So far it seems that at 8:30 a computer system called LZB was shutdown to some infra issues. Immediately the trains stopped in that line. At 8:36, someone said it was okay to let the trains continue over that rail at full speed as it was "all clear". At 8:53 there was the collision. So far 68 deaths.
This route is the last of the Spanish high speed lines that still has an older train protection system. There has been a similar accident in 2002 in Germany where LZB was also used: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienf%C3%B6rmige_Zugbeeinflu... . Now after 24 years you might think they had mitigating procedures in place...
The railroads in the USA were trying to push back and delay improvements to automated safety systems until the 2015 Amtrak 188 crash https://youtu.be/-mzaavmtT9M
Only was finally fully rolled out in I think 2020 5 years after the accident.
Delaying/avoiding spending money on safety seems to be common around the world.
As long as vision zero is considered more of a gross infringement on personal freedums than a laudable goal, making trains as safe as they are uniquely fit to become is not exactly a great way to allocate funds to maximize impact. Trains are already very safe. Even where they currently lack 4 layers of fail-safe systems operated at a level where that still permits reliable&punctual service. The same money on making them shine could be spent on improving car infrastructure (or even removing some car infrastructure!) for greater expected harm reduction.
> El Mundo is reporting that the Iryo train flagged a failure in its LZB signalling system 10 minutes before the crash, but the train behind did not receive the information due to a potential human error.
> Investigators believe the AVE high-speed train travelling behind crashed into the stationary Iryo service.
Some further points:
- Apparently some of the drivers involved were in training
- Infra maintenance is abysmal. Budgets are poor and or misspent
- Second time this happens, in 9 months
A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay
When LZB drops out, does the fallback to ASFA plus verbal authorization actually enforce block separation, or is it basically just driver discipline at 300 km/h?
When on verbal authorization, controller discipline is probably more important than driver discipline. And I really hope they don't do that at 300 km/h.
The incompetence in the world that is likely the underlying cause for this, is a serious cancer that is ruining our society. We need to speak out even against what seems like lesser issues, because we normalize that behaviour until it perverts everything.
The only way to achieve higher levels of competence is to enforce higher levels of accountability. Over the last couple of years Spain has suffered major infrastructural catastrophes without any leadership being held accountable at all. It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
You lost me at that part. It is entirely unreasonable to consider that in the vast majority of the world, where state-sanctioned killing of citizens has been abolished.
> Gross negligence is a lack of care that demonstrates reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others, which is so great it appears to be a conscious violation of other people's rights to safety. Gross negligence is a heightened degree of negligence representing an extreme departure from the ordinary standard of care. Falling between intent to do wrongful harm and ordinary negligence, gross negligence is defined as willful, wanton, and reckless conduct affecting the life or property or another.
its not only in spain where this type of issues have been on the uptick. people not getting jailed can be indicative also of the whole story not being told.
The history was a little more complex than that. The trains were not too wide for tunnels, they were the right size for the tunnels where they were ordered.
The problem is that while the trains were being built, the laws changed, requiring extra space between trains and tunnels so people can be evacuated.
Who ordered the trains was doing everything right, the problem was created by who changed the specifications in the middle of the process. The only solution would be to dump all the trains built and start from scratch in a new design for trains that are narrower from the start.
> It’s not unreasonable to consider jail time or even capital punishment for such gross negligence.
It is entirely unreasonable to consider capital punishment.
