I heard of a similar situation, there are times when trains almost drive themselves so the engineers don't need to pay much attention. The problem is when things go wrong and they need to act. Sometimes the engineers are so involved in other things that they fail to act.
That's one of the theories given for the cause of the 2008 Chatsworth train crash.
There is nothing about the physical world that guarantees a person pays attention because something is important. A common cause of accidents is when people do not pay attention. Train crashes specifically have happened in recent years due to distracted operators. Just because this run was more important than normal does not somehow mean the operator could not have been distracted.
> He's saying that there's things other than driver error or mechanical failure that could have contributed to the crash
In the same vein, I remember a rash of train accidents where the engineers were simply derelict in their duty, but the entire world seemed to rush to defend them because, oh my God!, accidents happened where positive train control systems were not installed.
I don't think even so much as a reprimand was given to people who failed to the one thing they are supposed to do: Control the speed of the train.
And yet train crashes and derailments are something that happens fairly regularly, despite it being a tight closed-loop system with manual controllers and operators. Cars are not even close.
"Someone screwed up"
On today's railways, it is very difficult, deliberate action excepted, for one error to cause an accident of this magnitude. Most modern railway accidents occur following an unfortunate combination of coincidental events and\or procedural breakdowns. Technology and procedures have evolved over the years to ensure that one mistake cannot lead to such an event. Railway authorities are no longer complacent and reactive in their application of safety measures as they once were.
There seem to be fairly regular (at least, more regular than one would like) AmTrak derailings in the US. That isn't to say I think it is AmTrak's doing specifically, I think it is like you said a maintenance issue coupled with everybody else who isn't on the train interacting with it.
Then there are the cases of engineers who are distracted and what not, but I'd imagine we're talking autonomous so that (hopefully) wouldn't be an issue.
One just happened last week. A problem with the air brakes that made them evacuate an entire car on the train. I've been on other trains that lost all electrical power in the passenger cabs. Had engines that could not start after pulling into stations. Not too mention when one train breaks down others get stuck behind it.
I think the failure is speculated to be caused by buggy reverse-engineered railway control systems --so not a problem with the system, but rather the implementation.
That's absolutely a problem if a train designed to have a driver doesn't have one (which is what happened here). If trains were designed to not need drivers, this wouldn't have happened, because (a) enough mechanical brakes would have been applied automatically, (b) the engine fire would have been detected and reported automatically, and (c) if the brakes failed there would have been an immediate alarm when the train started moving.
But what if the bus/train stops unexpectedly and another drives into it? It happens. Mechanical failures happen. Human error happens. Accidents happen.
I once saw an young man with some sort of psychosis so distracted that he walked into traffic at 5th and Folsom. And didn't realize it until he was halfway across.
Other hand a friend of mine with psychosis threw himself in front of a BART train.
Also with a train there nothing to engineer can do since the coefficient of friction between the steel wheels and track is like 0.05 vs close to 1.0 for rubber and asphalt. The engineer can't stop the train in time. These accidents take a bad toll on train engineers.
Quite tragic and sounds like an entirely avoidable accident. No mention of why the passenger train switched to the freight train track. Is that normal? What systems or protocols failed that lead to this accident? I didn't find any details about this in the article.
An angle you may not have considered is passenger safety.
Imagine if this happened to an airliner in flight: there'd be criminal charges for sure, not to mention huge damages and lawsuits from the families of the dead if some of the control systems locked up in mid-air.
Trains are not quite as susceptible to disaster arising in the course of operations as airliners, but a Newag Impuls 45WE runs at up to 160km/h in service with up to 218 people on board. (Their speed record is considerably higher.) A sudden breakdown in service is at a minimum going to cause timetable havoc and knock-on delays for other trains and at worse could lead to a mass casualty accident.
(John Deere tractors don't usually carry 200+ passengers and Apple computers don't usually get deployed in safety critical situations. So, different!)
Your analogy is not really valid. Although the NTSB is not talking, the cause is reported to be "loss of situational awareness". In essence, the conductor was in some degree at fault because he was controlling the speed and the train was going 105mph instead of 55mph.
There could have been other contributing factors (rock, tough schedule), but it seems likely that their severity will not be known -- the information just is not there.
Surely you would concede that the right course of action here is not obvious?
There is one, but it was rendered ineffective by the engineer's application of the independent brakes on the locomotive. This is another one of those classic cascades of errors, with each mistake paving the way for the next.
It just floors me that he didn't come to a complete stop before disembarking the locomotive.
In that particular case there were faulty brakes on one of the cars. Had they been working (or the fault communicated properly) and the train not been overloaded, the derailment would likely not have happened. There was no other alternative - if no braking had happened, the disaster would almost certainly have been worse.
In a computerised system, the brakes would most likely have fault reporting. Actually in this case they did - the logs indicated that the dynamic braking system wasn't producing any current. This should have been indicated to the driver.
There's also plenty of human error there in not reporting the brake failure and 'eyeballing' weights. Passenger trains are presumably designed such that even with severe overcrowding and lots of luggage there is small chance of the brakes being underpowered. I have no idea why an emergency brake system wouldn't activate all possible means to slow things down.
I agree that in this instance braking actually worsened the problem, but the solution was still that the train should have been braked properly. A computerised system would likely have performed similar steps although it would know the braking force provided by each technique and respond accordingly.
That's one of the theories given for the cause of the 2008 Chatsworth train crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chatsworth_train_collisio...
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