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While these events are statistically very rare, it is worth remembering that there have been two separate events in the past twenty years in Spain where high-sp
by david-gpu 9mo ago
While these events are statistically very rare, it is worth remembering that there have been two separate events in the past twenty years in Spain where high-speed trains have derailed leading to multiple fatalities [1][2]. In contrast, the Japanese Shinkansen has a spotless record since its introduction in the 1960s [3]. Not a single fatality due to a crash or derailment. And that's in a country with a much larger population and much higher passenger count per year.
What do they do differently?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_train_derailments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_train_derailments
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record
- vlovich123 9mo agoTrack maintenance?
- bell-cot 9mo agoYep. Which is the secret of preventing 99%+ of sudden mechanical failures of pretty much any type of infrastructure.
- dinkblam 9mo agoSpain basically does not do the required maintenance: https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-prompt-maintenance-investment-debate-2026-01-23/ https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...
- david-gpu 9mo agoFrom the linked article: > [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected on January 7. The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate? The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless without context. > [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.
- anon7000 9mo agoYep, plus their network is pretty new anyways. Which generally needs less maintenance than older infrastructure.
- pixl97 9mo agoJust because something is new, doesn't mean it's full of faults.
- imiric 9mo ago> The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate? Spanish officials are very good at deflecting blame and playing politics. Nobody wants to be held accountable for a catastrophe. Also see the 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging, but zero accountability. So while inspection standards might be inadequate, I would take anything a senior official says with a pound of salt.
- db48x 9mo agoBut he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny. The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age of track, not percentages of the total budget.
- raverbashing 9mo ago> 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging sigh Of course you're right
- Findeton 9mo agoSpecifically the fractured track was a soldered joint that joined a track from 1989 with a new one from a few weeks ago.
- jacquesm 9mo agoSoldered eh? No wonder then that it broke.
- exidy 9mo agoEnglish is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 9mo agoAs an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)
- jacquesm 9mo agoHeh, that would be a funny misunderstanding to have as well as the opposite, when you get back something soldered when you expected it to be welded.
- jacquesm 9mo agoInteresting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'. English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients). Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.
- rob74 9mo ago> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data. Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...
- amenghra 9mo agoHigher passenger count could imply ability to pass higher maintenance budgets?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway743950 9mo agoCould weather or some other geographic/similar aspect be a factor?
- bflesch 9mo agoThe geographic aspect of russian agents being in vincinity of the traintracks. Week before supply trains in Germany also derailed, as they do once per month.
- cromka 9mo agoI think even more important is the seismic activity in Japan asa risk factor here
- lifestyleguru 9mo ago> Santiago de Compostela derailment Hey that infrastructure looks perfectly fine and new, ahhh ok... they were going 180kmh where the speed limit was 80kmh..
- pibaker 9mo agoWhich is also exactly how the most deadly rail incident in the past half century in japan happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
- lifestyleguru 9mo agoWe oftentimes take ridiculous risks to save only 1-5 minutes of our time. Although reading about the Spanish disaster, the driver was rather reckless.
- andy12_ 8mo agoWhich is a problem that would have been prevented had they not purposefully disabled the ERTMS signaling system to avoid delays.
- pibaker 9mo agoI am not sure what conclusion can we draw from, as you said, two very rare incidents over a long period of time. Reminds me of when Malaysian airlines crashed two planes in a short period of time. It was a good time to get cheap flights from Europe to south east Asia as long as you can withstand relatives thinking you are literally going to die in their third crash.
- Freak_NL 9mo agoBit of an odd comparison, given that one of those flights (MH17) was shot down by a Russian Buk squad. That was not an issue attributable to the carrier in any way, and after the incident the likelihood of it happening again to Malaysia Airlines specifically was negligible.
- pibaker 9mo agoIt could be prevented by simply not flying over an active war zone, something airlines do all the times to prevent the exact same thing from happening.
- jojomodding 9mo agoAirlines started being more sensitive to this after the 2014 crash
- wafflemaker 9mo agoOr Girkin not ordering the civilian plane full of people to be shot down. It was a civilian plane at 10km altitude with a transponder on. Really doesn't look like a jet on a radar. And up to that point Russia wasn't known to supply the separatists with an anti air system and the crew to run it.
- junofan 9mo agoIt would seem the air defense systems used could not reliably determine what you imply they should [1][2]. I’m not sure where you’re coming from, or why it would matter what one country was known or not known to do. [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/18/12951/how-can-a-civilian-plane-accidentally-be-shot-down/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/18/12951/how-can-a-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/18/did-the-ukrainian-rebels-even-know-they-were-shooting-at-a-civilian-aircraft/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/18...
