Spanish High-Speed Train Crash Offers Safety-System Lessons

The tragic incident has brought a decades-old Spanish success story crashing to a halt

By Lucas Laursen

Image: Flickr/Contando Estrelas

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The driver of the high-speed train that derailed July 25 at a sharp curve in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, killing at least 80 passengers and?injuring 130 more, told controllers he took the curve at around 190 km/h, despite an 80 km/h speed limit. He survived the crash and is now under investigation by local authorities. Even if the driver turns out to have been responsible for speeding, potential passengers might wonder what else had to fail in the safety system to allow one man?s error to harm so many people.

The crash is the first fatal accident of a high-speed train in Spain, which launched its high-speed network in 1992 and now serves around 100,000 passengers a day. Authorities have not yet assigned it a cause. But it may turn out to be an anomaly. "The most common [reasons for a derailment are] problems with the track or rail and equipment," says mechanical engineer George Bibel at the University of North Dakota, author of Train Wreck: The Forensic of Rail Disasters. While train accidents from Connecticut to France have made news lately, derailments are a declining threat, at least in the U.S., where they dropped about 90 percent from 1976-2011.

The decline is thanks in part to improved monitoring of aging infrastructure such as rails, wheels and bearings, Bibel says. Spanish media reported that the tracks on which this train was running were not designed for the fastest class of high-speed trains. The implication is that the tracks may somehow have contributed to the accident. Lower-grade tracks do vibrate more and wear down faster. And using the same tracks for multiple types of trains, such as high-speed, longer local passenger trains, or even cargo, can also promote uneven metal fatigue. Changing temperatures or wet tracks can combine with worn-down train wheels or uneven loading of a train to promote derailing. Yet things as basic as regular inspections of hot spots with an infrared sensor or of metal fatigue with an ultrasound sensor can alert rail operators to aging infrastructure.

Higher-tech control systems are also emerging. Both the U.S. and Europe are adopting semi-automated braking systems designed to take over from speeding drivers. The track at the accident site, which was very close to the station, used older-generation signaling technology called ASFA, which alerts the driver to upcoming speed restrictions but which cannot override his or her control. The Madrid-Barcelona high-speed train line, in contrast, uses the Level 2 European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS), which can override the driver. The train drivers union announced that the tragedy "could have been avoided" if ERTMS had been installed on that stretch of track. Even if that is true, Spain already has one of the highest? ERTMS deployments in Europe. In the U.S., rail authorities have warned that they are unlikely to complete a legislated upgrade to similar technology in time for the 2015 deadline.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/n4eBaXuEU4o/article.cfm

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