5 ms·

A $10 steel bar can derail a train.

randomsearch 8y ago
Easier to protect a train line than all the roads in a country (and indeed, they are often protected). No physical trespass required, remote activated.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  Except rail lines aren’t protected, and couldn’t feasibly be protected. An autonomous car could easily be protected from this simply by using local sensors for collision avoidance, which I think is the norm, as opposed to what this headline misleadingly (heh) suggests. Edit: Relevant XKCD. Causing crashes isn’t hard period. https://m.xkcd.com/1958/ https://m.xkcd.com/1958/
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    In the UK railways are mostly protected. Now, that may be a simple fence, which someone could climb over, but then they may find themselves reported, or caught on CCTV. It's a very obvious, very visible thing to do, and in urban areas railways are indeed protected pretty well. And remote triggering something like that is non-trivial. Roads are everywhere, most of them completely unprotected, and you don't actually have to physically and visibly interfere with the road.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      > In the UK railways are mostly protected. They aren't protected. We know this from the numbers of deaths that occur each year on the railways.
- soziawa 8y ago
  Is it also easier to protect all train lines in the country? It seems a bit foolish to compare a single train line to all roads instead of all train lines to all roads.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    A more generous interpretation of my comment would have been "all trainlines versus all roads". In the UK there's an order of magnitude more roads than railways. In the US there are two orders of magnitude more.
    - soziawa 8y ago
      Should I also interpret this generously and assume that you only counted roads and train lines with the same amount of people traveling on them?
athenot 8y ago
Really? $10 won't buy you much in terms of steel. You'd probably need a lot more than just a crowbar. I'm not saying trains are invulnerable to debris on the tracks, just that they are designed to handle small stuff on the tracks.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  A crowbar well-placed/used is sufficient.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  A crowbar is not "small stuff on the tracks". Have you ever seen a train?
  - athenot 8y ago
    Yes. They are designed for that stuff. Here's the biggest accident (in France) from having a large object on the tracks: 80 ton oversized load. Only the engine car derailled. Trainset involved: 70 (Sud-Est) Service: train 736, Grenoble to Paris Location: PN 74, Voiron Injuries: 2 dead, 60 injured [Edit: date: 23 September 1988] A special road transport with a weight of 80 tons became stranded on level crossing 74. Train 736, rounding a curve toward the crossing, ploughed into it at 110 km/h (68 mph). The large mass of the road vehicle made this crash much worse than it might otherwise have been; the engineer and one passenger died, and many more were injured when the first trailer was ripped open by debris. Only the leading power unit derailed. This wreck, the most violent to date, became a reference for the design and crash testing of safety features for the next generation of TGV, as embodied by today's Duplex trainsets. These newer trains have several deformable sections, at the front and rear of the power unit and at the front of the first trailer, to manage and absorb crash energy without damage to passenger compartments. Trainset 70 was never returned to service, and the trailing unit 23140 became a spare in the Sud-Est fleet.
- Faaak 8y ago
  10$ is around 10kg of steel. With that, you can make a crude derailer and easily (and I mean it) derail a train.

Easier to protect a train line than all the roads in a country (and indeed, they are often protected). No physical trespass required, remote activated.

Robotbeat 8y ago
Except rail lines aren’t protected, and couldn’t feasibly be protected. An autonomous car could easily be protected from this simply by using local sensors for collision avoidance, which I think is the norm, as opposed to what this headline misleadingly (heh) suggests. Edit: Relevant XKCD. Causing crashes isn’t hard period. https://m.xkcd.com/1958/ https://m.xkcd.com/1958/
- randomsearch 8y ago
  In the UK railways are mostly protected. Now, that may be a simple fence, which someone could climb over, but then they may find themselves reported, or caught on CCTV. It's a very obvious, very visible thing to do, and in urban areas railways are indeed protected pretty well. And remote triggering something like that is non-trivial. Roads are everywhere, most of them completely unprotected, and you don't actually have to physically and visibly interfere with the road.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > In the UK railways are mostly protected. They aren't protected. We know this from the numbers of deaths that occur each year on the railways.
soziawa 8y ago
Is it also easier to protect all train lines in the country? It seems a bit foolish to compare a single train line to all roads instead of all train lines to all roads.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  A more generous interpretation of my comment would have been "all trainlines versus all roads". In the UK there's an order of magnitude more roads than railways. In the US there are two orders of magnitude more.
  - soziawa 8y ago
    Should I also interpret this generously and assume that you only counted roads and train lines with the same amount of people traveling on them?

athenot 8y ago

Really? $10 won't buy you much in terms of steel. You'd probably need a lot more than just a crowbar. I'm not saying trains are invulnerable to debris on the tracks, just that they are designed to handle small stuff on the tracks.

Robotbeat 8y ago
A crowbar well-placed/used is sufficient.
IshKebab 8y ago
A crowbar is not "small stuff on the tracks". Have you ever seen a train?
- athenot 8y ago
  Yes. They are designed for that stuff. Here's the biggest accident (in France) from having a large object on the tracks: 80 ton oversized load. Only the engine car derailled. Trainset involved: 70 (Sud-Est) Service: train 736, Grenoble to Paris Location: PN 74, Voiron Injuries: 2 dead, 60 injured [Edit: date: 23 September 1988] A special road transport with a weight of 80 tons became stranded on level crossing 74. Train 736, rounding a curve toward the crossing, ploughed into it at 110 km/h (68 mph). The large mass of the road vehicle made this crash much worse than it might otherwise have been; the engineer and one passenger died, and many more were injured when the first trailer was ripped open by debris. Only the leading power unit derailed. This wreck, the most violent to date, became a reference for the design and crash testing of safety features for the next generation of TGV, as embodied by today's Duplex trainsets. These newer trains have several deformable sections, at the front and rear of the power unit and at the front of the first trailer, to manage and absorb crash energy without damage to passenger compartments. Trainset 70 was never returned to service, and the trailing unit 23140 became a spare in the Sud-Est fleet.
Faaak 8y ago
10$ is around 10kg of steel. With that, you can make a crude derailer and easily (and I mean it) derail a train.