Fatal Talgo Derailment in Spain

[DET63]

Today's news says the driver was talking or texting on a mobile phone. The USA has had some headon collisions with the same cause, hasn't it? Can't they jam phones in the operator's space? And can't they just say drivers will be fired if they use a phone while on duty?

Perhaps the train operator thought the call was part of doing his duty:

In a statement, the court said Tuesday that the conductor was talking on the phone to an official of national rail company Renfe when the crash happened and apparently was consulting a paper document at the time.

 

[jis]

Today's news says the driver was talking or texting on a mobile phone. The USA has had some headon collisions with the same cause, hasn't it? Can't they jam phones in the operator's space? And can't they just say drivers will be fired if they use a phone while on duty?

Perhaps the train operator thought the call was part of doing his duty:

In a statement, the court said Tuesday that the conductor was talking on the phone to an official of national rail company Renfe when the crash happened and apparently was consulting a paper document at the time.

This is why in the US the Engineer is required to stop the train before copying down a Form D or any other written authorization, if there is a single person in the cab.

 

[hake]

Apart from casual curiosity over the past fifty years, I'd never taken much notice of Talgo trains until the frightful accident at Santiago. The video of the destruction of the oncoming train is ghastly and the break-up and destruction of the train is unbelievable. I watched the video with fascinated horror.

What provision was made by RENFE for progressive transition of the radius of the fatal curve and provision of super-elevation to mitigate the effects of over-speed round such curves on vehicle behaviour?

However, it is inherent Talgo vehicle design flaws that really concern me. Call me conservative if you like but I set great store by the use of separate collision-worthy deformation-resistant cars connected by couplings of such strength as to be capable of holding the cars apart but in formation in high speed derailments. Further, the use of sub-vehicle assemblies in the form of well-designed strong four-wheeled bogies promotes good alignment of the axles with respect to the direction of travel in instances of duress such as when a train is travelling round a curve at excessive speed.

Single axles à la Talgo are susceptible to being steered by the misalignment of the travel of the cars to which each wheel set is intimately and rigidly (by comparison with bogies) attached. The car derails and the axle follows it because it is directly aligned to the car. Bogies are far better able to continue to conform to the alignment of the track.

Cars must be held in line, upright and have a strong tendency to be able to conform to the alignment of the track. The Talgo at Santiago was unable to achieve this.

 

[user 1215]

The engineer was on a radio phone, not a personal phone getting instructions on his approach to Santiago de Compostela. He apparently knew he was going too fast as he tried to slow down from 115 MPH to 95 MPH - but according to that same article, the brake need to be applied almost 2 1/2 miles ahead of the speed change. Apparently he only applied the brakes "seconds" before impact.

 

[jis]

The engineer was on a radio phone, not a personal phone getting instructions on his approach to Santiago de Compostela. He apparently knew he was going too fast as he tried to slow down from 115 MPH to 95 MPH - but according to that same article, the brake need to be applied almost 2 1/2 miles ahead of the speed change. Apparently he only applied the brakes "seconds" before impact.

Sudden application of brakes under those circumstances could itself be a causative factor in the derailment.

 

[RRUserious]

The engineer was on a radio phone, not a personal phone getting instructions on his approach to Santiago de Compostela. He apparently knew he was going too fast as he tried to slow down from 115 MPH to 95 MPH - but according to that same article, the brake need to be applied almost 2 1/2 miles ahead of the speed change. Apparently he only applied the brakes "seconds" before impact.

Sudden application of brakes under those circumstances could itself be a causative factor in the derailment.

And his reason for being way overspeed was?

 

[hake]

José Luis López Gómez, inventor of a high-speed train guidance system: his work is ingenious but surely unnecessary when the reliability proven Jacob-type bogie is available.

Why persist with such a hotch-potch system as Talgo with its many weaknesses when demonstrably safe and intrinsically simpler systems such as are used by TGV are available? The answer is presumably to be found in national pride and its associated politics.

The knowledgeable contributions to this forum by others have opened my eyes. When travelling on trains outside the UK, I will be most careful to avoid travelling on Talgos.

 

[Guest]

A train being pushed is inherently unstable because the formation is under compression and so subject to buckling loads. A train being pulled is inherently stable because the formation is under tension and so tends to be stiff. Give me a locomotive at the front every time!

The Santiago video seems to show that the appalling physical events of the disaster commenced when a vehicle just behind the lead power vehicle was being squeezed off the curve before dragging the rest of the train off with it.

