Spain train driver held 'for reckless manslaughter'

[dipsydoodle]

Source: BBC News

The driver of a train that derailed in Spain killing 78 people has been accused of "reckless manslaughter", the interior minister has said.

Jorge Fernandez Diaz said Francisco Jose Garzon Amo, who was slightly hurt in Wednesday's accident, had been taken to a police station.

Mr Garzon is suspected of driving too fast on a bend. Reports say the train was travelling at more than double the speed limit at the time of the crash.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23477316

[Lasher]

1. Wonder if he was impaired by alcohol or drugs.

Or texting. More than double the speed limit seems pretty incredible.

[DWinNJ]

2. There could have been other problems

I am not an expert and am only going by what I see on YouTube, but it looks like there was something wrong even before the train went into the curve. The car just behind the engine doesn’t look right.

[dipsydoodle]

3. He might have hit the brakes at the bend

aside from which there should apparently have been some of computerised system in place to act as warning against high speed in that section of track.

I noticed what you mention about the first carriage too.

[Beacool]

4. He was speeding.

He took that curve at double the posted speed. I heard experts say that he needed to have reduced his speed a couple of miles before he got to that curve. I guess that we'll find out soon enough why he did it.

[Lenomsky]

5. You'd think ..

the train computer would alert the driver or slow the train!

I just don't get how these trains wouldn't have safeguards similar to airplanes and not have the route etc in memory like a GPS map. That's a lot of lost lives RIP

[TheMadMonk]

6. Railways are notoriously conservative.You might be surprised...

...by just how little automation there is along most sections of track. Just the same signage as has been there for decades and drivers expected to know every last inch of track.

I don't know what the situation in that part of Europe is, but here in Australia it can take up to 2 years to train a driver. Not because it's an inherently difficult task, but because it takes that long to memorise all the special case foibles of an entire commuter network.

Sydney's was i believe the worst, before they broke the network up into a number of separate inter-connecting circuits where individual trains (and hence their drivers) ran on closed loops, rather than the old routing method which tended to thread a single train along a significant portion of the entire network over the course of a single shift.

FFS, there are still whole chunks of whole networks here in Australia which lack the simplest of safety measures, an arm which can be raised to trip the brakes of any train passing into an interdicted section of track.

BTW, the routing aide memoire is a sheet of paper with the list of stations at which to stop to pick up and set down passengers.

The siphoning of wallets side of things, THAT they have fully computerised. The operations side of things in too many places, still relies far too much on far to many decidedly 19th Century ways of doing things.