happen, is provide incentives and an environment for attracting businesses and investment, but that typically correlates with low taxes and low government welfare spending, policies that Spaniards and other Europeans aren't known for supporting, so there you go. You get what you vote for.
Do you have any (counter)arguments to bring to the discussion, or do you enjoy firing vague snarky one-liners from the hip before moving on to the next thread?
Meanwhile people in the US have been framing Spain as some kind of post-work utopia. The "we quit our jobs and moved our family to Spain" is all over social media.
A lot of that is due to relatively low rents by EU standards (even if locals might complain, because their salaries are low compared to some other EU countries).
Just a couple of days ago the Spanish Transport minister appeared in a comedy sketch where he made fun of the current dysfunctional state of the rail system he is responsible of[1]:
> "Due to a system malfunction, the elevator will be out of service longer than usual," the public address system announces. The minister laments, "Oh, for heaven's sake. As if we didn't have enough to deal with already with Renfe."
It's an absolute disgrace to the country that this man first got to minister position, and that it's still there after two major incidents with lots of deaths.
It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.
Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.
> worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
The rail infrastructure is already publicly maintained via a government agency, ADIF. ADIF is not a goverment-owned for-profit corporation, its primary mandate is public service, not profit maximization, and ADIF doesn't compete with anyone, it's a state monopoly.
That's a sweet excuse until you understand that even state-owned nonprofits these days are run the way a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking private-sector manager would run it. Because there very probably is a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking public-sector manager running it.
Every year that passes, Japan's record of zero fatal high-speed train accidents since the Shinkansen was inaugurated in the 1960s becomes more and more incredible, with 10 billion passengers and counting.
(Excluding suicides/people falling on tracks, that is. And that one poor student in 1995 who got stuck in the door of a departing train and was dragged to his death.)
Both accidents involved Iryo, a Italian operator that started running high speed trains on Spain a few years ago. Given how small their fleet is, it's weird that they have been involved in every recent accident, but at least the Adamuz one was clearly the fault of the tracks and not the trains.
Spain's network liberalization is recent-ish, operators like Iryo exist since 2021.
Perhaps the synchronization between renfe and others is a weak point in the system. Decades of assuming that everything in the network is theirs, increased wear and tear, etc.
To be fair, what you're describing is literally an increase in inefficiency caused by liberalization. It's what large corporations solve by "vertical integration" or "in-housing".
If you operate a rail network you need to keep track (pun not intended) of the exact state of all parts of the infrastructure, maintain and update the schedules and routes to account for repairs or disruptions, observe utilization and demand changes (not all of which can be profitable due to externalities like the social benefit of connecting people in remote places even if they don't provide enough revenue) and of course you need to keep track of where your trains currently are and where they are going and need a system of signaling, failsafes and communication to prevent incidents like "rear-ending" a stopped train (which this looks like it was).
Once you start breaking this up into a separate companies (like Spain has done and other countries did in order to "liberalize" the natural monopoly of public transit) you create inefficiencies and misaligned incentives. If you then throw competitors in the mix (who of course only compete in the few profitable aspects like high-speed rail because they only exist to extract surplus value from the system by withdrawing more from it than they put in - that's the literal definition of "profit") the misalignment of incentives gets worse and at worst so does communication.
As a software developer, it's kinda like having to build a publicly document general purpose API for your server-client application so it can work with arbitary third-party clients while having your team at the same time be moved into separate organizational units with different managers. Yes, sure, you can do that, but you better hope this will be reflected by another digit being added to the budget because not only will it make the project a lot more expensive but the same goes for every change that needs to be made to it in the future (not to mention front-to-back performance optimization is pretty much off the table) - except the point here is cutting government expenses so you don't get a real budget and this isn't a greenfield project but a brownfield legacy codebase never intended to serve this use case.
That should never cause a crash. You don't let one train go onto a section of track unless you know that there's no other train on that section of track. If train A has failed to move when instructed, then train B waits for it to move.
That all is true, and furthermore the AVE train was running way above the 30 kmh limit set when the automatic control systems fails. The only way this accident could happen is if someone violated every existing procedure.
The train operators do not seem to be a factor in either incident. Still too early to know what happened today, but the first findings point to an entirely different type of incident.
Also it's of course worth acknowledging that the means of preventing accidents as a train operator is fairly limited beyond the basics. Even if you see something and react in time, trains are extremely efficient at going where the rails will take them but that makes them also very bad at stopping to do so even when you want them to.
There is train colision in spain every month, atleast 8 of last 12 crashes are linked to russian hacking campaings, railway systems are computers too ;) Also there were 2 physical sabotages by unknown actor, but whole europe is under russian sabotage spree for last 4 years, so it is murky in europe right now.
At this point, Spain must have the worst high speed rail safety record in Europe if not.. more broadly?
I am a little surprised doing some light searching that its one of the longest high speed rail systems / highest passenger count HSR systems in Europe?
I've only taken HSR in France & Italy and not been to Spain in over 15 years so was not aware of the build out.