* an eye for an eye solves nothing - it doesn't bring dead people back to life, it just results in another person killed
* it's not an effective deterrent, it won't change how people act more than the risk of jail-time will
* it's unethical. It sounds like 'justice' if your idea of justice is simple retribution, but it completely undermines the concept of redemption - it advocates treating people as unfixable and unable to atone for their 'sins' and instead of limiting the pain and suffering - it spreads pain to more people
* no system is perfectly and inevitable you will end up punishing somebody with death based on faulty / flawed evidence that only later comes to light as being flawed/faulty. You can't bring a dead person back to life and say "sorry we got it wrong"
* finally - and perhaps most critically - tragedies such as these are almost the result of failures across an entire system with 10s, 100s, sometimes 1000s of people each culpable to varying degrees with many 'sliding doors' moments where such a tragedy could have been avoided had a different decision been taken. Sure you can always simplify things and point to the symbolic figurehead and say they are ultimately accountable and should take the ultimate responsibility for the group's failure (bonus points if in doing so you highlight how well paid they are to take on such a responsibility). But what you'll arrive at isn't justice and higher standards - instead you'll just have another dead person, killed in cold blood and the generic hope that somehow that additional death will act as a stronger driver of change than the already very real deaths that occurred in the tragedy itself.
I was just listening to the EconTalk podcast, and the guest was a Spanish demographer that specifically said that Spanish train system was being starved for funding in the past 10 years or so. This is because the population is aging, and all of the growth in the economy is being directed towards pensions and health care for the rapidly growing number of retirees.
Ayn Rand gets a lot of hate from the philosophy world, and Atlas Shrugged is definitely not a good novel by any means, but you have to give her credit for basically predicting where we are now from way back in the 50's.
Won’t speak for the poster, but in my experience the incompetence of the average person is only exceeded by the incompetence of the ownership class. The people Ayn Rand lauded are usually the largest obstacle to actually Getting Shit Done.
I was incredulous, I wondered what sort of LoC does book rankings like it's Buzzfeed, I thought "Maybe it's the LoC after a Trump-infestation or DOGE", but (1):
> In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible.
The fact that you equate a survey result (who knows who heard of the survey, or if there was a campaign to skew the results) to the LoC giving it a rating, and "that's why I read it", and you think this is a good rebuttal, reveals to me a lot about you.
Regardless of how that one survey was done AS ends up on many best US fiction book lists. The 90s may have also been one of the AS peaks, as I recall being told to read from multiple people (family and teachers). From your own link:
The novel made the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books of the Century in 1996, and Radcliffe Publishing ranked it 92 out of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. In 1999, Atlas Shrugged was number 37 in the list of 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians. A Harris poll placed Atlas Shrugged on America’s Top 10 Favorite Book List in 2008, and The Modern Library ranked it the number one best novel published in the English language in 2009. The novel is listed as number six on Boston Library’s list of 100 Most Influential Books of the Century, and it ranks number five on the list of the 20 Most Inspirational Books ever written. Atlas Shrugged has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese (2007).
From a story perspective, I found AS too long and preferred The Fountainhead. Were they influential to my younger self? Sure, much like the Bible was to me as an atheist. A story with both good and bad ideas to draw from.
I can understand a lot of the dislike of that novel, but her description of how the United States slowly falls apart due to culturally-reinforced incompetence is worth appreciating.
From what I can remember (of reading the book 25 years ago), it predicted an increasing suspicion and resentment of excellence and competence, coinciding with a rise in socialist sentiments. The net result is that various aspects of society would begin to break down as the total amount of competence in the culture vanishes.
I think she attributed too much of the symptoms merely to socialism; obviously the world is more complex than that. But we've got this train crash, the ongoing issues with Boeing airplanes, several multi-billion dollar public infrastructure projects across America that have stalled and will likely never be completed (like the California high speed rail system), the list goes on.
To me it seems the opposite is happening: the push for higher profits by the Capitalists is overriding the competence of rank and file, resulting in these disasters. And all these profits just shoring up wealth that is accruing unequally to those same Capitalists is what is inciting socialist sentiments.
To me Ayn Rand's writings always seemed like an Economics Horror story: effective at instilling dread in its readers, but of some highly unrealistic boogeyman.
When I said that the world is more complex than that, I meant that she oversimplified it. To say that the opposite has happened is also an oversimplification.
How do you even speak to the ineffable idea of 'incompetence'? How do you remediate it? More draconian, individualized worker surveillance?
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.
Incompetence and laziness are very different things. You can have very hard working, engaged, active people that are still incompetent for the job they are supposed to do.
