Speeding train kills 12 youths in Spain

It is more like "12 young reckless kids won Darwin award by crossing rails where they should have not".

There is an underpass, it was not used. Train won right of way.
 
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:(

You would think people would have the sense to stay off the tracks around a station. So many rail accidents happen this way. It's very hard to hear and see a train approaching at high speed when there are multiple lines and other trains concealing its approach.
 
No mention in the report of alcohol- but a group of young people headed for a beach party at night?
It's a sad and wholly avoidable accident. I feel for the driver more than anyone. What the hell does he feel like today?
 
That poor conductor, I can't see him being able to work anymore. I certainly would never want to be anywhere near a train after something like that, even if it was because of utter retardation on the kids' part.
 
Soapy Sam said:
I feel for the driver more than anyone. What the hell does he feel like today?
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Oh very likely like week-old feces. I didn't read the article (barring something rather out of the ordinary, such incidents are depressingly common) so I don't know how far in advance he was able to see the kids and hit the brakes, but the inevitability of outcome and direction is going to be with him for a very, very long time through no fault of his own.
 
I think it just means "fast". I think that's an intercity line- trains run at speeds way over 100mph. The AVE high speed trains reach 180mph, though I don't know if this was one of those.
Extremely hard to judge the speed- and it seems the station was crowded, people are in the habit of crossing the line because the underpass is small and gets crowded- and in the large crowd of people headed for a midsummer beach party, probably many simply followed the person in front without even being able to see along the adjacent line.
The driver of the express would have had no chance to brake.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/10399126.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE
 
The train was running at 136 Km/h, below the 150 Km/h speed limit for that track. It would have needed 1 Km to stop.

There was an underpass, apparently crowded with people wanting to get to the beach. This group decided to cross the tracks as a way to avoid the crowd.

Well, they did. :(

It's a terrible accident. The conductor is in shock and there are 14 wounded, 3 of them in critical condition. As Soapy says, it was wholly avoidable, which makes it worse.
 
fitzgibbon said:
Oh very likely like week-old feces. I didn't read the article (barring something rather out of the ordinary, such incidents are depressingly common) so I don't know how far in advance he was able to see the kids and hit the brakes, but the inevitability of outcome and direction is going to be with him for a very, very long time through no fault of his own.
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It's a problem in the US, too. Essentially every engineer who's been around more than a couple of years has killed someone, usually a car stalled on the tracks.

It's almost never their fault, and they still feel like crap. Counseling is rampant, apparently, because of it.
 
A documentary from 2005 IIRC, recently repeated on BBC chronicled the Mumbai railway system over a typical day. Accidental railway deaths are a very common occurrence, perhaps partly to the sheer numbers involved.
A quick search for stats found this page with info on 2006; it appears that line crossings account for several hundred deaths.

One would think an easy way to avoid such occurrences would be to erect a fence between lines at the point where they pass through stations.
 
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I wonder if any of the parents are going to sue the Railroad.
If I were a judge I would say, "I am sorry for your loss, but in any argument between a train and an object on the tracks, the trains wins".
 
Three commisions, three, are going to investigate this (ah, Spain...). Everything points at reckless behaviour by the party-goers. It seems the train was going slower than the speed-limit, there was a crowded but practicable underpass, and a bunch of people just decided to jump the tracks to cross over and tragedy happened.

There are some small voices saying things like "But I didn't see any signs pointing to where the underpass was" and "It was dark". They're probably normal so soon after the accident. We'll see how this develops. Now comes the grieving and a *lot* of stupid articles on trains.

Today I'm a bit down from unrelated things from work and the perennial lack of critical skills in my country (we're making a map of woo pharmacies, and look). This has made it much worse, and I have a test tomorrow. Yeah, I'm whining.
 
I also feel for the driver more than anyone else. He's going to have to live with the guilt of other peoples' actions.

I was on a train once in Boston that a guy threw himself in front of and killed himself. The next day there was an article about it in the Boston Globe, and they said that a Boston train conductor is involved in 7 suicides on average over the course of their career.
 
Some years ago, I did a video about GO Transit here in Toronto, riding the trains (including in the cab) over the course of the summer. Once while riding the cab of the locomotive on the Stoufville train, we surprised a couple of dogs sitting in the middle of the tracks just out of the Scarborough station. This wasn't high speed territory by any stretch (30mph/50kph tops). Yet instinct forced both dogs to run up the tracks away from the train. Neither one made more than a slight thud when we ran them over.
 
Morwen said:
Three commisions, three, are going to investigate this (ah, Spain...). Everything points at reckless behaviour by the party-goers. It seems the train was going slower than the speed-limit, there was a crowded but practicable underpass, and a bunch of people just decided to jump the tracks to cross over and tragedy happened.

There are some small voices saying things like "But I didn't see any signs pointing to where the underpass was" and "It was dark". They're probably normal so soon after the accident. We'll see how this develops. Now comes the grieving and a *lot* of stupid articles on trains.

Today I'm a bit down from unrelated things from work and the perennial lack of critical skills in my country (we're making a map of woo pharmacies, and look). This has made it much worse, and I have a test tomorrow. Yeah, I'm whining.
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Sadly, in any case like this there is a real desire to find somebody or something to blame other then the victims. No one wants to admit in public that the stupidity of the kids was the cause of their demise. I am really afraid some innocent scapegoat will be found.
 
Soapy Sam said:
No mention in the report of alcohol- but a group of young people headed for a beach party at night?
It's a sad and wholly avoidable accident. I feel for the driver more than anyone. What the hell does he feel like today?
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I saw a show on TV that dealt with train accidents and the effect they have on the engineers. They interviewed one guy who was given several months leave after a fatal accident to recover from the trauma. On his FIRST DAY back on the job, a woman pushing a baby in a stroller tried to beat his train across the tracks, and as he bore down on her, one of the stroller's wheels got stuck. She managed to get it free in time, but...sheesh! What are people thinking?

Must be a lack of appreciation for basic physics.
 
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Cainkane1 said:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37887352/ns/world_news-europe

Twelve young people were run over by a train at a Barcelona train station.
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CASTELLDEFELS, Spain - The last thing they heard was the piercing whistle of an oncoming train.

Moments later, dozens of mostly Latin American immigrants who crossed the tracks instead of using an underground passageway to reach a beach party in this seaside resort were dead or injured, their body parts strewn among the rails.
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Maybe the whistle wasn't in Spanish.
 
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