Large Scale Central

Spanish Train Crash CCTV footage

The max I ever ran was 70 mph light locomotives, loaded trains maxed out at 60. Even at that speed it was quite a thrill, but at the same time, quite stressful. The joke with engineers is that we think 5 miles ahead, and 2 miles behind. I would imagine that the engineer knew the territory well enough that he wasn’t surprised by a 50 mph curve.

On every locomotive I’ve been on, they have an overspeed trip. Normally for freight locomotives it’s 72mph. When you hit 72 the automatic brake kicks in and makes a full service set and attempts to stop the train. You can’t over ride the overspeed on the locomotives I’ve been on (in North America).

Adif, Spain’s railway agency, confirmed that a high-tech automatic braking program called the European Rail Traffic Management System was installed on most of the high-speed track leading from Madrid north to Santiago de Compostela — but the cutting-edge coverage stops just 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of where the crash occurred, placing a greater burden on the driver to take charge.

Adif spokeswoman Maria Carmen Palao said the driver from that point on had sole control of brakes and when to use them. She said even European Rail Traffic Management technology might not have been powerful enough to stop a speeding train in time.

“Regardless of the system in place, the drivers know the speed limits. If these are respected, an accident should not take place,” she said. “Whatever speed the train was traveling at, the driver knows beforehand what lies ahead. … There’s no sudden change in which a driver finds out by surprise that he has to change speed.”

Gonzalo Ferre, Adif’s president, said the driver should have started slowing the train 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) before the dangerous bend, which comes immediately after the trains exit a tunnel.

He said signs clearly marked this point when the driver must begin to slow “because as soon as he exits the tunnel he needs to be traveling at 80 kilometers per hour.”

I’ve been seeing on the tube, and reading about how the bad guys can potentially take control of planes, trains and automobiles, through the onboard Com Pewter. Now, the evidence seems against it in this case, but what about the Korean airliner that just missed sticking its landing in San Fransisco, and the Southwest airliner that landed nose down in New York? Could somebody have fussed with the controls with a black box on the ground at just the right moment to “screw the pooch?” That’s something to think about.

When a ship can zig-zag all over the ocean, cut donuts and create all manner of havoc, while the onboard electronics remain clueless, showing on course and speed, that’s gotta give you pause.

This is the reason that all of my Skippers insisted that the Quartermaster’s Mates and Navigator shot the stars at sundown and dawn, and took noon and moon sights. “The stars don’t lie,” they said. We also turned off the onboard automatic navigation systems. “Too many things to go wrong,” they said. Those systems, while not as sophisticated as the ones in use today, supposedly could take us from pierside, out the channel, across the ocean, up the next channel and put us alongside the assigned pier. We may have tried it out, just to see if the damn thing worked, but never while I was on watch.