Yes. Modern levels of reliability and safety don't come from workers trying harder or caring more, it requires systems, procedures, controls, redundancy, fail-safes.
> This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
It's both. The nihilism (see France riots for ex) and general incompetence that many of us see in the workplace or in our dealings with, for example, government agencies, and in our dealings with others is obviously there too and needs to be rooted out.
How do you deal with incompetence? In Europe I have no idea because of labor laws. In America we should probably be aggressively firing bad workers and grifters, and at the same time increasing wages and benefits and providing for items like safety and proper rest for those who actually want to show up and get things done.
The students were protesting because of chronically underfunded schools that didn't have functioning air-conditioning during a heat wave. If anything, the protests are direct exercises of the will to power, to pursue changes against the status quo with both meaning, vigor, and a pro-social endgoal.
There's a special kind of mental gymnastics that ascribes nihilism to intentional acts of property damage as a tool of political leverage. It's a frame rooted in both cowardice and a complete lack of real world, lived experience of what movement work is, preferring far-removed armchair general-ing with none of the institutional prestige or base level of academic rigor that at least the ivory-tower provides.
Automation of a bad process or security measure is not a way out of the incompetence of people who designed it. Automation of garbage only brings more garbage.
For a moment there my first tought was that "autonation" might be something like the concept of a nation made by the individual itself or something like that.
We need to create a word for typos/autocomplete errors that have a positive result like this on the reader.
no clear cause has yet been named. it can be many things and ultimately they will always blame human error because it gives away the least information about what really happened.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
Once upon a time I did root cause analysis professionally, and a trainer told us if you attributed the root cause to people without finding malice you were just being lazy. At the very least I doubt anyone to blame here was actually involved in the accident, but someone who decided it was not in the budget to put an automated system in place faster.
They had an automated system, it had failed earlier in the day in that section causing trains to be signalled to stop. Then they had a manual go-slow human backup protocol which appears to also have not been observed - some drivers were given clearance to continue as normal. Swiss cheese of compounded failures, with tragic results.
i personally think that incompetence is actually the norm. that such things like trains even exist, imo is very much due to extraordinary people being incentivized to do extraordinary things. trains are extraordinary to me. this is not to diminish your sentiment in any way.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
Who wants to design a basic cryptographic p2p lock between trains that limit their speed 30km/h if they're not able to get proof they're alone on a track; when the alternative is to debate endlessly about whom to blame, and which billion-dollar conglomerate has the technical prowess to sit on the committee to debate the specs for a much worse system.
At this moment, may be incompetence, but I wouldn't discard still a sabotage that go out of hand.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why.
And a train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near an station, we still don't know why.
Is not clear still If the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or if the machinist didn't even tried to stop the train. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war with riots and strikes triggered just before an election at all levels, including strange delays and train accidents all around Europe in Poland, France, etc. We know that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this is just another added source of chaos happened suspiciously just before the November Spanish elections.
The probability of all of that happening at the same time just by chance is zero.
As someone from the US I have repeatedly heard that Spain's economy is doing reasonably well. And I just looked it up, unemployment is approximately the lowest it has been in two decades. Considering the post 2009 era of economic turmoil that Spain went through, that economic momentum seems like a real positive.
In June Goldman Sachs put out an article noting how well Spain's economy is doing, which included this employment comparison (showing Spain's outperformance versus its peers):
Then lets crash 10x more trains, it will still be safer than cars. The point is not to be safer than cars, the point is to not die while taking my daily commute in a form of transportation I have no control over whatsoever. Especially if its easy to mitigate like in the case of trains.
My feeling is there is a serious psychological manipulation campaign going on against the west and allies via social media.
Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy", "Russia is better than our own government, the UK is a failure".
1. I see the same from people in some non-western (or western allied) countries too.
2. I do not see many comments like that (although i do not look at youtube comments, i do see comments on these on social media) and have never seen any saying Russia is better than the UK!