* France HSR ~150M annual journeys / 110B annual passenger-kms
"Italy’s annual high-speed rail (HSR) passenger fatality rate is effectively zero, as there has never been a passenger fatality recorded on the country’s dedicated high-speed network"
"France’s dedicated high-speed lines (LGV—Lignes à Grande Vitesse) have historically maintained an extraordinary safety record. Across several decades of commercial operation since launching in 1981, there has never been a passenger fatality resulting from a high-speed crash during commercial service on a dedicated high-speed line"
Spain by comparison has 2 fatal accidents adding up to ~100 passenger deaths this year alone. Something like 300 fatalities in its history.
People can say it's 'years of neglect' and might even believe it, but to me it's clear train liberalisation directly caused 2 train incident in Spain this year. Yes trains are slightly cheaper (for now, look at GB to estimate how long the low prices will last), but I'm not so sure the redundancy you pay for in a public monopoly is worthless, especially in areas where an incident can cause this many deaths.
"Directly" is way too strong. Yes, it may have been a factor here that the train that remained standing still was from another operator, but there are many more important factors at play, the main one being apparent lack of safety mindset of the controller. In other European countries with even more operators, the safety record is not commensurably worse.
It is though. It's like the electricity market. We try to liberalize it, we see it doesn't work, so we add regulations and regulators (here the "controller"), and each time there is a failure, we blame regulation or regulators, or both. Sometime when it's too egregious we blame the particular company that was caught fucking up, because blaming the system that allows such fuck ups would cost to much: ideologues in power agreeing to the idea that maybe, market do not work everywhere.
The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure. Hope this was the final straw we have to endure and they pay for their negligence at best, evil at worst in court.
Sorry to make a political statement with this tragedy, but the downgrade in Spain in recent years is just too much.
DEP and my condolences to the relatives and love ones.
Not only it's a political statement but it's also one that's disingenuous.
The dismantling of public services, of which the maintenance of train tracks is part of it, has been done by all kinds of governing parties in Spain, and the cuts have been greater when a right wing government was in place.
To shift all the blame to just the latest ones in power is manipulative at best.
The current government has been in power for more than 8 years. Eight years. To deflect blame to a currently non existent right wing movement is real mental gymnastics on your end.
Close collaborators of the current president are in jail due to corruption, much of it from stealing from ADIF.
It's the second time in a year something like this happens.
All my thoughts go to the victims of this tragedy.
I'm not denying their responsibilities, but to just blame the current government , forgetting all the previous history, and not looking first into what is to really blame, is a blatant manipulative tactic.
It could all be that the prime minister himself when to the control room and forced the collision to happen, and if that I'd join you all on blaming him. But we need to study what happened and then we can try to make it not happen again.
There's lots on unrest in Spain, and Europe, but there's also lots of inference from different parties, so many that we don't even know them all or what they want. Are the violent demonstrations organised by far right, Russia, US, Israel, far left? we don't know, but they tend to give worse press to all the leftist movements, so I'm thinking that is not their origin, given all the other non violent movements going around.
With all this there's everyday more and more manipulation, in social media, in news, in comments, that all (that I've seen) comes from the far right or similar movements. You message, and the one I responded, sound a lot like them.
I'm not defending this government, they are too right wing for me, not enough social spending, not fighting enough corruption (which both main parties and several of the minor do take part in), too Spanish for my taste (I'm Catalan). OTOH I despise blame calling before having the whole picture.
The Adamuz train crash was a maintenance issue, or lack of checks after the maintenance jobs, as some sources say that part of the line was very recently renewed. Today's crash seems to be a human failure from ADIF train control.
This one is the kind of thing that's not supposed to be able to even happen (one train running into the back of another) if positive train control is implemented properly.
People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC but their system is very simple and it works (it throws the train into emergency if it passes a red signal by physically knocking out the air).
Exactly, this can't happen. You need to put measures on this.
Both the maintenance issue and bad systems that lead to human error creating this crash need to be taken responsability by the public system and fix them.
Apparently they have the automated systems, but they were not working, so they were under human operating rules.
Which, in the USA at least, severely limits speed you're allowed to use (because once the only thing between you and gory death is a human, eventually that human makes a mistake).
I've always thought that a train lacking PTC on the rails should be able to "deploy" a small car-sized thing that runs ahead of it at the same speed but 2x current stopping distance away from the locomotive - if it stops communicating or detects any anomalies the train goes into emergency.
They told the train to drive "as normal". This was a controller mistake as the procedure says they could only drive in visual/slow mode.
Same mistake was made with other train and the driver replied that that was not allowed, and the operator corrected accordingly. But the driver of the train that crashed didn't raise the issue.
As it looks now the controller made a mistake when taking over manual control of the segment after systems failure ("continue as normal" vs "continue slow"). The train driver probably should have also known they should not drive at normal speed without safeties in the segment, but I guess they trusted control had cleared previous trains.
Between 10-20 minutes control room did not realize a train was approaching an occupied section where the other train was holding on a red track signal.
Human error but signals serious deficiencies at protocol, oversight etc. In control room.
People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC
Who does this? The US barely has PTC because freight companies continue to fight it tooth and nail. You only need to look at the Amtrak Cascades crash to see how subpar even modern rail infrastructure is in the US. Neither is PTC a panacea as anyone who is old enough to remember when Thales' craptastic train control system sent a Muni train the wrong way down the wrong tracks in San Francisco.
There are definitely groups of people who hate the limited speeds of Amtrak, especially in the southwest corridor (the trains Amtrak runs there are capable of "technically high-speed (120 mph)" but can't do it because the freights haven't paid for the rails to be upgraded.