- hibikir 9mo agoThey are two very different accidents: The second was insufficient/poor maintenance: Supposedly the train that checks for this had passed 2 months before, and someone will have to wonder whether it's just not passing often enough, or if the inspections are just poor in general. The first was purely a matter of not upgrading the signaling in a very low speed section: The crash could have happened with regional trains too. Every engineer knew that it was unsafe and one distraction was enough to get someone killed, but Spain is still well in the middle of track expansion, so it's all the horrors of politicking. Unless you have a crash, not upgrading those signals costs nothing, but, say, the very expensive connection to Asturias was worth a lot, so iffy tradeoffs were made. Hopefully better engineering-driven tradeoffs are made regarding track maintenance, but hey, this is Spain, not a place where we are good at efficient, reliable safety processes: See the failures in Valencia for the DANA, where the chain between the meteorologists seeing a risk that led to recommending evacuation, and the actual order of evacuation was so slow, so we ended up with 229 deaths.
- ehnto 8mo agoFor comparison, the Japanese high speed rail track inspection trains run three times every month. A lot more frequent. They run at full speed between regular train operations. I saw one of them running on my last trip, which is said to be good luck.
- nelox 9mo ago[flagged]
- pmarg 9mo agoJust a small clarification, Spain has two distinct track stems for normal trains (Iberian gauge) and high speed rail (international gauge). High speed rail is completely separate from the iberian gauge network which is primarly used for city and regional trains. Only a few cargo trains use the high speed network. Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system. The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
- fpoling 9mo agoI have lived in Spain for the last two years and observed the luck of maintenance in a lot of things. For example, people typically pay for house/apartment insurance. But insurance companies never send a person to check for things like leaking pipes or whatever. Rather they simply wait until an accident happens and dispatch an emergency crew and cover a lot of damage that could be easily prevented. Then people tolerate non-trivial damage to homes/apartments like leaky roof not reporting it to insurance companies for weeks. Then with cars people often do not follow the maintenance schedule and insurance companies do not ask for that. Typically people drive until damage happens due to a minor accident or maintenance are forced by state required technical inspection once in few years. The car companies even offer free maintenance checks as a part of guarantee but people skip even that. Yet when someone spends efforts to complain, thinks do gets done. For example there a city service to remove graffiti on public areas. If one files a complain, they react and remove the graffiti. However sometimes one needs to send a complain twice.
- AshamedCaptain 9mo agoI think you are describing how the entire world works. I have lived in 3 western European countries through my life, and they all work this way. Never I had the pipes in my home inspected, even now that I live in areas where it freezes regularly. Never has anyone (not even my insurance) forced me to follow any particular maintenance schedule (albeit I'm quite sure somewhere in the fine print it will read that if the accident is because of poor maintenance they'll just ignore the claim). Here the city service to remove Graffiti is almost overnight, and works better than many other public services...
- baq 9mo agoPerhaps there are less FSB agents blowing up sections of track with shaped charges in Japan.
- bflesch 9mo ago[flagged]
- gambiting 9mo agoThey do seem to come out of the woodwork quickly. Tbf I remember even before the current war, HN had a lot of Russian users - I'm not entirely surprised they would naturally defend their country, even if they aren't oblivious to what is happening.
- rvba 9mo agoOn other websitrs those are not real users, but bots. Bots that track each mention of a keyword (nowadays can analyse posts too). I wonder if Dang has any tools to deal with that.
- pfannkuchen 9mo agoWhy would they do that though? Like if people start associating "support Ukraine" with "get randomly attacked" then perhaps carrying out attacks could get them to reduce their support. But if the public don't think it's related, then what is the benefit to Russia? Do the Spanish government secretly know and it's a pressure tactic on them?
- secult 9mo agoThe recent tactic is to spread distrust to own government by any means necessary - seemingly random failing infrastructure is hardly attributable to some foreign actor, yet it has implications on who gets in the government after next elections, especially europarliament. And as you can observe, most of the "anti-system" parties are pro-russian, openly or by agenda. edit: I'm not saying this accident looks like sabotage. The spread of propaganda after it happened it's a different story.
- masklinn 9mo agoA component here is the highly unfortunate timing of two trains crossing one another as one of the trains derailed. Both trains look like rigid HSRs, and usually when these derails they stay very stable and rarely have fatalities.
- shevy-java 9mo agoYeah. Japan really has better quality standards here overall. Now - Japanese mentality is strange to me, but the quality standards and thought process, are convincing.
- wafflemaker 9mo agoAfter reading Shogun, Cryptonomicon and watching plenty anime and documents about Japan (including Japanese rail system - still using the "pointing and naming" method I've learned from them) I would risk saying that Japanese do literally everything differently.
- Arainach 9mo agoA list consisting entirely of fictional works (one by an American who has never lived in Japan even) is not a good basis for claiming to understand a culture. Seriously, Cryptonomicon is a bizarre thing to put on this list. I like the it a lot, but none of that book takes place in Japan and the closest intersection is Japanese soldiers during World War II, with a brief participation of a single fictional Japanese company in the modern section of the book.
