There was the same discussion a few days ago on another post. It's not a fair comparison. You can hardly hijack a train. Even if you manage to get control of the train, you cannot land it in a tower full of people. The worst you can do is make it de-rail which, while it will probably kill a lot of people, is unlikely to kill all of its passenger. And if you carry a bomb you will blow at most one compartment. Also, with train, even if someone manage to get to the driver compartment, you can still control a lot of the train from the outside. You can change its direction at exchange point, you can cut its supply in electricity (if it is an electric train) therefore stopping it (although in quite a dangerous way...). And you are still on the ground were it is very easy for police / military to catch up and intervene. You can't do that with a plane several kilometers high in the sky.

Planes are much more sensible to all of those potential threat. That is why we ended up with such drastic security. Although I have to say, in a lot of places, security is way more relaxed. If you travel from the E.U to the E.U you have way less check and queue time.

The thing is that if someone wants to use a bomb to derail a train it may be easier to place the bomb on or near the tracks, which obviously bypasses any security onboard.

This was attempted on the TGV during the terrorist wave of the mid-90s in France but, fortunately, it did not detonate.

That being said, I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.

I'm so glad that terrorists are largely unimaginative and/or incompetent. There are so many targets, including trains, that they're ignoring that would be so much easier to hit.

I think what many people seem to be missing is that you don't need to kill 3000 people. If you kill 1000, spread out across 10 cities, you're going to cause a lot of fear and chaos.

> I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.

Nope.

Spain has security checks at their major stations for high speed trains including to go to France, but France does not

There are so many widely open train stations in France that securing only some of them would be a huge waste of time and energy while securing them all would be nearly impossible.

And I really don’t want to live in a country where boarding a train is as painful as boarding a plane. Millions of people are using train to commute, adding security checks would totally kill the train.

For what’s it’s worth it’s more of a bag scan rather than a full security check like at the airport. Certainly the full security check is not something I want to deal with but it wasn’t too bad. They only do it at the main stations in Spain and only if you’re riding the high speed trains, so I imagine if France did it then it would only be at TGV stops which are not so numerous

The point of terrorism isn't especially to kill "a lot of people" (although that helps, obviously); it is to terrify. Many recent terrorist attacks killed relatively few people, yet were extremely effective in terrorizing.

Should the first car of a TGV explode at 350+ km/h I think it would work as a terror attack.

Yet, although train security is nil, it never happens [0]. I'm not sure why. My first guess is there are not that many terrorists. We probably could ease the security on planes with few ill effects.

[0] There has been train attacks or hijacks but no bombs AFAIK.

It's not nil. I had to get my luggage x-rayed when I went from Barcelona to Madrid, a national trip.

I didn't get checked for metal objects etc, but there is no point. You can't get to the cab from the train anyway. And the impact of knifings/shootings is the same as in a busy shopping centre. We don't do metal detections there on every visitor.

So the main terrorism risk really relevant to it being a mode of transport rather than any other crowded place, is bombing and thus derailment of the entire train. And that is something that is checked for, at least here in Spain.

It is not checked in France, ever, at all, and TFA is about French TGV.

It is true that it is "checked" in Spain; I experienced it this summer while going from Sevilla to Cordoba. However the check is (in my experience) quite superficial; also, as it creates long lines of people that get upset that they may miss their train, it is expedited and many things do not in fact pass through the X-ray machine. And finally, it is not checked on all trains; we were checked from Sevilla to Cordoba (the train was going all the way up to Barcelona) but there were no checks on the return leg.

So, while it would be trivial to bring bad things aboard a train in France, it seems that it wouldn't be difficult in Spain either.

We had two hi-jacking of a train in NL a long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Dutch_train_hijacking

France in 2015:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Thalys_train_attack

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_15:17_to_Paris

Spain in 2004:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

Ofc these things happen, but compare that to the number of hijacked aircraft : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking

Pre 2001, there was more than 10 hijack almost every year.

You don't get it.

Trains are left to themselves, there is no surveillance.

Ill intentioned people can change dynamic of the attack, instead of needing 2 planes and use them as kinetic projectiles against buildings, they'd need an armed guy on 10 trains

The end result in terms of human losses is the same because a guy with a gun can go through each and every compartment and off everybody before the police would even know what's going on.

Multiply that scenario by 10 or 20 or 30 and you have the worst national tragedy in the history of the nation.

I am thankful because if people on HN can't conceptualize that, then the odds of some goatfuc*er in the mountains of Afghanistan doing it are even lower....but still people thought they could not conceptualize the attacks happened in the 2000s. Everybody remembers the first, but there were also London and Madrid.

Or the terrorists could just go shoot up a packed nightclub, which is exactly what they did in the Bataclan attack in Paris. There isn't really anything particularly attractive about trains as a target compared to any other crowded place.

Also, your hypothesis is that a single person could kill everybody on a train, but in reality they'd get assaulted with suitcases, the doors between carriages would be barricaded, somebody would pull the emergency brake and people would flee, etc. This was actually tried once in France, and the attacker managed to kill zero (0) people before they were overpowered.

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20201217-thalys-train-gun...

It would be extremely easy to go onto a TGV (with a ticket), put a suitcase in the luggage compartment with a bomb in it, and not board the train.

