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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.

Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.

Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.

> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about

Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?

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Wait, are you saying you did?

> Wait, are you saying you did?

I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post.

You can too. Here is a general layout for passengers: https://www.bahnhof.de/en/troisdorf/map

You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

On top of that you can see the platforms in question on wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/S13_Troi...

You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?

They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.

The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.

It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they affect the decision making of the various entities in this story. So I will leave that part to you. I personally don't form opinion on things I don't know about.

What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.

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