- tyre 9mo agoWell I have watched the show adaptation of Shogun, which features authentic Japanese language, and enjoy the occasional Omakase (in Brooklyn), so I’d say I’m pretty qualified to comment on Japanese rail over the past sixty years.
- andrecarini 9mo agoI've managed to draw the Japan flag in middle school one time. Add me to the list of reputable sources.
- userbinator 9mo agoJapan has a culture of perfection.
- prmoustache 9mo agoBut every culture has its exceptions. 2 words: Tataka airbags.
- legitronics 9mo ago> And that's in a country with a much larger population and much higher passenger count per year. These are actually points making the Japanese system easier to maintain. Because of smaller surface area it’s much denser.
- tjwebbnorfolk 9mo agoearthquakes, tho? Maybe the constant state of necessary vigilance has something to do with it here.
- NewJazz 9mo agoDifferent soil? Different climate/weather patterns. Japan having to build to earthquake standards, so being more robust overall? Or to specific failure modes, at least.
- Animats 9mo agoDoctor Yellow.[1] Full rail inspection every ten days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Yellow
- wvbdmp 9mo agoAt full speed!
- Animats 8mo agoWhich matters, because Doctor Yellow inspection trains can be put into the schedule with the regular trains. There's no need to shut down traffic while a slow inspection car chugs along. BART recently got a full-speed inspection car.[1] They needed a specially built one because BART has a non-standard track gauge. The Federal Railroad Administration has track inspection cars, but only six of them for the whole country. One was seen on CALTRAIN track.[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHa1Si7CW8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHa1Si7CW8Q [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQcRHn9YiPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQcRHn9YiPg
- chakintosh 9mo ago> What do they do differently? Accountability.
- Ekaros 9mo agoMy understanding is that Shinkansen that is high speed rail in Japan is grade separated system. That is tracks are only used by high speed rail. In Europe generally tracks are shared outside few specific links. This means that Shinkansen tracks are designed and build to much higher standard.
- evan_a_a 9mo agoIn Spain the high speed network is separate from the traditional network too. There is some inter connectivity to allow for high speed trains to call at traditional stations, but the high speed network is for high speed trains only.
- m4rtink 9mo agoYeah, the planned Czech high speed trains (VRT) have the same gauge but are expected to be used by the high speed trains almost exclusively, with a limited number of normal-speed passenger trains and AFAIK no cargo traffic at all.
- numpad0 8mo agoJapanese rails are all built on commuter style architectures and the tracks are generally owned by its users. So train operators are strongly incentivized to keep them in good shape. Also, Far East right now is also massively cash poor yet labor rich relative to the rest of the world. Everything is crazy undervalued and there are clear gaps between amounts of money changing hands vs work being done. Skilled-labor-intensive tasks are going to be much easier when cheap skilled labor is just perpetually available.
- franktankbank 8mo ago2 questions one rail related, one societal. 1) Can you expand on your first sentence? When you say user owned what does that mean exactly? 2) If skilled labor is undervalued does that mean those with those positions live kind of meager lives? Or what is that like?
- numpad0 8mo ago1) There are type 1/2/3 train operators that owns everything/borrows rails/owns just rails as Japanese laws classify them, but type 3 lines are mostly rural low-traffic branch lines. Most high-traffic lines are owned(+accesses leased to type 2s) by train operators. Some of regional Shinkansen lines are technically owned by government run JRTT agency and leased to local JR company, which are probably as unrelated as UK government and its Royal Mail are. 2) I mean, like, it's the place where the English loanword for "death by overwork" came from. Also, undervalued means things costing less than they are worth. Trash costing little isn't undervalued, that's more adequately valued.
- franktankbank 8mo agoThank you, haha on answer 2 !! Answer 1 is still not clear to me. Can you contrast it with how Spanish track is managed?
- numpad0 8mo agoShinkansen is built like a giant subway. Fixed transponders everywhere, mission control monitoring and coordinating everything, stations right on the main line etc etc. They even use the same callouts as intra-city trains and they've long been at almost GoA 2 levels in train people terms? I admit that I was a bit uninformed about specifics of Spanish train system in that, the rails were in fact laid by then-Spanish national rail and the operator was then-national company, but still, they don't seem like built and maintained like the BART or the NYC subway that happens to go 200mph in straight sections. That Shinkansen architecture is unique, and that is also guaranteed to be more labor intensive than how everything in most HSRs are.
- zrn900 8mo ago> While these events are statistically very rare These events happening 4 times in 3 days are statistically nonexistent. Even less existent is them starting to happen right on the day before a major politician in Spain visits Israel to talk about buying Israeli security and monitoring systems.
- NedF 8mo ago[dead]