That's really sad.
Leo Wesson
Photographer/Videographer
817.733.9157
www.leowesson.com
On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Nathan Wajsman <photo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> A couple of clarifications: the train was not a high-speed (AVE) train. It
> was travelling on AVE tracks (which have a different gauge than standard
> Spanish rail) but it was a new(ish) type of hybrid train that can make use
> of both sets of tracks. It cannot reach the AVE speeds of 300 km/h, only
> somewhere around 200 km/h.
>
> Apparently there are two different safety systems, the one used on the AVE
> trains which would have prevented a driver from exceeding the limit to the
> extent it apparently happened here, and an older system which was in use in
> this case and which does not provide the same kind of continuous monitoring.
>
> One of the Spanish newspapers has found Facebook posts by the driver from
> last year from which it appears that he really liked speed--he posted a
> picture of the speedometer of his train with some comments about how lovely
> it would be to trip a police radar at that speed etc. The posts have now
> been removed.
>
> The driver survived the accident and has allegedly admitted to police that
> he was going too fast. The black boxes of the train will tell the rest of
> the story, I guess along with blood tests on the driver.
>
> Cheers,
> Nathan
>
> Nathan Wajsman
> Alicante, Spain
> http://www.frozenlight.eu
> http://www.greatpix.eu
> PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
> Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/
>
> YNWA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 25, 2013, at 5:28 PM, Ken Norton wrote:
>
> >> CNN has a really scary video of the train crash in Spain recorded by the
> >> security camera:
> >
> > Yeee. That thing was cooking through that corner. Kinda glad my
> > twice-weekly Amtrak trip is a bit slower, (85 MPH / 135 KPH top
> > speed), although, there are times when we go through a switch a bit
> > too fast and you get whiplash. (When the stuff comes flying off the
> > overhead bins, you know they hit it way too fast). And one time, I
> > know that the car I was in derailed one of the axles for about a
> > minute until it corrected at a crossing--talk about ROUGH and NOISY--I
> > was hanging on pretty tight, just in case. It was a bad ride after
> > that point as there was obviously some damage which they inspected at
> > each stop after that and kept us from doing the normal speed.
> >
> > My question surrounds a safety feature I thought these high-speed
> > trains were required by EU law to have and that's an automatic speed
> > limiter that kicked in for slower segments to protect against human
> > error?
> >
> >
> >> According to the BBC coverage, that curve was rated for a speed of
> 80km/h, and the train was going at about 190km/h, more than twice the speed
> limit for that curve:
> >
> > That speed rating would have included a healthy dose of safety margin,
> > but probably not that much safety margin.
> >
> > The sad thing is that about 1/3 of the passengers have already died.
> > The number of severe injuries is even greater. There weren't very many
> > that walked away from it. The perspective is that this was the
> > equivalent of a plane crash given the speed, passenger count and
> > velocity termination.
> >
> > A side-note observation. On Amtrak, all windows can be removed for
> > egress. Just pull the rubber grommet and yank on a handle. This was
> > the result of a crash a few years back where the rescuers couldn't
> > break through the lexan windows and a number of people died. It
> > doesn't look like this train featured that kind of safety window.
> >
> > Sad, very sad.
> >
> > --
> > Ken Norton
> > ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
> > http://www.zone-10.com
> > --
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