Everyone wants PTC installed, nobody wants to pay for it. Amtrak wants the railroads to pay for it. The railroads don't care about it because they run 50 MPH or less freights, so they want the government to pay for it. The government has no funding and wants Amtrak to pay for it. Amtrak reminds the government that Amtrak is just the government with a bad wig on, and the cycle continues.
And California keeps trying to build a high-speed rail for infinity billion dollars when the cost to PTC the entire LOSSAN corridor is only $250-500 million (and many agencies have done parts of it themselves already).
The state of US rail is entirely due to nobody actually giving a shit and there not being a central authority powerful enough to force it thought (because nobody gives a shit). Kind of the story of the USA in general.
The human failure appears to be mistake number 3 or 4.
1. Automated system fails
2. Decision is made to run the system manually
3. Iyro train fails to move on when instructed (Comms failure?, train failure?)
4. Controller uses imprecise language when instructing following train.
To say this is totally down to 4 is to scapegoat the last link in the chain.
They do have such sensors, and have for many years! Japan's shinkansen pioneered this tech in the 1960s (and has an essentially perfect safety record). It's just that by necessity, the sensing is done through the tracks, rather than directly by the train cars.
You might be imagining something like the automated emergency braking that's used in automobiles, where radar is used to detect an imminent collision. But high-speed trains have stopping distances measured in miles, and it's not feasible for one train to detect another at such distances (especially e.g. on parallel tracks or around curves).
So instead the train positions have to be monitored and relayed by sensors in the tracks, which necessitates a coordination system. And it seems that that system is what broke down. The automated system should have been (and presumably was) fail-safe, but instead of stopping trains until it was fixed, the operators chose to override it and use a much more fallible manual signaling system.
> Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
I'm sure you're already aware that this is an irrational fear. As bad as this accident is, and as reprehensible as it was that it was allowed to happen, I'm pretty sure there have still been significantly fewer fatalities per passenger-km in Spain this year than there have been on US highways. It's just that we've become numb to the fact that 100 Americans die in car accidents every day.
Metro style trains all have it. It's just continental long distance systems that are sometimes lax about those things.
Train wheels are all solid metal so you can watch out for electrical faults between the left and right rails. You can, and this is in fact how many metro style trains operate, require the ground infra to be responding OK and report no faults in the next part of the rail for the train to enter a new section.
Reading other comments, looks like this Spanish system did have a German system that is more advanced that basic electrical fault based system, it was just switched off because it was broken. That's downright reckless, and it shouldn't be a normal behavior.
They don't advertise you how those things work, because it's useless information for most. Doesn't mean they never had such systems for the past ~150 years.
> “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.
This is not the first time something broadly like that happens. In 2013 another train crashed because there was a section of the track where the operator had to manually adjust the speed, and he didn't.
One would think that the operation of these trains would be fully automated at all times, and with sufficient allowances to handle emergencies safely.
Point in case: Japan has not had a single death due to a crash of a high speed train, even though they have been operating an extensive network for decades.
The operation is fully automated until the point when the system breaks and the human controller orders manual overrides.
They could have waited for recovery etc. The issue is they switched to manual and then botched it. We don't know root cause yet (bad management, timetable pressure, lax work culture...?).
According to the available information, the failure of the automated system caused six trains to stop. They were then given manually the go-ahead to proceed at full speed (!!!). Six does not sound like a huge number of them to ensure that the train ahead is moving normally before the train behind is told to continue. This sounds like a massive failure in either the protocol or the operator's ability to follow the protocol. Mind boggling stuff, really.
As a Spaniard I am profoundly ashamed that these crashes are happening, when other countries like China, France and Japan seem to manage just fine with their extensive high-speed rail networks.
The public minister of transport is still on his chair after the last ones. No responsability admited and blaming the far right for attacking him with media.
Is amazing how the current politic scene at spain has shittified, they get away with everything and ppl will still clap for them.
so thanks everyone for downvotes just because you use slow news sources or deny the truth EU high speed trains are extremely dangerous compared to China on deaths/volume
> ABC is American, not sure why you'd claim this is a Spanish newspaper.
I have no words for stupidity of some commenters here...
"ABC (Spanish: [aˈβeθe]) is a Spanish national daily newspaper. Along with El Mundo and El País, it is one of Spain's three newspapers of record."
"ABC was first published in Madrid on 1 January 1903[1][2] by Torcuato Luca de Tena y Álvarez-Ossorio.[3][4] The founding publishing house was Prensa Española, which was led by the founder of the paper, Luca de Tena.[4] The paper started as a weekly newspaper, turning daily in June 1905.[5] In 1928, ABC had two editions, one for Madrid and the other for Seville.[4][6] The latter was named ABC de Sevilla.[4]"
"ABC is the longest-running national newspaper in Spain. With clear roots in its founding values, it constantly evolves, adapting to technological innovations and social changes to offer the best information offer"
Don't forget that several countries such as russia are waging hybrid warfare against the EU, there have been frequent sabotage acts against rail lines and cargo shipments. China is currently not targeted by russian hybrid warfare, and the US does not have a functional high speed rail system at all.
Ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem ('argument directed at the person'), is a rhetorical tactic of attacking the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion often using a totally irrelevant, but often highly charged attribute of the opponent's character or background.
