Regarding the second point, 2013 accident was caused by higher than allowed speed and drivers had been complaining about the line not having the security system that automatically enforces speed limits. In this year's accident, the line has a much stricter securty system.
The main issue with spanish rails, high speed and specially traditional rail is the lack of maintenance.
For example, people typically pay for house/apartment insurance. But insurance companies never send a person to check for things like leaking pipes or whatever. Rather they simply wait until an accident happens and dispatch an emergency crew and cover a lot of damage that could be easily prevented. Then people tolerate non-trivial damage to homes/apartments like leaky roof not reporting it to insurance companies for weeks.
Then with cars people often do not follow the maintenance schedule and insurance companies do not ask for that. Typically people drive until damage happens due to a minor accident or maintenance are forced by state required technical inspection once in few years. The car companies even offer free maintenance checks as a part of guarantee but people skip even that.
Yet when someone spends efforts to complain, thinks do gets done. For example there a city service to remove graffiti on public areas. If one files a complain, they react and remove the graffiti. However sometimes one needs to send a complain twice.
Never I had the pipes in my home inspected, even now that I live in areas where it freezes regularly.
Never has anyone (not even my insurance) forced me to follow any particular maintenance schedule (albeit I'm quite sure somewhere in the fine print it will read that if the accident is because of poor maintenance they'll just ignore the claim).
Here the city service to remove Graffiti is almost overnight, and works better than many other public services...
Does the system automatically slow down the train, or does it notify the engineer? I would imagine that there are some scenarios where going over the speed limit is the correct choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bullet_Train
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Train_Explosion
In the movies terrorists place a bomb on board and the train crew has to maintain a minimum speed or the bomb explodes (this is where that american movie with a bus got the idea). And they have to manipulate the ATC or else it will stop the train when they enter sections of the track with lower minimum speed, or else ATC stops the train and the bomb explodes.
That might be because Japan did have a huge railway accident in 2005 due to excessive speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
> Of the roughly 700 passengers, 106 passengers and the driver were killed, and 562 others were injured
The Santiago de Compostela derailment (first link on the parent comment) happened in 2013 for the same reason.
All that said, I would not be surprised if the culprit for this particular case is lack of maintenance. However I would wait until the official investigation is over before drawing conclusions.
I’m not sure these are comparable, high-speed rail needs much tighter tolerances as the risk is orders of magnitude higher. As the parent comment stated there have been zero major crashes on the japanese shinkansen lines.
There is also no reason to treat speed limits on high speed and normal trains differently. There are plenty of speed related crashes on low speed lines. If anything the stakes are even higher on commuter trains because they tend to carry more people, many of which will be standing, and are more likely to crash into another structure as was the case in the Japanese incident mentioned.
No, Japan more or less invented ATC in the 1960s for the purpose of running the Shinkansen safely.
> Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services.
Not true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYol11bVoNw
https://ameblo.jp/nakamurapon943056/entry-12488005292.html
> but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Spanish high speed trains mostly run on their own tracks because of gauge differences. France and Germany are the ones who actually runs high speed trains on old tracks, a lot.
It is surprising how many upvotes you can get on the internet just by glazing the Japanese.
This is called Mini-Shinkansen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Shinkansen
This comes with limitations, as the maximum track speed on these converted lines is apparently around 130 km/h.
None of the actual Shinkansen stadard lines have level crossings.
But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?
A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.
A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!
At least in France, high speed trains on older tracks won't go as fast as on the dedicated high speed tracks
Is exactly what a text bot would say. Eloquent, but when you think about it, is just nonsense. Which operator treats HSR as "fast trains on tracks" and which does not treat it is a "tightly controlled system"?
That's why something like a fractured high speed rail track would never go undetected in Japan.
https://www.plassertheurer.com/en/today/stories/japanese-pre...
https://global.jr-central.co.jp/en/company/data-book/_pdf/20...
https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr61/16_21.html
https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.
I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.
We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.
One major difference is infrastructure. Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services. There are no cars, pedestrians, or animals anywhere near the line. In much of Europe, including Spain, high-speed lines are very good, but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.
Another key factor is how strictly operations are controlled. Speed limits are enforced automatically rather than relying on driver compliance alone. If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately. The design assumption is that human error will happen, so the system is built to prevent a mistake from turning into an accident.
Maintenance is also handled with extreme conservatism. Track geometry, overhead lines, and rolling stock are continuously monitored, with very tight tolerances. Components are replaced earlier than strictly necessary because preventing failures is considered far cheaper than dealing with the consequences of one.
Japan has also invested heavily in detecting external hazards. Earthquake early-warning systems automatically cut power and apply brakes before shaking reaches the tracks, and the same mindset applies to weather, landslides, and other environmental risks.
Finally, there’s a strong institutional safety culture behind all of this. Procedures, training, and reporting of near-misses are taken very seriously, and lessons are applied incrementally over decades. The objective isn’t just to meet safety standards but to systematically remove edge cases.
It’s not a single piece of technology that explains the record. It’s the combination of dedicated infrastructure, automation, conservative engineering, obsessive maintenance, and a culture with very little tolerance for shortcuts.