alt Hacker NewsI can't imagine what every passenger who survived and the families of those who passed are going through. Such a catastrophic incident with multiple human failures is so tragic and so needless. From the controller to the driver, every single one of them should have said hey we shouldn't just ignore a signal and should investigate why it's on first. For this to be such a quick decision suggests it's not a one off. I would be extremely interested to see how many near misses or ignored signals there has been across Spain. The crash earlier this year was due to inexperienced workers and it seems as if significant training improvements and protocols are needed.
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If as a driver you get told by the control centre to get the train moving again at maximum line speed, surely you should be able to trust that it is safe to do so?
I don't see how this would fall on the drivers at all.
> From the controller to the driver, every single one of them should have said hey we shouldn't just ignore a signal
A train driver has zero insight in what is going on and where other trains are. They do need to trust the orders they get, if you want to question every order you will never start to drive.
The even more insane thing to me is that the controller knew that there was another train in that block, knowing it was no signal failure. The driving train should’ve never been commanded to continue on full speed by the controller.
To have had this many incidents compared to other HSR networks around the world gives all the signs of a classic case of normalisation of deviance.
Sadly we'll probably watch a lot of individuals being blamed/scapegoated for systemic issues, but hopefully even Spanish politics can organise a proper investigation after this many deaths in a single year.