Just a few days ago Spain is still in riot mode. The next protest is going to be on 31th October apparently.
This is gonna add fuel to the fire, and as I lived in East Asia (Hong Kong to be specific) I'm kind of curious why it all happened around the eurozone lately.
France, Albania, Belgium, Spain, Greece, UK and Serbia recently (although it is not eurozone but closely related anyway as part of the great Balkans). What's left? Germany and Poland I guess?
Anyhow it really reminds me of the First World War
because it is symptom of Sanchez government, two high speed train crashes within a year, his minister not resigning, throw there high living expenses, no wonder Spaniards protest
El Pais is reporting they think it was a controller error,
https://elpais.com/espana/2026-10-28/por-que-han-chocado-dos...
An automated system[*] had failed earlier this morning, so controllers were working manually.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung ("LZB")
[added translation]: "The LZB safety system, which controls Spain's high-speed rail network, malfunctioned on Wednesday morning, causing about eight trains to come to a halt in the area. The control center then switched to manual control and ordered all trains to resume operation. However, the Iryo, for reasons that remain unclear, was unable to start and remained stationary. And that is where human error came into play, according to these initial hypotheses."
El Pais, English version: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-10-28/at-least-10-peop...
Honestly, to blame the controller after the automated system has failed is pretty low. The system does not run this way normally for good reasons, and whilst the controller maybe trained to handle the situation they won't be well practised at it.
The primary reason is computer failure followed by the decision to run the system manually.
When computers fail here in the Netherlands, trains are just stopped until they can be fixed.
In some cases, trains can be ordered to drive "at sight" -- slow enough (walking speed, basically) to stop if there's something visible on the tracks that shouldn't be there (train, car, person, cow, whatever)
Not just when computers fail. When union negotiations fail, when it's too cold, when it's too hot, when it snows, when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks, or whenever they come up with a new excuse.
You haven't used trains elsewhere if you think Dutch ones are bad.
Try a few weeks of German trains. Sometimes no trains leave on time for weeks.
Those inconveniences prevent tragedies like this one.
All trains stopped. Then a train was cleared to continue full speed while next one was waiting on a red light.
Proper training focuses specifically on those exceptional situations (like it does for airplane pilots), with strong emphasis on always falling back on safe procedures. Even so, you can't cover 100% of possibilities.
They ran the trains with no blocking, not even tokens!? In 2026!? Unbelievable.
There was a human override after all trains stopped.
Those override switches are dangerous enough to have tamper evident seals, or sometimes padlocks. And even if they are to be used, there just must be something mechanical to substitute those systems, most simply and least efficiently by physical tokens(tablets) assigned to each stations. Trains had those systems literally since late 19th century.
Passenger service with just verbal orders over a phone is simply unacceptable.
I think Spain needs a complete mindset change, to fully come to the 21st century. While there are truly many people who "take their job" seriously, the overall "world of work", and professional standards are very, very low in Spain. Yes, it's a generalization, but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard.
In short, Spain needs to re-invent its world of professionalism. I'm not saying that it should become like Swizerland overnight but the current mindset is incompatible with the 21st century's complexities. Portugal is currently further along that road.
>but anyone living in Spain will tell and complain about bad company practices, no or slow responses, and a general lack of professionalism, in all sectors.
Sounds just like Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and any many other EU countries, including the EU itself, where there's "employment for life" guaranteed by the state or by strong unions, which makes them ripe for cronyism, complacency and incompetence to thrive unchecked until people inevitably die, and only then can audits and system reforms actually be done. The way it works, is that things need to get worse, before they are allowed to get better. I think this has been the case in politics since time immemorial.
>Further than that, almost all problems and tension in Spain would disappear if earnings caught up to at least the European standard. [...] Portugal is currently further along that road
From what I saw interviewing, Portugal has much lower earnings, and earnings aren't something the government can control. What the government CAN DO to stimulate high earnings to happen, is provide incentives and an environment for attracting businesses and investment, but that typically correlates with low taxes and low government welfare spending, policies that Spaniards and other Europeans aren't known for supporting, so there you go. You get what you vote for.
Sounds líke your opinions are well ahead of your judgement.
Do you have any (counter)arguments to bring to the discussion, or do you enjoy firing vague snarky one-liners from the hip before moving on to the next thread?
Meanwhile people in the US have been framing Spain as some kind of post-work utopia. The "we quit our jobs and moved our family to Spain" is all over social media.
Those are not incompatible though? I'm from Spain and it's a great place to retire.
The railway system in the US is not very impressive, though.
A lot of that is due to relatively low rents by EU standards (even if locals might complain, because their salaries are low compared to some other EU countries).
Not just rent but food and wine are also inexpensive (and amazing). Plus many Americans are already familiar with the language.
If you can work remotely (or not at all), Spain has a lot going for it.
Just a couple of days ago the Spanish Transport minister appeared in a comedy sketch where he made fun of the current dysfunctional state of the rail system he is responsible of[1]:
> "Due to a system malfunction, the elevator will be out of service longer than usual," the public address system announces. The minister laments, "Oh, for heaven's sake. As if we didn't have enough to deal with already with Renfe."
Very funny minister...
[1] https://www.lasexta.com/programas/cara-show-marc-giro/oscar-...
