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TGV Accident Caused By Excessive Speed (railwaygazette.com)
Cochonou writes: Analysis of the black boxes of the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) which derailed on Saturday revealed that the accident resulted from excessive speed and late braking. The test train entered a 945m-radius curve at a speed of 265 km/h, far over the maximum speed of 176 km/h. The French national railway company ruled out any other cause, such as mechanical failure or track mishap.
During test runs, a number of security features are disabled, in particular parts of the TVM system, which would have prevented any overspeed during normal service. This leaves the train speed under the sole responsibility of the driver.
The accident, which killed 11 people, occurred on the last run of the scheduled trials on the new high-speed line between Paris and Strasbourg. As more details on the accident surface, it becomes evident that this last run was performed in a festive spirit, with relatives (including children) of the employees on board, and seven people present in the train cab instead of train. This casts a shadow on the security procedures of the French national railway company: it appears that the high-speed train technology is considered so safe that the risks inherent to trials runs were somehow neglected. The two drivers and the traction inspector have been suspended pending possible criminal charges. Other changes in the management structure will probably follow.
During test runs, a number of security features are disabled, in particular parts of the TVM system, which would have prevented any overspeed during normal service. This leaves the train speed under the sole responsibility of the driver.
The accident, which killed 11 people, occurred on the last run of the scheduled trials on the new high-speed line between Paris and Strasbourg. As more details on the accident surface, it becomes evident that this last run was performed in a festive spirit, with relatives (including children) of the employees on board, and seven people present in the train cab instead of train. This casts a shadow on the security procedures of the French national railway company: it appears that the high-speed train technology is considered so safe that the risks inherent to trials runs were somehow neglected. The two drivers and the traction inspector have been suspended pending possible criminal charges. Other changes in the management structure will probably follow.
At least it wasn't another terrorist attack.
Well, yea, when you're all hyped up on shit like that, of course you make bad judgments and accidents happen.
Must be the drug of choice over in the EU given their current attitudes and events. It's certainly not weed.
Black box audio from the train revealed seven spectators in the cab chanting "Plus vite! Plus vite! Plus vite!"
Better known as 318230.
Yet one more accident that could have been prevented by Positive Train Control
During test runs, a number of security features are disabled
If they'd already disabled some safety features because it was a test run, then they probably would have disabled that too if it had been installed.
So it's not just rednecks and their pickup trucks.
you mean the TVM system. the system that was disabled for testing....
In case you missed it in the summary:
During test runs, a number of security features are disabled, in particular parts of the TVM system, which would have prevented any overspeed during normal service. This leaves the train speed under the sole responsibility of the driver.
Positive Train Control is effectively the US equivalent of TVM, and so would have been disabled even if it was used on TGV.
I was gonna say, "well, seeing what happens when you go too fast is part of a test pilot / driver's job", until the article mentioned bringing kids along. Ugh, that's reprehensible.
There are so few snarky comments. Wonder what this thread would be if the derailment happened in China...
Time to ban trains. And some people who ride trains buy tickets in cash, better ban that too. We need more women and transgenders in trains, too.
This message is brought to you by liberal demoncraps.
In the USA, train engineers routinely admit that their lives are worth about 50 cents. That's the cost of a single-point-of-failure resistor in each signal node. If that resistor fails, the signals will show all-way-green.
Why isn't this automated? I know... they say it's a test run, so certain safety features are disabled, but ffs, can't you at least find an operator who knows wtf he's doing? This is just sad.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I remember that it is a deliberate decision for safety.
In the late '70, the SNCF knew they could run a TGV completly automatic (at least on the high speed lines, not on the normal speed lines)
They decided that that is dangerous, so the train driver has to set te speed manually, on the speed limit displayd to him
by the cab signal system (TVM) and if he (or she) sets the speed too high, the train performs an emergency braking.
So the train driver had someting to do, and was not out of the loop, he was realy needed (malfunction ).
"seven people present in the train cab instead of train" What is that suppose to even mean?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
....crash caused by excessive speed. Who knew?
Tres Grande Vitesse?
More like "Tros Grande Vitesse" am I right?
what? too soon?
At least in europe on numerous metro systems. Welcome to the 21st century USA!
However you can't expect automated systems to test themselves. You'll still need humans in the test loop somewhere. Plus for the sort of speeds the TGV gets up to I imagine most people would still prefer someone to be up front if even all he does is to feed the dog that bites him if he touches the controls.