3. The feeling of failure in the UK goes back to long before the Ukraine war - it has been developing over many decades.
My view is the west had a golden age after winning the cold war and cannot cope with the loss of its global dominance since. This has also had bad effects for some countries outside the west (not necessarily western allied) and there have been other political shifts around the world too.
I also think the way the news operates, and the rise of social media and mobile phones, lockdowns during the pandemic, have a lot to do with it.
Normal publications rarely publish good news. At most, news are often neutral, but mostly bad. One has to go out of their way to read actual good news.
Ah but the good news thing is actually nothing to do with Spain and everything to do with news in this era. It’s a problem everywhere that news is like 95% bad, and not because the world is getting any worse either.
That's not really fair though. Almost all pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided the accident if they were observant and took responsibility for their own safety. People just walk out in front of cars, assuming they will stop, buried in their phone with earplugs in.
I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.
If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.
You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.
It is distasteful and crass that one train correctly stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to another signalling failure, inattention or error. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic. The tragedy is that the system was left in such a dangerous state. The real world doesn't obey the laws of physics you wish for, it's full of external variables including careless, inattentive and greedy people who sometimes cause a lot of harm. My pointing out the system that caused the accident is not the same as saying I'm glad they're dead. Accusing me of being crass and distasteful smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude, or nobody understands suffering like I do. In short, I wasn't laughing.
It was no joke here either, the headline was inaccurate. There were not "two high-speed trains". One train stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to a failure to stop due to another signalling failure. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic.
A simple solution would be for all trains to have self recoding GPS which they probably all have and log their location on an internet map plus marking all the switches and allow open viewing to public and passengers to monitor their own train versus others. Ai can also be used to set the alarm.
The GPS location as well as track ID gets logged every 3 sec. They probably already have the info. Its not rocket science; that is how their systems probably work. They probably log the ID of previous and incoming switch too. They probably have all of this, just make it public.
I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not. I have actually written code for this type of stuff years ago for real systems ... not trains but some other crap.
East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained
Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed
USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure
"The disaster occurred after years of multiple warnings from the train drivers' official union, while the current government was passing legislation that would make drivers' ability to strike or take industrial action for safety concerns unlawful."
"Three weeks before the crash, the rail workers' union had raised concerns over problems with the administration of the rail network which could put the passengers in danger."
There are all kinds of isolated systems that trigger warnings but the thing that seems to be missing everywhere is a centralized simulation with all the data in it. Or perhaps a series of simulations each slightly further in the future. If any variable changes run it again until it reaches its time stamp.
For example, it shouldn't be possible in 2026 for a vehicle to get stuck on the crossing (with cameras) without the train driver getting a notification. You can even power down an entire track if it's obstructed. You might not want self driving, self breaking seems quite desirable.
Some days ago I actually traveled on these high speed trains to Madrid (the same route Madrid - Seville). I paid extra to be able to select a middle car seat because of similar disaster that happened in Spain only in January this year:
118 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 12.5 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/28/spain-high-speed-train-crash...
https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2026/10/28/toledo-tr...
https://www.reuters.com/live/spain-train-crash-live-deaths-i...
Only was finally fully rolled out in I think 2020 5 years after the accident.
Delaying/avoiding spending money on safety seems to be common around the world.
> Investigators believe the AVE high-speed train travelling behind crashed into the stationary Iryo service.
https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2026/10/28/6ae1c9a1e9cf4a372...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271032
You lost me at that part. It is entirely unreasonable to consider that in the vast majority of the world, where state-sanctioned killing of citizens has been abolished.
> capital punishment for such gross negligence
"gross negligence" is a very specific legal test.
> Gross negligence is a lack of care that demonstrates reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others, which is so great it appears to be a conscious violation of other people's rights to safety. Gross negligence is a heightened degree of negligence representing an extreme departure from the ordinary standard of care. Falling between intent to do wrongful harm and ordinary negligence, gross negligence is defined as willful, wanton, and reckless conduct affecting the life or property or another.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/gross_negligence
But there's a reason they used to execute people in the public square.
The problem is that while the trains were being built, the laws changed, requiring extra space between trains and tunnels so people can be evacuated.