It's an absolute disgrace to the country that this man first got to minister position, and that it's still there after two major incidents with lots of deaths.
Remember who disinvested in the rail system maintenance: the previous right-wing government.
We are 8 years into Sanchez's government. Ridiculous scapegoat.
It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.
Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.
> worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.
The rail infrastructure is already publicly maintained via a government agency, ADIF. ADIF is not a goverment-owned for-profit corporation, its primary mandate is public service, not profit maximization, and ADIF doesn't compete with anyone, it's a state monopoly.
That's a sweet excuse until you understand that even state-owned nonprofits these days are run the way a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking private-sector manager would run it. Because there very probably is a harsh capitalist / neoliberal blood-sucking public-sector manager running it.
They are very bad capitalists then, because ADIF high speed lost 200 million dollars last year.
By the way, don't act as if the Japanese high speed network is not the best on the planet. It's much more liberalized than the Spanish one.
Every year that passes, Japan's record of zero fatal high-speed train accidents since the Shinkansen was inaugurated in the 1960s becomes more and more incredible, with 10 billion passengers and counting.
(Excluding suicides/people falling on tracks, that is. And that one poor student in 1995 who got stuck in the door of a departing train and was dragged to his death.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment ?
And this accident occurred a few weeks ago.
https://apnews.com/article/japan-train-accident-8759a27eaae8...
Neither was a Shinkansen.
Japan probably doesn't have DEI priorities in hiring staff.
Absolutely braindead take.
Japanese train companies do have DEI priorities in hiring and promoting staffs.
1: https://www.jreast.co.jp/recruit/career/diversity/propulsion...
https://www.reuters.com/world/two-high-speed-trains-rear-end...
Says the Spanish train crash in Jan of this year that killed 46 was the "same operators on the same line."
Both accidents involved Iryo, a Italian operator that started running high speed trains on Spain a few years ago. Given how small their fleet is, it's weird that they have been involved in every recent accident, but at least the Adamuz one was clearly the fault of the tracks and not the trains.
Spain's network liberalization is recent-ish, operators like Iryo exist since 2021.
Perhaps the synchronization between renfe and others is a weak point in the system. Decades of assuming that everything in the network is theirs, increased wear and tear, etc.
To be fair, what you're describing is literally an increase in inefficiency caused by liberalization. It's what large corporations solve by "vertical integration" or "in-housing".
If you operate a rail network you need to keep track (pun not intended) of the exact state of all parts of the infrastructure, maintain and update the schedules and routes to account for repairs or disruptions, observe utilization and demand changes (not all of which can be profitable due to externalities like the social benefit of connecting people in remote places even if they don't provide enough revenue) and of course you need to keep track of where your trains currently are and where they are going and need a system of signaling, failsafes and communication to prevent incidents like "rear-ending" a stopped train (which this looks like it was).
Once you start breaking this up into a separate companies (like Spain has done and other countries did in order to "liberalize" the natural monopoly of public transit) you create inefficiencies and misaligned incentives. If you then throw competitors in the mix (who of course only compete in the few profitable aspects like high-speed rail because they only exist to extract surplus value from the system by withdrawing more from it than they put in - that's the literal definition of "profit") the misalignment of incentives gets worse and at worst so does communication.
As a software developer, it's kinda like having to build a publicly document general purpose API for your server-client application so it can work with arbitary third-party clients while having your team at the same time be moved into separate organizational units with different managers. Yes, sure, you can do that, but you better hope this will be reflected by another digit being added to the budget because not only will it make the project a lot more expensive but the same goes for every change that needs to be made to it in the future (not to mention front-to-back performance optimization is pretty much off the table) - except the point here is cutting government expenses so you don't get a real budget and this isn't a greenfield project but a brownfield legacy codebase never intended to serve this use case.
But in this case Iryo seems the victim - it's train was stopped on the track and got hit from behind.
Because it failed to move forward when instructed, or so it seems.
That should never cause a crash. You don't let one train go onto a section of track unless you know that there's no other train on that section of track. If train A has failed to move when instructed, then train B waits for it to move.
That all is true, and furthermore the AVE train was running way above the 30 kmh limit set when the automatic control systems fails. The only way this accident could happen is if someone violated every existing procedure.
The train operators do not seem to be a factor in either incident. Still too early to know what happened today, but the first findings point to an entirely different type of incident.
Also it's of course worth acknowledging that the means of preventing accidents as a train operator is fairly limited beyond the basics. Even if you see something and react in time, trains are extremely efficient at going where the rails will take them but that makes them also very bad at stopping to do so even when you want them to.
Article is completely pay walled; please consider deleting and reposting with a readable source.
The criteria shouldn't be paid or not, it should be quality or slop.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv1j309d4g98t - available to me - I'm not sure how accessible the BBC news is now to those elsewhere?
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20261028-two-high-speed-t...
As of writing the article says 10. Other sources, sadly, indicate up to 39.
There is train colision in spain every month, atleast 8 of last 12 crashes are linked to russian hacking campaings, railway systems are computers too ;) Also there were 2 physical sabotages by unknown actor, but whole europe is under russian sabotage spree for last 4 years, so it is murky in europe right now.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/european-...