I have some modest personal knowledge of catastrophic railway disasters. I was very close to the Harrow and Wealdstone accident, resulting in 112 dead, on 8 October 1952. That many more did not die was thanks to a detachment of Yank military paramedics, who just happened to be passing the site, and helped so many badly hurt people as if they were wounded on the battlefield. They changed British practice of dealing with the seriously injured forever. Previously, British practice was to put the injured into ambulances and get them to hospital where treatment would commence. Thanks guys.

 

[hake]

Report from UK Guardian Newspaper on 31 July 2013

SPANISH TRAIN'S BLACK BOXES REVEAL DRIVER WAS ON PHONE TO RAIL FIRM

Court says Francisco Garzón was responding to call from RENFE controller when train derailed, raising questions about firm's role in disaster

The driver of the high-speed train involved in last week's Spanish train disaster was responding to a phone call from the rail company when the crash took place, according to a preliminary investigation released on Tuesday. The driver, Francisco Garzón, has been provisionally charged with multiple counts of negligent homicide.

The train, operated by Spain's national rail company, RENFE, left the track and slammed into a wall as it was approaching Santiago de Compostela on a journey from Madrid to Ferrol in north-western Spain. The death toll from the accident stands at 79.

In an official statement, the court handling the case said that "minutes before the derailment, [Garzón] received a call on his professional telephone to signal to him the route he had to take on arriving in Ferrol. It appears, from the content of the conversation and the background noise, that the driver consulted a plan or some similar paper document."

The person on the other end of the telephone "appears to have been a controller", the statement said. The existence of the conversation emerged from an inspection of the "black boxes", which began in the presence of the investigating magistrate on Tuesday morning.

The statement said the train was travelling at 192km/h (119mph) shortly before the crash. It added that "a brake was activated seconds before the accident" and that "it is estimated that at the moment the train left the tracks it was travelling at 153km/h." The speed limit on the bend where the train derailed was 80km/h.

News of the call Garzón took adds a new dimension to the investigation and for the first time raises questions about Renfe's role. Garzón who was only a few kilometres from Santiago del Compostela station when he answered the telephone, could have been called when the train was stationary.

Since the disaster, the heads of RENFE and the network operator, ADIF, have put the responsibility squarely on Garzón. But the driver's union has expressed concern that he was being blamed before the analysis of data from the onboard recorders.

Garzón was charged when he appeared before the investigating magistrate on Sunday. He was freed from custody on condition that he surrendered his passport and agreed to report to the court once a week.

Spanish news agencies, quoting police and court sources, said that he admitted he had acted recklessly. But, according to subsequent versions, he said he was confused as to which bit of the route he was travelling on.

The Spanish daily El País said one of the first people to speak to Garzón after the crash was the police inspector who took command of operations at the scene. The paper said that, in the report he later submitted, the police commander recalled that he had asked the driver how he was.

He quoted Garzón as replying: "I'm slightly injured. But I'm not what is important. What's important are the passengers." Then, on three occasions, he said: "I've ****ed it."

Colleagues and neighbours of Garzón came forward to defend him, describing him as a responsible and cautious driver. Juan Jesús García Fraile of the railway workers' union cautioned that, without the data from the black boxes, "we do not know what happened".

The view taken of the crash could have important financial repercussions. Spain has been a pioneer of high-speed rail traffic and has an important railway construction industry. RENFE is among firms bidding for a 13bn (£11.2bn) contract to build a high-speed rail link in Brazil. The terms of the tender reportedly exclude firms involved in the running of systems where an accident has taken place in the preceding five years.

 

[cirdan]

Today's news says the driver was talking or texting on a mobile phone. The USA has had some headon collisions with the same cause, hasn't it? Can't they jam phones in the operator's space? And can't they just say drivers will be fired if they use a phone while on duty?

It wasn't a private phone call. He was talking to the scheduler about some change in the schedule. Apparently the scheduler wanted the train to take a different line / track than normal and was discussing this with the engineer.

 

[cirdan]

José Luis López Gómez, inventor of a high-speed train guidance system: his work is ingenious but surely unnecessary when the reliability proven Jacob-type bogie is available.
Why persist with such a hotch-potch system as Talgo with its many weaknesses when demonstrably safe and intrinsically simpler systems such as are used by TGV are available? The answer is presumably to be found in national pride and its associated politics.

The knowledgeable contributions to this forum by others have opened my eyes. When travelling on trains outside the UK, I will be most careful to avoid travelling on Talgos.

