TGV Accident Caused By Excessive Speed (railwaygazette.com) 96
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.
My question is... (Score:3)
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.
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I used to think the same way... then I had to go from Portland to Seattle on business... a lot.
Turns out that the train takes the same amount of travel time (esp. when you factor in traffic), and when you add up gas and the cost of parking in Downtown Seattle (where even hotels will charge something like $40/day), it is actually somewhat *cheaper* than driving. Seattle is small enough size-wise to make most of it walkable without too much trouble.
I'd much rather sit in a fairly cozy seat on the train, plug
Re:My question is... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Given the terrain around here, I'm not really sure if you'd want something that flew at 200kph
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The terrain is never a problem if you have the will and money for a fast train infrastructure. They'll build elevated tracks, tunnels and ditches to keep the going smooth.
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So, you say that flying cars are the only solution, then? /s
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Europeans laugh when Americans think 100 years is a long time.
Americans laugh when Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance.
In the western US, 100 miles might not get you to the next *county*, forget the next state. With few exceptions (NY area eastern seaboard, LA-SD, Portland-Seattle), the travel distances between major targets in the USA are large enough that nothing short of a 500mph maglev can even try to compete with a jumbojet on time, even granting 1-2hr overhead on the plane.
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And that's at slow US train speeds. TGVs in the most frequently used corridors would give us much better door-to-door times for regional travel, and would cut the puddlejumper clutter at our major airports. Flying would be a much better experience if it were reserved for long distances.
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No need for a car for me...I'll just happily keep my enormous dick...
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No need for a train for me...I'll just happily keep my car....
At normal full cruising speed the TGV goes 300 km/h (186MPH) vs. 130km/h (81MPH) on France Motorways. Assuming time between trains / busses is no more than 5-10 minutes, and the journey time took no more than 50- 100% extra time over driving, I'd be glad to take public transit everywhere (acceptable time between busses/ trains could be longer up to 1hr-2hr for intercity travel). With the exception of a road trip on a wide open sunny motorway, driving is a chore. And a car is a depreciating asset to maintain
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Your car doesn't, either. You have to find parking when you get there. Not to mention you can't have a drink when you are there. Who the fuck wants to drive to Paris and not have a drink?
Yes, we know you love your cars. Other people love living their lives more, hence them travelling by train.
Simple : Chicken and egg problem. (Score:1)
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 follow
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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.
On a test he'd most certainly know what to do. But the mind has bugs, it slips our mind, we think we already did it, we get lost in thought or conversation and so on. The better question is why this system needs to be disabled at all. Surely compared to building the rail track and putting a train on it, getting the markers in place to signal speed limits and install a track profile should be trivial. Even if they want to do speed trials in excess of the production speed, they should be able to use a test pr
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It's not automated first because they're operating outside commercial speed envelope (they're authorized to overspeed as munch as 10% over commercial speed limit to check engineered margins actually exist) and second because those new tracks are often used with new hardware, and new hardware can have bugs that require emergency human action to avoid crashes. Therefore the test protocol gives maximum freedom to the engine operator.
(likewise new planes are tested by test pilots outside normal envelope, except
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At least it wasn't another terrorist attack.
We still aren't sure the engineer that drove to fast wasn't a secret muslim. Or a soviet sleeper agent, and ISIS cracked the codes of the KGB to activate them. We are all in grave danger.
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Unless my math is wrong, 10.5 gun related deaths a year per 100,000 population [wikipedia.org] 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.
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10.5 gun related deaths a year per 100,000 population .... in the US
But only 3.01 in France.
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more people die in a couple of days in the US of A from bullets than died in the Paris terrorist attack
Way to go! Bring the issue of USA gun ownership into the discussion!
We need the equivalent of Godwin's rule to describe doing this. I'd call it Nukenerd's rule.
Re: Excessive Speed? (Score:2)
That's what Poland said
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Gun violence is gun violence. Doesn't matter if it's a terrorist or a robbery or a crazy person.
Think you missed my point. TFA is about a railway accident.
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Should we be arming the engineers? (Desperately trying to make it on-topic.)
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you mean the TVM system. the system that was disabled for testing....
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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.
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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)
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Yet one more accident that could have been prevented by Positive Train Control [wikipedia.org]
Wouldn't a hosts file have prevented it?
Black box (Score:3)
Black box audio from the train revealed seven spectators in the cab chanting "Plus vite! Plus vite! Plus vite!"
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Train a Trop Grande Vitesse
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Or Jeremy Clarkson [youtube.com]
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Not singing this [blogspot.com]?
hold my beer and check this out (Score:1)
So it's not just rednecks and their pickup trucks.
The life of a test pilot ... oh wait. (Score:3)
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.
Re:The life of a test pilot ... oh wait. (Score:5, Insightful)
You would have been wrong, anyway. There's no mystery whatsoever what happens for a particular turn radius, center of gravity, turn bank, and speed. Someone with the necessary information can calculate the derail speed within a few mph. There's nothing to be learned by trying to test the limits.
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Bet there will be an app that will soon be out that can monitor your speed on a specific track and let you know you are screwed just before the train derails.....
Yeah, but then somebody will type in a wrong number, and people will blame Apple...
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Please think a bit. This wasn't supposed to be a dangerous or destructive test in which there was likelihood of derailment and multiple deaths.
A few weeks ago down the road here several people died at an airshow which had hundreds of kids in attendance. Everyone there knew there was a greater chance of an accident than when watching routine flying, but the chance is still very small, because nothing is done which is likely to cause a crash.
Someone made the decision to drive at ridiculously unsafe speed. It
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Well it depends, because part of the TGV tests in the final phase is public demonstration. It happened in Japan - their newest bullet train was running on test tracks, yet many people lined up to buy tickets to be the first to ride it (it can go over 500kph) because while it will take many years to build or upgrade the tracks to
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I don't need your modsplaining, asshole. Please, don't hate.
Re:Automate trains (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Err, we do (Score:2)
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.
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Huh? Of course, I can... I used to write unit-tests for a living... But I was not referring to this particular incident — this was a test run (although having so many people aboard during a test seems strange). My point is, the replacing of human operators with computers should've happened all over the railroads long before the much more complicated automatic car-driving hit the streets.
And my guess as to the reasons remains valid despite
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"Huh? Of course, I can... I used to write unit-tests for a living"
Testing some bit of software in a PC is not the same as testing 400 tons of hardware that can do 200+mph you idiot.
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Well I'm damn sure it wasn't a high speed train where they're not only testing the entire train systems including emergency systems, but signalling, catenary and track too. Good like automating the testing for all that genius.
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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 b
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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 tel
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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
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"...on account of F=ma and all."
I think you mean 1/2mv**2
how many? (Score:2)
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"seven people present in the train cab instead of train" What is that suppose to even mean?
I'm not one of those grammar knowing people, but i think that's technically correct english that's made needlessly vague by a couple omissions.
"seven people present in the train cab instead of (in the) train (cars)."
The cab being the driving compartment. The more colloquial term (at least in my neck of the woods) is usually the engine, but perhaps this train didn't have a separate engine car?
You could argue that saying they were in the engine/cab instead of the train is inaccurate, since the cab is i
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I will not complain too much however, as the editors fixed a broken link.
Train à Grande Vitesse (Score:2)
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Trop Grande Vitesse
Criminal charges? (Score:2)
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.
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Perhaps you're not a native speaker, so maybe you should be made aware that "murder" does not merely mean "kill"; it means quite specifically that there was intent to kill.
You should not use it in the context of an accident unless you're accusing someone of deliberately causing those deaths--in other words, unless you're claiming that it was not an accident.