Kaja Kalas EU official on russian sabotages : https://www.facebook.com/reel/1554741255960830
At this point, Spain must have the worst high speed rail safety record in Europe if not.. more broadly?
I am a little surprised doing some light searching that its one of the longest high speed rail systems / highest passenger count HSR systems in Europe?
I've only taken HSR in France & Italy and not been to Spain in over 15 years so was not aware of the build out.
Would be interesting to see the figures per passenger-mile and per passenger-journey.
According to cursory search:
* Spain HSR ~45M annual journeys / 30B annual passenger-kms
* Italy HSR ~65M annual journeys / 50B annual passenger-kms
* France HSR ~150M annual journeys / 110B annual passenger-kms
"Italy’s annual high-speed rail (HSR) passenger fatality rate is effectively zero, as there has never been a passenger fatality recorded on the country’s dedicated high-speed network"
"France’s dedicated high-speed lines (LGV—Lignes à Grande Vitesse) have historically maintained an extraordinary safety record. Across several decades of commercial operation since launching in 1981, there has never been a passenger fatality resulting from a high-speed crash during commercial service on a dedicated high-speed line"
Spain by comparison has 2 fatal accidents adding up to ~100 passenger deaths this year alone. Something like 300 fatalities in its history.
This is quite bad.
People can say it's 'years of neglect' and might even believe it, but to me it's clear train liberalisation directly caused 2 train incident in Spain this year. Yes trains are slightly cheaper (for now, look at GB to estimate how long the low prices will last), but I'm not so sure the redundancy you pay for in a public monopoly is worthless, especially in areas where an incident can cause this many deaths.
Also the train network was neglected a lot since the 70s-80s so the car and oil companies could earn huge profits.
"Directly" is way too strong. Yes, it may have been a factor here that the train that remained standing still was from another operator, but there are many more important factors at play, the main one being apparent lack of safety mindset of the controller. In other European countries with even more operators, the safety record is not commensurably worse.
It is though. It's like the electricity market. We try to liberalize it, we see it doesn't work, so we add regulations and regulators (here the "controller"), and each time there is a failure, we blame regulation or regulators, or both. Sometime when it's too egregious we blame the particular company that was caught fucking up, because blaming the system that allows such fuck ups would cost to much: ideologues in power agreeing to the idea that maybe, market do not work everywhere.
Nice job, i won't get fooled again though.
Train controllers (dispatchers, signallers) existed way before liberalization.
There is merit to your arguments, but I still don't think it's the main issue in this case.
The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure. Hope this was the final straw we have to endure and they pay for their negligence at best, evil at worst in court.
Sorry to make a political statement with this tragedy, but the downgrade in Spain in recent years is just too much.
DEP and my condolences to the relatives and love ones.
Not only it's a political statement but it's also one that's disingenuous.
The dismantling of public services, of which the maintenance of train tracks is part of it, has been done by all kinds of governing parties in Spain, and the cuts have been greater when a right wing government was in place.
To shift all the blame to just the latest ones in power is manipulative at best.
There's nothing manipulative here. Anyone that follows Spanish politics and it's not a political hoolingan can see this.
Yet another unsourced vacuous 'everybody says so' statement. Frankly, bots do a better job...
Let me state some facts:
The current government has been in power for more than 8 years. Eight years. To deflect blame to a currently non existent right wing movement is real mental gymnastics on your end.
Close collaborators of the current president are in jail due to corruption, much of it from stealing from ADIF.
It's the second time in a year something like this happens.
All my thoughts go to the victims of this tragedy.
I'm not denying their responsibilities, but to just blame the current government , forgetting all the previous history, and not looking first into what is to really blame, is a blatant manipulative tactic.
It could all be that the prime minister himself when to the control room and forced the collision to happen, and if that I'd join you all on blaming him. But we need to study what happened and then we can try to make it not happen again.
There's lots on unrest in Spain, and Europe, but there's also lots of inference from different parties, so many that we don't even know them all or what they want. Are the violent demonstrations organised by far right, Russia, US, Israel, far left? we don't know, but they tend to give worse press to all the leftist movements, so I'm thinking that is not their origin, given all the other non violent movements going around.
With all this there's everyday more and more manipulation, in social media, in news, in comments, that all (that I've seen) comes from the far right or similar movements. You message, and the one I responded, sound a lot like them.
I'm not defending this government, they are too right wing for me, not enough social spending, not fighting enough corruption (which both main parties and several of the minor do take part in), too Spanish for my taste (I'm Catalan). OTOH I despise blame calling before having the whole picture.
> The government here in Spain is more concerned with staying in power than solving real problems or improving infrastructure
I don't know of any country where this is not the case
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271657
Yes, you could have saved yourself the disgraceful jab, specially taking into account that it was the previous government who disinvested in rail.
wastedpotenTial indeed...
There is something deeply broken with Spanish rail.
The Adamuz train crash was a maintenance issue, or lack of checks after the maintenance jobs, as some sources say that part of the line was very recently renewed. Today's crash seems to be a human failure from ADIF train control.
This one is the kind of thing that's not supposed to be able to even happen (one train running into the back of another) if positive train control is implemented properly.
People rag on the USA refusing to allow higher speeds without PTC but their system is very simple and it works (it throws the train into emergency if it passes a red signal by physically knocking out the air).
Exactly, this can't happen. You need to put measures on this.