Talgos are not intrinsically unsafe. Talgo technology has been around since the 1930s and as far as I know this has been the first major accident involving such a train. You cannot compare a TGV to a Talgo. It's horses for courses. A TGV is a fast train for a fast track. On slow tracks it is a costly lumbering power-sucking behemoth. A Talgo is designed more for transitionsl system running on both high and low speed tracks and transitioning between them, and notably running faster on slow / conventional lines than regular trains with bogies. If you watch line-speed restrictions in Spain you almost invariably see that Talgos have their own speed limits that are 10 to 20 km/h above those of regular passenger trains. Their light weights and axle loads means they can safely traverse curves at more elevated speeds while their passive tilt technology increases passenger comfort while using a fraction of the tilting energy and being far more intrinsically fail-safe that the ultra expensive hi-tech active tilt technologies used on the tilting trains of other countries. And because for historical reasons, Spain uses a different track gauge than other European countries, and the mixing of the two gauges calls for trains that can traverse between the two systems, Talgo trains are pretty much ideal. A TGV can do none of these things, and yes, RENFE does own some TGVs and uses them on certain services. So calling this protectionism is missing the point entirely. Any train will derail if driven through a curve at double the speed limit. In fact when it comes to track failures such as track elements fgailing under a train (Gerard's Cross etc) I'd far rather be in a talgo as a bogie / truck is not guided but hunts its own way and in a curve will seek to go straight ahead. If the track failed under the middle of a Talgo, the following axle would follow the previous car and the rest of the train would follow the curve rather than cutting staright ahead as happened in the above incidents.

 

[RRUserious]

Wow, the story in today's paper makes this crash sound more and more like so many disastrous plane crashes. I'm thinking specifically of the most deadly crash in history in the Canary Islands. Heavy fog on the runway, poor communications with the control tower, pilot edgy about losing time. Hits the throttle and plows into another full plane sitting on the runway. The bit about trying to read a plan on paper while the train careens ahead at twice the speed it should have been at shows a train system out of control. This was an accident waiting to happen. Probably not the first case of unsafe operation, but the train operators just ran out of luck.

 

[NW cannonball]

Wow, the story in today's paper makes this crash sound more and more like so many disastrous plane crashes. I'm thinking specifically of the most deadly crash in history in the Canary Islands. Heavy fog on the runway, poor communications with the control tower, pilot edgy about losing time. Hits the throttle and plows into another full plane sitting on the runway. The bit about trying to read a plan on paper while the train careens ahead at twice the speed it should have been at shows a train system out of control. This was an accident waiting to happen. Probably not the first case of unsafe operation, but the train operators just ran out of luck.

Agree - like so many disastrous plane crashes -- and train crashes -- several unexpected failures combine - and then -

Inadequate train control, operator complacency, distraction, failure of situational awareness, communication problems adding to those -- failure of hardware and software safeguards -

Wait for the official report.

 

[RRUserious]

They say disasters are when several things line up and synchronize. I don't know how many things there are with trains, but behavior considered "acceptable" by operators ceases to be safe when something else happens, too. Fatal crashes are when you get to look at the "things we do all the time" and realize how lucky operators are that those things didn't cost lives.

 

[WhoozOn1st]

This NY Times item reports that the crashed Talgo's engineer responded to warnings in the cab by making three brake applications before, and as, the derailment occurred.

Spain: Alarms Warned Train’s Driver Before Accident - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/world/europe/spain-alarms-warned-trains-driver-before-accident.html?ref=todayspaper

"At least three alarms went off inside the train that crashed last week in northwestern Spain moments before it derailed, prompting the panicked driver to activate the brakes three times even as he talked on the telephone with another employee, an examination of the train’s two black boxes released Friday revealed."

 

[RRUserious]

Too late? Or malfunctioning brakes?

 

[jis]

Clearly too little too late. But whether that was due to brake malfuction or the driver not bothering to verify the results of his action on the actual speed we have no way of knowing without more info.

There appears to be a similarity between this crash and the Asiana one. In the latter they were going through the right motions without bothering to monitor speed, and apparently in the former he was also going through the motions of brake application without monitoring speed until he was in the curve and it was too late. (That is assuming that the braking system was working as it was supposed to.

 

[RRUserious]

Does anything on trains give the engineer a better chance than passengers of escaping injury or death?

 

[Ryan]

Not particularly. Given that the engineer is in the front, they're probably more likely to be injured when running into something. Chase, Bayou Canot, Capitol Limited/MARC collision are just a few...

Edit: Came across this link while reading about Bayou Canot - firsthand account from one of the conductors. Short, but EXCELLENT read that puts a human face on the disaster:

http://www.gcwriters.org/destruction_of_amtrak.htm

 

[hake]

José Luis López Gómez, inventor of a high-speed train guidance system: his work is ingenious but surely unnecessary when the reliability proven Jacob-type bogie is available.