Drivin' that train, high on Champaigne...
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There are two computer-driven subway lines in Paris, with plans to develop this technology to other lines.
I think the problem is mostly one of certification. Full authority autopilot code is held to much stricter standards than driving aids, even though they are essentially the same thing on trains.
Also, the human driver is usually the only technical person on the train and may need to deal with various problems like various types of obstacle or malfunctions. An autopilot may guarantee the train safety by breaking before the obstacle but may be clueless about what to do afterward : people (healthy or not), animals, rocks other trains or track damage are not dealt with the same way. Should the police be called ? Is there a medical emergency ? For how long will the traffic be interrupted ? Is there a danger for other trains on the same line ? Automated subway lines mitigate the problem with an array of sensors and passive measures (walls) that would be impractical for long distances.
To get Egg you need chicken.
Before setup of the security system you need to finish the track test itself. From my understanding this was some early test where the TVM & other system were not yet opperating (in progress of setup).
Latest test track are run using a special trail that is Iris 320 and will check everything including that the TVM is fully fonctionnal.
Until that point, trains must be run in manual mode with additional security rules to avoid issues.
Clearly the security measures were not followed. We anticipate the guys will be sacked because of that (they might be chatting one with another).
The problem was that for test run there are lots of "civilian" people on bord that want to be there to see such unique moment.
It always end-up with people going into the cockpit. This can result into disturbing the pilote. This becomes a serious problem if you are on a test run without automatic safety on.
I also anticipate new rules will be set to prevent such issues.
If there are criminal charges, I expect that they will be with token 'punishments'. To an average, sane, person, what punishment can compare to the knowledge that almost a dozen people were senselessly murdered because of your poor judgement? There are no reparations they could make to the victims or their families for the loss.
This knowledge will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
I don't need your modsplaining, asshole. Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What resistor is that? Please elaborate.
I know a bit about signals and I know of no such resistor. The equipment and control logic for US signal systems are fail-safe designs, based on the standard AREMA guidelines and any failures will cause the signals to go all red.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
And yet, the job of a car's "driving aid" is much harder than that of a train's autopilot. So it is reasonable to expect self-driving trains before self-driving cars.
None of these require the driver to be physically present on a train — camera feeds can tell a remote dispatcher ("driving" 20 trains at the same time) all he needs to know about obstacles and interruptions. As for medical, fire, or police emergencies — those are reported by passengers pushing a button (or by talking to a conductor). The push may as well (and probably already does) connect them to the emergency dispatchers wherever they are — and with the speed the train is going, it will get to the next village or town before the caller finishes explaining, what's going on.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Union rules required railroads to keep firemen around long after the last steam engines had been retired and replaced with diesel-electrics, even though they had no real job to do. Keeping engineers around when trains can pretty much run themselves sounds like more of the same.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Yet one more accident that could have been prevented by Positive Train Control
Wouldn't a hosts file have prevented it?
None of these require the driver to be physically present on a train — camera feeds
Which have less coverage than a physically present human plus cameras, who has full view from the cabin and can get out and walk+talk if needed.
Anyway, communication could be broken, if it can be established anyway in a remote area in poor weather. It's like you've never left an urban environment. TGV aren't local trains. There simply isn't some magic 100% reliable high-bandwidth realtime, secure radio system between two arbitrary points on land.
can tell a remote dispatcher ("driving" 20 trains at the same time)
Oh good, less than 1/20 of the attention, that'll be problem-free.
all he needs to know about obstacles and interruptions.
Really, all? Do you know exactly what a driver needs to know?
As for medical, fire, or police emergencies — those are reported by passengers pushing a button (or by talking to a conductor)
Medical and police, sure. Fire? a smoke/fire alarm might react first, or - in the driver's cabin - a driver noting a combination of sensors, or seeing or smelling something. "Reports of smoke in the cabin" are still what first tips off some airline pilots to problems, and I've even been in a coach which had to be evacuated because it started filling quickly with smoke from the rear while winding through the Highlands of Scotland... I can't bear to think what would have happened if this had been driverless, with passengers frantically hitting a button to communicate with some base station just to get another signal sent back to stop the vehicle. Again, this isn't an urban bloody tram.
