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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.
Unless my math is wrong, 10.5 gun related deaths a year per 100,000 population comes about to about 93 gun related deaths a day in the US. ((322,200,000/100,000)*10.5)/365.2425 = 92.6. So you are not wrong there.
And yes, when you're all hyped up on shit like guns, of course you make bad judgments and accidents happen.
Turns out that the train takes the same amount of travel time
Just goes to show how slow trains are in the USA if you need to highlight that they are as "fast" as a car.
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.