Both the maintenance issue and bad systems that lead to human error creating this crash need to be taken responsability by the public system and fix them.
Apparently they have the automated systems, but they were not working, so they were under human operating rules.
Which, in the USA at least, severely limits speed you're allowed to use (because once the only thing between you and gory death is a human, eventually that human makes a mistake).
Yeah, and seems like the automated systems have been failing a lot recently. Or that they didnt correctly designed them for this case.
This means the health of those systems and mantinability by whoever was responsible hasn't been well done.
I agree with you, once the only thing and death is a human, nothing can be trusted, humans will make mistakes.
I've always thought that a train lacking PTC on the rails should be able to "deploy" a small car-sized thing that runs ahead of it at the same speed but 2x current stopping distance away from the locomotive - if it stops communicating or detects any anomalies the train goes into emergency.
They told the train to drive "as normal". This was a controller mistake as the procedure says they could only drive in visual/slow mode.
Same mistake was made with other train and the driver replied that that was not allowed, and the operator corrected accordingly. But the driver of the train that crashed didn't raise the issue.
As it looks now the controller made a mistake when taking over manual control of the segment after systems failure ("continue as normal" vs "continue slow"). The train driver probably should have also known they should not drive at normal speed without safeties in the segment, but I guess they trusted control had cleared previous trains.
Between 10-20 minutes control room did not realize a train was approaching an occupied section where the other train was holding on a red track signal.
Human error but signals serious deficiencies at protocol, oversight etc. In control room.
Who does this? The US barely has PTC because freight companies continue to fight it tooth and nail. You only need to look at the Amtrak Cascades crash to see how subpar even modern rail infrastructure is in the US. Neither is PTC a panacea as anyone who is old enough to remember when Thales' craptastic train control system sent a Muni train the wrong way down the wrong tracks in San Francisco.
There are definitely groups of people who hate the limited speeds of Amtrak, especially in the southwest corridor (the trains Amtrak runs there are capable of "technically high-speed (120 mph)" but can't do it because the freights haven't paid for the rails to be upgraded.
Everyone wants PTC installed, nobody wants to pay for it. Amtrak wants the railroads to pay for it. The railroads don't care about it because they run 50 MPH or less freights, so they want the government to pay for it. The government has no funding and wants Amtrak to pay for it. Amtrak reminds the government that Amtrak is just the government with a bad wig on, and the cycle continues.
And California keeps trying to build a high-speed rail for infinity billion dollars when the cost to PTC the entire LOSSAN corridor is only $250-500 million (and many agencies have done parts of it themselves already).
The state of US rail is entirely due to nobody actually giving a shit and there not being a central authority powerful enough to force it thought (because nobody gives a shit). Kind of the story of the USA in general.
It's also a maintenance issue. The automatic control systems were offline and that's why they were manually controlling the trains.
Which is a valid fallback, but only with lower speeds. If someone made the call to go manual and continue at speeds over 30 km/h…
The human failure appears to be mistake number 3 or 4.
1. Automated system fails 2. Decision is made to run the system manually 3. Iyro train fails to move on when instructed (Comms failure?, train failure?) 4. Controller uses imprecise language when instructing following train.
To say this is totally down to 4 is to scapegoat the last link in the chain.
It feels like every few years there is such collision in Spain :-/
Last high speed train crash was just at the beginning of the year (Adamuz), with 46 casualties
the most recent crash with fatalities appears to be January 2026 https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260123-spain-train-coll...
It baffles my mind that trains never had the technology for sensors so they could atleast slow down before incoming collisions.
Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
They do have such sensors, and have for many years! Japan's shinkansen pioneered this tech in the 1960s (and has an essentially perfect safety record). It's just that by necessity, the sensing is done through the tracks, rather than directly by the train cars.
You might be imagining something like the automated emergency braking that's used in automobiles, where radar is used to detect an imminent collision. But high-speed trains have stopping distances measured in miles, and it's not feasible for one train to detect another at such distances (especially e.g. on parallel tracks or around curves).
So instead the train positions have to be monitored and relayed by sensors in the tracks, which necessitates a coordination system. And it seems that that system is what broke down. The automated system should have been (and presumably was) fail-safe, but instead of stopping trains until it was fixed, the operators chose to override it and use a much more fallible manual signaling system.
> Stuff like this just further enhances my fear of collective travelling.
I'm sure you're already aware that this is an irrational fear. As bad as this accident is, and as reprehensible as it was that it was allowed to happen, I'm pretty sure there have still been significantly fewer fatalities per passenger-km in Spain this year than there have been on US highways. It's just that we've become numb to the fact that 100 Americans die in car accidents every day.
Metro style trains all have it. It's just continental long distance systems that are sometimes lax about those things.
Train wheels are all solid metal so you can watch out for electrical faults between the left and right rails. You can, and this is in fact how many metro style trains operate, require the ground infra to be responding OK and report no faults in the next part of the rail for the train to enter a new section.
Reading other comments, looks like this Spanish system did have a German system that is more advanced that basic electrical fault based system, it was just switched off because it was broken. That's downright reckless, and it shouldn't be a normal behavior.
They don't advertise you how those things work, because it's useless information for most. Doesn't mean they never had such systems for the past ~150 years.
From the article in El País:
> “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.