The push may as well (and probably already does) connect them to the emergency dispatchers wherever they are — and with the speed the train is going,
It's like you've never done basic first aid training. Any sufficiently large or remote organisation needs its OWN procedures, because anyone in life-threatening danger is otherwise dead long before an ambulance arrives. (That's why, for example, and contrary to popular belief, Amazon isn't Evil for asking people to call its in-house EMT team rather than dialing 911.)
it will get to the next village or town before the caller finishes explaining, what's going on.
Just how small is the country you live in?! A cross-country train is still spending most of its time going through nowhere. /. is sometimes interesting for little more than its ability to reveal the ignorance of the layperson. A simple "I haven't thought this through" is sufficient, now.
Why are we still using humans to drive the trains? We already have computer-driven cars on the roads — and driving a car is a lot harder for a computer both because of the complex terrain and human-only signalling.
I wonder, what is it? Is it a fear of protests by union-thugs? Engineers' own inertia?
As one such engineer (formerly), I can tell you that one reason is passenger unease with having no driver, and another is to have staff on hand to deal with emergency situations (like evacuation). We have yet to see public unease with driverless cars abate - perhaps then we could have driverless trains. That might seem the wrong way round (as you say, trains are one-dimensional), but the public (and the press) illogically demand a far higher safety standard (real or as they perceive) for trains than cars - a source of exasperation for us railway engineers.
Having said that, there are some driverless railways - the [low speed] London Dockland Light Railway for example [low speed and driverless, but not staff-less]
We're very close to that. Problems are:
1. The technology is mostly there but rarely all there. The US, for example, is rolling out PTC, which is 90% of the self-driving-train solution (though it's intended to be merely a safety upgrade), but PTC will not be universal. While Europe is way ahead of the Americas on this, largely because they're not stupid, boneheaded, and corrupt when it comes to transportation policy (and thus they take trains seriously rather than deliberately running them down, making them all but unobtainable, and then claiming nobody wants them when nobody rides once-a-day museum relics whose stations are 50 miles away from anywhere you want to go and whose speed rarely breaks 50mph) PTC is still not universal.
2. You do, still, need equivalents of the technologies going into, for example, Google's self driving car. Did a tree fall on the track? Has heat bent the rails out of shape? Is there an idiot driving parallel to the train who's likely to jump the tracks at the next crossing (well, in fairness, human engineers can't generally deal with that either, and usually have to suffer the trauma associated with slamming on the brakes, getting out, and finding bits of someone's head on the track.) What about a washout?
3. Yeah... unions. I hate blaming unions for anything, largely because 90% of the time when someone claims unions are the thing that killed a particular industry or stops needed reform from happening, they're making it up or at the very least massively exaggerating. In this case, however, the unions have this issue on their radar and have been fighting smaller crews, and expressed concerns that PTC = 1 engineer or eventually no engineers.
There are automated systems out there, but they generally run in completely enclosed subway tunnels and have a high degree of human monitoring. Until PTC can be augmented with techologies that can visually and non-visually verify the tracks ahead are safe, we can't really automate any major conventional intercity railways.
But I bet it wouldn't take a year for, say, a team made up of Google's self driving car engineers to create those technologies.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
High on not being able to spell, apparently.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Train autopilot on new high-speed track is simple, just as plane autopilot is simple in cruise mode (yet planes do fail in autopilot mode every once in a while, the Paris Rio flight comes to mind). The problem is the final city approach part because city real estate is expensive so its a can of worm where tracks cross in all kinds of creative ways and high-tech modern trains use the same track as old decades old not always perfectly maintained suburban trains. (building a new station way outside the city is *not* convenient and *not* what you want to do if you want lots of paying passengers)
Besides, sometimes trains stop in the middle of nowhere (engine failure, electricity failure, safety stop because a cow or a human managed to bypass fences and decided the track is a nice place to spend the evening). That does not happen often but passengers kind of like knowing some operator is sharing the misery with them and is not cosy in a remote control room.
Regarding problems with the track... it seems like an engineer driving a TGV train at 200 mph isn't going to be able to do much by the time he sees a tree or washed out track, on account of F=ma and all.
There's a good chance that you're unfamiliar with it but they should have let the monkey drive.
"Open up the switch, I'm gonna let him through the hole, 'cause the monkey's got the locomotive under control."
-The Monkey and the Engineer (a different Grateful Dead song that doesn't get radio play)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"...on account of F=ma and all."
I think you mean 1/2mv**2