From the linked article:

> [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected on January 7.

The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?

The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless without context.

> [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy,

They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.

Yep, plus their network is pretty new anyways. Which generally needs less maintenance than older infrastructure.

Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's full of faults.

> The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?

Spanish officials are very good at deflecting blame and playing politics. Nobody wants to be held accountable for a catastrophe. Also see the 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging, but zero accountability.

So while inspection standards might be inadequate, I would take anything a senior official says with a pound of salt.

But he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny. The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age of track, not percentages of the total budget.

> 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging

sigh

Of course you're right

Specifically the fractured track was a soldered joint that joined a track from 1989 with a new one from a few weeks ago.

Soldered eh? No wonder then that it broke.

English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.

Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.

English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients).

Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.

Schweissen und löten. Has nothing to do with Switzerland (Schweiz) ;)

Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it written. German is a language that I will happily use but don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably need exponential notation to represent the number of errors.

As a matter of fact schweissen is only correct spelling in Switzerland.

In Germany it would be schweißen.

As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)

Heh, that would be a funny misunderstanding to have as well as the opposite, when you get back something soldered when you expected it to be welded.

Czech uses "Pájení" (derived from "joining") vs "Svařování" (derived from "boiling".

So, also different with different etymology in a language from a different group (although these things were probably influenced by German)

Yeah - the Czech wording is quite clever:

* the first one makes it clear a something (a different material) is used to join things together

* the second one implies you melt/boil the things to join them together

This was a track laid a few weeks ago? I think that's the problem.

> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data.

Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful. How much money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...