There would be zero risk for the terrorist. There are no baggage check, and no one makes sure the owners of each luggage are on board. In theory each suitcase should have a label with the owner's name and address, but that too is not checked (and even if it was it would be the easiest thing to fake).

I just don't understand why it doesn't happen. I think the main reason is because there are very few actual terrorists, contrary to what everyone wants us to believe.

It's actually easier to just mine the tracks and be gone long before the train comes and derails.

> There isn't really anything particularly attractive about trains as a target compared to any other crowded place.

The amount of people per square foot surface, the fact that there is no way out and the fact that police cannot rush to the scene

We need to get rid of those through-highrise rails!

You don't need an armed guy on 10 trains. Just plant bombs on the rails and blow them up.

> Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing

This is a really strange take - security on airplanes was introduced due to hijackings, in which case the airplane can be used as a very lethal weapon to attack most anything, really. You are much more limited in what damage you can cause by hijacking a train, since trains are limited by where the tracks go. Worst you can do is probably derail the train by going to fast in a curve and potentially hurt people living near the curve, or worse, slam into a station and cause damage in and around it. Still, a fraction of what a hijacked airplane can do in terms of damage.

This cognitive dissonance is everywhere. Apparently even on HN.

There are 100-200 people on a train, some have 300.

No security at all. You only need an ill intentioned guy with a gun and it's over for all those on board. They'd move across compartments and off everybody.

Multiply that by the amount of trains which travel everyday and you'd get a pretty chilling scenario.

> it's over for all those on board

Is it, though? There are a lot of trains where you can't even get to the locomotive while the train is moving, and I couldn't find any train accident in modern history[1] where all passengers died.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...

You can't escape from an attacker on a moving train.

You can eve pull the emergency brake and smash the emergency windows. You can't get out of a plane while in flight and it is also hard when it's on the ground.

Ill intentioned people would move across compartments and off everybody with a firearm.

People have tried these kind of things, but there truly are better targets than trains. Even a bomb will accomplish relatively little, the station being a better target.

You can crash a whole plane by poking a small hole with a tiny bomb.

Put a bomb in a TGV, and you'll kill people nearby, but not in the other wagons. So it's not a particularly attractive target compared to say, a shopping mall.

Terrorists planned to derail one in the 1990s by destroying rails, they were thwarted beforehand. But even if they succeeded, TGV is designed specifically to resist derailment and not fold on itself like a regular train, so it's unlikely most passengers would have been killed.

> TGV is designed specifically to resist derailment

Not sure about that. In 2015 they did a demo of a new TGV line and the train derailed just by going a little too fast in a curve [0]. It killed eleven people on board and injured 42 others.

The number of dead and injured is so low because there were very few people on board. If a bomb exploded on the first car of a TGV the number of casualties would be high.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckwersheim_derailment

65 % above the design speed of the curve isn't quite just "a little too fast".

Yet it did not fold, just as parent said.

Your best option is likely controlled demolition of a bridge. And that needs decent number of explosive and knowledge. Plus timing. Ofc, the financial damage is quite substantial, but loss of life is in the few hundred range.

So it's not specific to TGV, if you can destroy such a bridge you could destroy any number of similar works, or even whole buildings. Busy commuter trains typically have more passengers.

I don't know about the TGV and other high speed trains, but in normal trains you can move from one compartment to the other.

So I stand by what I said and I claim once again that you only need one ill intentioned person with a firearm and everybody on board is basically done, they'd move across compartments and off everybody.

There are thousands of trains which all have that same vulnerability, so a coordinated attack would have a toll much higher than everything seen before.

People have a blindspot, they'd claim that such attack would never take place because the "production value" is not the same as explosive attacks.

I don't think hoping that ill intentioned people hold "production value" as rigorous parameter when planning an attack is a valuable strategy

Such a person with a firearm would do the same damage in a mall than in the TGV. There is no multiplier effect, unlike in a plane.

The amount of people per square foot surface, the fact that there is no way out and the fact that police cannot rush to the scene.

It's not like a mall

> There is no multiplier effect

Your multiplier effect is the initial factor advantage of how easy it is to pack a firearm on a train.

A depressed kid could do it, easy target to recruit online, and doesn't even need firearm training considering that it would be as easy as shooting sardines in a barrel given the physical space in a train.

So basically an ill intentioned group would need to recruit 20 depressed kids , put them on 20 different trains departing at approximately the same time and they'd cause a toll in excess of everything seen before

Again, it's just as easy to pack a firearm in a mall. That's why the security is the same as in a mall.

The amount of people per square foot surface, the fact that there is no way out and the fact that police cannot rush to the scene

A train is not a mall.

True, there are more people in a mall, and you don’t need a long time to move through piece by piece…. as you need for the train.

What if the train stops? This can be done by any personell quickly. Doors and windows of trains can be opened everywhere, they are designed that way. Stop the train, intercom and tell people to leave the train and the situation is over.

Chances are this will turn out differently than you assume

In the US, it takes 1.5 days for a 9/11s worth of people to die from covid.

The TSA does not seem very effective [1], and terrorism via plane hasn't killed very many people since 9/11. Cockpits are re-inforced, passengers will fight back. It's hard to highjack a plane.

Abolishing the TSA in airports and slightly increasing vaccination requirements would be a net win/win for life and liberty.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...