I suspect lost in translation. “Safety” may be the more accurate word.

Its up to 68 deaths now actually. I never had issues with spanish trains, but it seems they are having some major problems recently. If i can immediately remember the last mass casuality train accident off the top of my head then its happening too often. The last one wasnt even a year ago. 46 deaths that time. Like wtf are you doing with your train systems for it to fuck up this badly twice in one year???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Adamuz_rail_disaster

Apparently bad rail welding and wrongly configured automatic rail fault detection thresholds in that case. For this new one it will take a while to know for sure i guess but it looks like human error during the signalling.

There the accident was caused by illogical placement of different train protection areas. The fast section had a modern high-speed train protection system and where there was a curve, and therefore a slower section, the track was protected by the older Spanish train protection system.

The last piece of information from the high-speed system should of course be "curve ahead, slow down", but because the crew installing it was looking only at the map of the high-speed section, they failed to notice that where the section ends, there is something immediately beyond. For them it was a straight stretch of railway that then continues "wherever" beyond the "relevant section".

There was a physical trackside sign warning about the curve, but good luck spotting a trackside sign at a speed of 250 km/h, especially when the in-cab device telling you what speed to drive says "250 km/h until further notice by the in-cab device".

Of course, where the high-speed section ends and the older section begins, there is a train protection transmission saying "in a couple hundred metres the maximum speed is 80 km/h", but at point there's nothing left to do except slow the train down to decrease the magnitude of the disaster.

We've got the same funding on transport that we had on 2012. Austerity policies killed these people.

Human error. There was a train stopped in the railway (maybe because it had an issue, still to be cleared). The system knew of this, so it put a red light which was being respected by the other trains to avoid a crash.

The second train, was waiting in a red light but at a certain moment, a human operator told the train driver to ignore the red light and move. The train driver then started the train despite the red light and this is the end result.

Apparently not. The line is equipped with the German LZB system and a similar accident got very close to happening in Germany for reasons that had nothing to do with cost cutting.

Tagging @nomad@infosec.pub as well.

At least the causes were very different. The Adamuz accident took place because of a rail breaking. And it broke in a way that would be difficult to cause using explosives or tools, but rather simply because of not having been checked often enough.

This one was the LZB train protection system's computers crashing, which caused 8 trains to be stopped by the protection system. The train dispatcher then did not follow the procedure for ordering the trains to return running: They were supposed to drive their first couple of kilometres with a reduced speed, but they were ordered to proceed at full speed. 7 did, 1 stayed still. And then one of the seven moving trains collided at a very high speed with the one that was standing. The LZB computers crashing is apparently a relatively common occurrence, and happens in the home country of the LZB system, Germany, as well. It could have been a "foreign entity" (heh, guess which one), but actually there's good reason to believe it was a "regular" software mishap. However, what is sure is that the resulting disaster took place because of dispatcher error, and that cannot have been because of any foreign influence.

Low, but not zero. Failures happen, and disaster news gets clicks, so it gets reported on more widely.

It’s the third major train accident in a year if you include the train derailment that happened two days after the Adamuz disaster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Gelida_train_derailment

yeah I wouldn't put it past the fsb one bit to create this chaos

ETCS is an absolute nightmare mandate

What makes it a nightmare mandate?