Spanish rail's costly blunder: New trains too large for tunnels

And that's why I always travel with uBlock.

Only 2-3 years? That’s a disaster what do you mean! People need to be kept on the payroll, etc and the entire schedule will have more consequences. That is a huge expense for something that is literally a few clicks on a keyboard. It’s something that should never have happened.

>The more interesting thing about the story is how several top government officials were fired as a result

This is false, government propaganda. https://www.antena3.com/noticias/sociedad/despedido-renfe-po...

Yeah, I’m scratching my head at the British press laughing at them over this, but seemingly not giving two tiny damns that HS2 is now between £4,000,000,000 and £66,000,000,000 over budget depending on whose figures you trust, and counting.

> Clickbait headline -- the error was caught during the design phase.

I don't agree. This is a colossal blunder. Train clearance is a very basic trait of each railway line, along with track gauge. Ordering trains that you cannot even operate in your railway lines is perhaps the biggest screwup any railway operator can possibly make.

I'm not sure you fully understand the magnitude of this sort of screwup. Catching the problem in the design stage actually means it took the manufacturer to double-check the contract to realize his client did a gross unrecoverable mistake that resulted in their orders being fundamentally incompatible with their intended use.

The only clickbaity aspect of this article was tacking another notorious episode of Spanish mishaps which was their submarine design being fundamentally broken. It reads more like a cheap jab at Spain than anything else.

Another example is the Amtrak Acela. The coaches were built 4" too wide, and as a result the expensive "tilt" feature could not be used along a major section of the route.

France stations weren't build as per the spec. That would have had to be corrected at some point anyway.

I'm pretty sure this was heavily covered it when it happened 8 years ago. This was also 5 times less expensive

If I were a train-building contractor, I'd send someone with a laser rangefinder to a few of the actual stations to double-check the official figures. And also to every tunnel.

Unless these errors are going to be fixed at the expense of the government / railway company. not the manufacturer, of course. (Sad laughter.)

Getting all stations to a common standard is the right thing to do, specially if you want to build trains accessible for everybody.

> France had a similar (but more easily mitigated blunder): Trains too wide for station's platforms, requiring ~1000 platforms to be "re-configured".

France's problem was entirely different. They designed a train up to spec, but it turned out that about 10-20% of train stations failed to comply with it.

Increasing your loading gauge to a bigger standard has quite a few advantages. If the tunnels were old renovating with bigger standard isn't a bad idea.

I mean it would be better to plan this sort of thing form the beginning, but still.

A very interesting point in the link. In resume yes, it seems that trains really would physically fit in the tunnels and would enter and exit the tunnels without problems

... what they would not do is respecting the buffer space of security around that is required by current laws. As result if a train stops in some tunnels for an emergency the people may not have enough space for exiting the train safely and quickly (by modern standards).

When did this happen? I remember the Cobra had issue. Or is this happening now?

Probably many examples. Maybe you're thinking of Jeff Bezos' yacht that couldn't fit under a decommissioned (but still standing) railway bridge:

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1079568745/jeff-bezos-yacht-d...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-the-thurs...

Eager managers (or lead engineers) that circumvent the usual “boring” vetting steps.

Sadly, those of us in software, are quite familiar with these types of blunders.

Fortunately, software is “soft,” so we can, quite often, code our way out of these messes.

Hardware, on the other hand, is “hard,” so it isn’t so easy to extricate ourselves.

I worked for hardware companies, for most of my career, and experienced the mind-numbing “measure twice, cut once” methodology that they use.

Software folks seldom have patience for that, and, to be fair, the process can introduce deadly rigidity to a software project (which was why I was fighting a constant hopeless battle for flexibility).

So I guess another possibility is, is that someone promoted a software architect into a position of influence in the project.

I'm sure when they were all private railroads, every company had a consistent standard for width of tunnel. Unify all those independently designed systems together, lose some important documentation along the way, and you're left with something where you can't simply look up important technical constraints.