Why persist with such a hotch-potch system as Talgo with its many weaknesses when demonstrably safe and intrinsically simpler systems such as are used by TGV are available? The answer is presumably to be found in national pride and its associated politics.

The knowledgeable contributions to this forum by others have opened my eyes. When travelling on trains outside the UK, I will be most careful to avoid travelling on Talgos.

Talgos are not intrinsically unsafe. Talgo technology has been around since the 1930s and as far as I know this has been the first major accident involving such a train. You cannot compare a TGV to a Talgo. It's horses for courses. A TGV is a fast train for a fast track. On slow tracks it is a costly lumbering power-sucking behemoth. A Talgo is designed more for transitionsl system running on both high and low speed tracks and transitioning between them, and notably running faster on slow / conventional lines than regular trains with bogies. If you watch line-speed restrictions in Spain you almost invariably see that Talgos have their own speed limits that are 10 to 20 km/h above those of regular passenger trains. Their light weights and axle loads means they can safely traverse curves at more elevated speeds while their passive tilt technology increases passenger comfort while using a fraction of the tilting energy and being far more intrinsically fail-safe that the ultra expensive hi-tech active tilt technologies used on the tilting trains of other countries. And because for historical reasons, Spain uses a different track gauge than other European countries, and the mixing of the two gauges calls for trains that can traverse between the two systems, Talgo trains are pretty much ideal. A TGV can do none of these things, and yes, RENFE does own some TGVs and uses them on certain services. So calling this protectionism is missing the point entirely. Any train will derail if driven through a curve at double the speed limit. In fact when it comes to track failures such as track elements fgailing under a train (Gerard's Cross etc) I'd far rather be in a talgo as a bogie / truck is not guided but hunts its own way and in a curve will seek to go straight ahead. If the track failed under the middle of a Talgo, the following axle would follow the previous car and the rest of the train would follow the curve rather than cutting staright ahead as happened in the above incidents.

The video of the incident appears to show that the first vehicle to leave the track was a Talgo vehicle. The front bogie equipped power car appears to have been wrenched off the track by the violence of what was happening behind it. Who knows if bogie equipped rolling stock would have held the curve? It looks clear to me that a Talgo left the track first.

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

Not particularly. Given that the engineer is in the front, they're probably more likely to be injured when running into something. Chase, Bayou Canot, Capitol Limited/MARC collision are just a few...
Edit: Came across this link while reading about Bayou Canot - firsthand account from one of the conductors. Short, but EXCELLENT read that puts a human face on the disaster:

http://www.gcwriters.org/destruction_of_amtrak.htm

I think the only reason this engineer survided while so many passenger died is because the leading unit was not the first to leave track, and it was pulled off by the cars behind it. When pulled off, it seems that the rear of the leading unit impacted first, with the front following in, so the engineer suffered less force than in a collision.

 

[jis]

The video of the incident appears to show that the first vehicle to leave the track was a Talgo vehicle. The front bogie equipped power car appears to have been wrenched off the track by the violence of what was happening behind it. Who knows if bogie equipped rolling stock would have held the curve? It looks clear to me that a Talgo left the track first.

The speculation in the European rail community has been that the second car which has a MTU genset mounted in it to provide power in non-electrified territory to these Class 730s was the first to derail, possibly due to its odd weight distribution. It is also those two cars at each end that caught fire due to diesel fuel leaking and getting ignited.

 

[RRUserious]

What a weird way to construct a train.

 

[George Harris]

Not particularly. Given that the engineer is in the front, they're probably more likely to be injured when running into something. Chase, Bayou Canot, Capitol Limited/MARC collision are just a few...
Edit: Came across this link while reading about Bayou Canot - firsthand account from one of the conductors. Short, but EXCELLENT read that puts a human face on the disaster:

http://www.gcwriters.org/destruction_of_amtrak.htm

I think the only reason this engineer survided while so many passenger died is because the leading unit was not the first to leave track, and it was pulled off by the cars behind it. When pulled off, it seems that the rear of the leading unit impacted first, with the front following in, so the engineer suffered less force than in a collision.

Look at the video. As the heavy lead diesel plows into the ballast, the passenger carrying cars were pushed into it by a combination of momentum and the trailing diesel unit. A string of soda cans crushed between two bricks.

 

[RRUserious]

In a related matter, my Swiss friend says Swiss engineers run red lights on their mountain railways routinely. They do it and get away with it and then one day a guy does it and has a headon collision. Do authorities discipline staff who do risky things?