Who ordered the trains was doing everything right, the problem was created by who changed the specifications in the middle of the process. The only solution would be to dump all the trains built and start from scratch in a new design for trains that are narrower from the start.
It is entirely unreasonable to consider capital punishment.
* an eye for an eye solves nothing - it doesn't bring dead people back to life, it just results in another person killed
* it's not an effective deterrent, it won't change how people act more than the risk of jail-time will
* it's unethical. It sounds like 'justice' if your idea of justice is simple retribution, but it completely undermines the concept of redemption - it advocates treating people as unfixable and unable to atone for their 'sins' and instead of limiting the pain and suffering - it spreads pain to more people
* no system is perfectly and inevitable you will end up punishing somebody with death based on faulty / flawed evidence that only later comes to light as being flawed/faulty. You can't bring a dead person back to life and say "sorry we got it wrong"
* finally - and perhaps most critically - tragedies such as these are almost the result of failures across an entire system with 10s, 100s, sometimes 1000s of people each culpable to varying degrees with many 'sliding doors' moments where such a tragedy could have been avoided had a different decision been taken. Sure you can always simplify things and point to the symbolic figurehead and say they are ultimately accountable and should take the ultimate responsibility for the group's failure (bonus points if in doing so you highlight how well paid they are to take on such a responsibility). But what you'll arrive at isn't justice and higher standards - instead you'll just have another dead person, killed in cold blood and the generic hope that somehow that additional death will act as a stronger driver of change than the already very real deaths that occurred in the tragedy itself.
That's why I read it.
It's very cool, especially on HN, to say how terrible it is. But, as we used to say in rebuttal: scoreboard!
> In 1991 the Book of the Month Club and Library of Congress asked readers to name the most influential book in their lives: Atlas Shrugged came in second only to the Bible.
The fact that you equate a survey result (who knows who heard of the survey, or if there was a campaign to skew the results) to the LoC giving it a rating, and "that's why I read it", and you think this is a good rebuttal, reveals to me a lot about you.
(1) https://www.atlassociety.org/post/ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged-p...
The novel made the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books of the Century in 1996, and Radcliffe Publishing ranked it 92 out of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. In 1999, Atlas Shrugged was number 37 in the list of 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians. A Harris poll placed Atlas Shrugged on America’s Top 10 Favorite Book List in 2008, and The Modern Library ranked it the number one best novel published in the English language in 2009. The novel is listed as number six on Boston Library’s list of 100 Most Influential Books of the Century, and it ranks number five on the list of the 20 Most Inspirational Books ever written. Atlas Shrugged has been translated into 14 languages, including Chinese (2007).
From a story perspective, I found AS too long and preferred The Fountainhead. Were they influential to my younger self? Sure, much like the Bible was to me as an atheist. A story with both good and bad ideas to draw from.
I think she attributed too much of the symptoms merely to socialism; obviously the world is more complex than that. But we've got this train crash, the ongoing issues with Boeing airplanes, several multi-billion dollar public infrastructure projects across America that have stalled and will likely never be completed (like the California high speed rail system), the list goes on.
To me Ayn Rand's writings always seemed like an Economics Horror story: effective at instilling dread in its readers, but of some highly unrealistic boogeyman.
This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.
The reality is very different: https://www.railway.supply/renfe-rejects-drivers-union-claim...
> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.
>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.
Social historians have been debunking the thought-terminating cliche that we ever had a trend of merit-based hiring since time immemorial:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-meritocracy-r...
https://archive.org/details/meritocracymyth0000mcna_n6g9
https://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rh...
It's both. The nihilism (see France riots for ex) and general incompetence that many of us see in the workplace or in our dealings with, for example, government agencies, and in our dealings with others is obviously there too and needs to be rooted out.
How do you deal with incompetence? In Europe I have no idea because of labor laws. In America we should probably be aggressively firing bad workers and grifters, and at the same time increasing wages and benefits and providing for items like safety and proper rest for those who actually want to show up and get things done.