This is not the first time something broadly like that happens. In 2013 another train crashed because there was a section of the track where the operator had to manually adjust the speed, and he didn't.
One would think that the operation of these trains would be fully automated at all times, and with sufficient allowances to handle emergencies safely.
Point in case: Japan has not had a single death due to a crash of a high speed train, even though they have been operating an extensive network for decades.
The operation is fully automated until the point when the system breaks and the human controller orders manual overrides.
They could have waited for recovery etc. The issue is they switched to manual and then botched it. We don't know root cause yet (bad management, timetable pressure, lax work culture...?).
According to the available information, the failure of the automated system caused six trains to stop. They were then given manually the go-ahead to proceed at full speed (!!!). Six does not sound like a huge number of them to ensure that the train ahead is moving normally before the train behind is told to continue. This sounds like a massive failure in either the protocol or the operator's ability to follow the protocol. Mind boggling stuff, really.
As a Spaniard I am profoundly ashamed that these crashes are happening, when other countries like China, France and Japan seem to manage just fine with their extensive high-speed rail networks.
Another one.
The public minister of transport is still on his chair after the last ones. No responsability admited and blaming the far right for attacking him with media.
Is amazing how the current politic scene at spain has shittified, they get away with everything and ppl will still clap for them.
more like 46 dead already
so much for European safety, now compare it to volumes on Chinese HSR and number of deaths there compared to Spain
edit: inconvenient truth for downvoters?
50 according one of the biggesr Spanish newspapers, just open the homepage, you can read 50 even in Spanish
https://www.abc.es
so thanks everyone for downvotes just because you use slow news sources or deny the truth EU high speed trains are extremely dangerous compared to China on deaths/volume
No you likely got downvotes for claiming the yet to be known number of deaths.
I know there have been other Spanish train crashes in recent years but does you're pointing to all of Europe. Source?
https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/spain-train...
also one of the 3 major czech stations reporting at least 46
https://tn.nova.cz/zpravodajstvi/clanek/660035-srazka-rychlo...
if you open one of the biggest newspapers in Spain they report already 50 dead
https://www.abc.es
So thanks for giving me downvotes just because you use outdated news sources!
The pompous snark likely won't help if you're concerned with down votes, but that's for the sources.
That leaves the Europe claims, as it stands your comparison would be Spanish railways vs Chinese.
> if you open one of the biggest newspapers in Spain they report already 50 dead
Which one, El Pais? ABC is American, not sure why you'd claim this is a Spanish newspaper. What Czech TV stations report also feels not so relevant.
Here you have an actual news article from an actual Spanish newspaper: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-10-28/at-least-10-peop...
To be fair, they linked to abc.es which is a Spanish site.
> ABC is American, not sure why you'd claim this is a Spanish newspaper.
I have no words for stupidity of some commenters here...
"ABC (Spanish: [aˈβeθe]) is a Spanish national daily newspaper. Along with El Mundo and El País, it is one of Spain's three newspapers of record."
"ABC was first published in Madrid on 1 January 1903[1][2] by Torcuato Luca de Tena y Álvarez-Ossorio.[3][4] The founding publishing house was Prensa Española, which was led by the founder of the paper, Luca de Tena.[4] The paper started as a weekly newspaper, turning daily in June 1905.[5] In 1928, ABC had two editions, one for Madrid and the other for Seville.[4][6] The latter was named ABC de Sevilla.[4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(newspaper)
"ABC is the longest-running national newspaper in Spain. With clear roots in its founding values, it constantly evolves, adapting to technological innovations and social changes to offer the best information offer"
https://www.abc.es/contacto/quienes-somos.html
It is also 4th biggest in Spain by circulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Spain
Don't forget that several countries such as russia are waging hybrid warfare against the EU, there have been frequent sabotage acts against rail lines and cargo shipments. China is currently not targeted by russian hybrid warfare, and the US does not have a functional high speed rail system at all.
Blaming Russia for a train crash in Spain is a level of psychosis I had never seen before.
Right? Clearly it was Israel.
Wait to you hear people claiming that Russia is invading Ukraine! Why would Russia murder women and children? Definitely psychosis!
What concrete evidence do you have that this crash, or the one earlier this year, was caused by the Russians?
You must have an incredibly high P(h)...
This Russian paranoia is more damaging than actual Russian operations at that point...
French riots? Russia
Spain train accident? Russia
Right wing party wins? Russia
Rainy weekend? Russia
Acela was pretty successful at locking pax in the toilets.
Just a few days ago Spain is still in riot mode. The next protest is going to be on 31th October apparently.
This is gonna add fuel to the fire, and as I lived in East Asia (Hong Kong to be specific) I'm kind of curious why it all happened around the eurozone lately.
France, Albania, Belgium, Spain, Greece, UK and Serbia recently (although it is not eurozone but closely related anyway as part of the great Balkans). What's left? Germany and Poland I guess?
Anyhow it really reminds me of the First World War
I can't see why you would think a train crash would "add fuel to the fire"
because it is symptom of Sanchez government, two high speed train crashes within a year, his minister not resigning, throw there high living expenses, no wonder Spaniards protest
Well said.
Failure of 'third way' liberalisation politics explain some of it. Serbia it's way more complicated than that though.
Spain is not in riot mode and the two violent riots are not related to political protests nor have political goals.