I heard of a similar situation, there are times when trains almost drive themselves so the engineers don't need to pay much attention. The problem is when things go wrong and they need to act. Sometimes the engineers are so involved in other things that they fail to act.

That's one of the theories given for the cause of the 2008 Chatsworth train crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chatsworth_train_collisio...