In 2013, Spain had to lengthen their new model of S-80 submarines by 10 meters, because a spreadsheet error made them 100 tons overweight.

That may happen, but it's not the case here.

The project was written using modern standard sizes, as required by law; but knowing that the tunnels are ancient, they also mandated the provider to make a field study to figure out the real tunnel minimum sizes, and build the trains according to its result.

The scandal happened when this caused a delay in the initial estimated dates, and politicians found out that they wouldn't be able to open the train lines in time for this year's elections.

What are you on about. American cities and states do keep their fleets up to date. Its a bit of a bell curve, but replacement after a median of 40 years is fairly typical. Just the other day in the news.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYBQVB8H1Mw

BART also got a bunch of new cars in the past few years.

It greatly depends on the railroad. Amtrak car ages average about 30 years. National average for freight is around 20 years. The CTA L is all either built or refurbished in the last 24 years and the bulk of the stock is less than 15 years old. BART, MBTA and NYC Subway are more embarrassing with their 40-50-year-old cars and constant delays to put their complete new orders in service.

They are usually procured in series, but only a few (compared with cars) trains per series are built. For example, there are three configurations for Germanys current top of the line ICE4 high speed train, with 37, 50 and 50 sets built.

Trains seat more people than cars, and they don't spend most of their time sitting idle in parking lots, so you need fewer.

These ones are probably custom made because they’re being built to a 1-meter gauge.

There are about 3 popular train gauges in Spain: 1m, Iberian and the high speed trains at least use the European standard so they can travel non-stop.

Toronto had to spend a lot more money on its streetcar refresh because they use a gauge nobody else uses, along with tighter turning radii than most other systems. No off-the-shelf possible.

https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/ttc-flexity-streetcars...

Usually manufacturers take their standard designs and modify them, but can run into issues like where things unexpectedly resonate because you tweaked the design subtly.

Because there was no one standard back in the 19th century, not everything is standardised. You can have different loading gauges (roughly, what size vehicle will fit through the infrastructure) and the track gauge (the width between the rails). Whilst most of continental Europe is fairly standardised nowadays, you have various exceptions, like Spain and Portugal using a metre wide track gauge, or Great Britain[1] having a very small loading gauge.

Beyond that, the order size of the various railways is often relatively low (hundreds to thousands or carriages, or dozens of full sets) and railway operators often want them customised for specific services types (an intercity operator will want first class coaches and provision for food service, a commuter operator will want to cram as many people in as possible etc.) so everything going to be bespoke at some level.

[1] The island of Ireland, both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, uses a different set of standards to Great Britain or mainland Europe.

The numbers are just far lower then cars. The individual parts are far larger and far lower numbers. You can't have as much economics of scale.

Also, every customer has a lot of wishes. Imagine it more like Uber buying 1 million GM cars demanding to have costume interior and many other details.

It really depends on what the train is supposed to do. A train is mostly costume to its mission. An S-Bahn that operates more like metro, needs lots of large doors with a open layout. The same basic train can also be configured for an inter-city operations, having very different layout, different doors and so on.

And each country has different standard, differ track gauge, loading gauge, signaling, breaking and so on. Accessibility standards is another huge thing that is slight different everywhere.

But even so, lots of train types are quite similar, lots of train are built on the same platforms. Each of the manufactures have a few standard platforms. And inside different train there is lots of reuse.

> Is it typical for trains to be custom made?

Well, yes and no. There is a basic train set, and then it is usually customized to the operator’s needs. There isn’t really a “reference design” you can order, because nobody would order it. But the manufacturer tries to have as much commonality that they can to get some scale advantages.

Metra (Chicago’s intracity rail) has ordered a few hundred of these French trains [1]. They will be push/pulled by diesel locomotives, and the “customizations” are mainly just having bicycle storage areas and wheelchair ramps on both sides that work regardless of platform height (even no platform at all).

But that basic train car is used in a lot of European countries.

[1] https://www.alstom.com/coradia-stream-regional-trains-higher...