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Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

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otikik

>If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately

That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment

> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured

The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.

All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.

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For context: the aforementioned crash in Japan was not on a high-speed / Shinkansen line but a normal commuter train. Both the 2013 accident in Spain and the recent one were high speed trains.

I’m not sure these are comparable, high-speed rail needs much tighter tolerances as the risk is orders of magnitude higher. As the parent comment stated there have been zero major crashes on the japanese shinkansen lines.

The second train crashed on a non-high speed part of the network.

There is also no reason to treat speed limits on high speed and normal trains differently. There are plenty of speed related crashes on low speed lines. If anything the stakes are even higher on commuter trains because they tend to carry more people, many of which will be standing, and are more likely to crash into another structure as was the case in the Japanese incident mentioned.

That's still an issue of design though. I am pretty certain that this would not have been possible in quite that way in Japan.

Your comment is down thread of a comment containing a link to a Wikipedia page of a Japanese train crashed caused by speeding. I do not understand how can you think this is impossible in Japan.

> That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.

No, Japan more or less invented ATC in the 1960s for the purpose of running the Shinkansen safely.

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