The students were protesting because of chronically underfunded schools that didn't have functioning air-conditioning during a heat wave. If anything, the protests are direct exercises of the will to power, to pursue changes against the status quo with both meaning, vigor, and a pro-social endgoal.
There's a special kind of mental gymnastics that ascribes nihilism to intentional acts of property damage as a tool of political leverage. It's a frame rooted in both cowardice and a complete lack of real world, lived experience of what movement work is, preferring far-removed armchair general-ing with none of the institutional prestige or base level of academic rigor that at least the ivory-tower provides.
we need to eliminate profit-based motives for safety critical areas.
Eventually everyone will come around e/acc.
For a moment there my first tought was that "autonation" might be something like the concept of a nation made by the individual itself or something like that.
We need to create a word for typos/autocomplete errors that have a positive result like this on the reader.
malfuncitoning equipment. humans, geopolitical agendas against europe... there can be a lot of things going on here.
dont jump to conclusions and be skeptical of what people shout.
in fact, i think your sentiment is fundamentally the same that drives extraordinary people to do extraordinary things! it's a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are, and when it's coupled with resources, support, etc., that's when impressive things happen!
this also means that i don't think it helps much to shame people broadly or politicize the matter.
A computer system failed, stopping 6 trains, we don't know why.
Somebody then ordered the trains to keep moving, even if there was still a train stopped. We still don't know why.
And a train that should be moving slowly after such events by protocols, was moving at 150-200 Km/h near an station, we still don't know why.
Is not clear still If the machinist tried to stop the train and the brake system failed, or if the machinist didn't even tried to stop the train. Black boxes will clear that in the next weeks.
And this must be taken in a whole context of hybrid war with riots and strikes triggered just before an election at all levels, including strange delays and train accidents all around Europe in Poland, France, etc. We know that hybrid war will be more vicious the more desperate are the Russians, and this is just another added source of chaos happened suspiciously just before the November Spanish elections.
The probability of all of that happening at the same time just by chance is zero.
I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
In June Goldman Sachs put out an article noting how well Spain's economy is doing, which included this employment comparison (showing Spain's outperformance versus its peers):
https://imgur.com/QqB74I6
The bodycount sits around 100 this year for trains and 1775 last year for cars.
Even correcting for distance travelled it’s still way more safe.
> I can't remember the last time I read good news related to my country.
I hear comments like this from people from many countries.
Go look at Youtube on a story about UK helping Ukraine and look at all the comments saying, "Putin is not our enemy", "Russia is better than our own government, the UK is a failure".
It's not healthy.
1. I see the same from people in some non-western (or western allied) countries too. 2. I do not see many comments like that (although i do not look at youtube comments, i do see comments on these on social media) and have never seen any saying Russia is better than the UK! 3. The feeling of failure in the UK goes back to long before the Ukraine war - it has been developing over many decades.
My view is the west had a golden age after winning the cold war and cannot cope with the loss of its global dominance since. This has also had bad effects for some countries outside the west (not necessarily western allied) and there have been other political shifts around the world too.
I also think the way the news operates, and the rise of social media and mobile phones, lockdowns during the pandemic, have a lot to do with it.
There is a risk of just being outside. Usually due to cars.
I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.
If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.
You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.
> Distasteful and totally crass.
That's culture-dependent. In some cultures it's not unusual to joke about tragedies (even when they are one's own).
On another topic, I shall reconsider using bus over train for my trips.
It seems impossible to imagine that there are any layers of defense in depth involved here… Because it should be so easy to avoid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempi_train_crash
No not exactly an "accident".Yes, same government. 0 resignations, 0 political consequences, 0 apologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
For example, it shouldn't be possible in 2026 for a vehicle to get stuck on the crossing (with cameras) without the train driver getting a notification. You can even power down an entire track if it's obstructed. You might not want self driving, self breaking seems quite desirable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster
This time there are 68 casualties so far and hundreds injured: https://english.elpais.com/spain/2026-10-28/at-least-10-peop...
Rest in peace.