Apparently the crashing driver blindly followed the order of retaking full speed with no regards to a red light that should have been denoting an occupied track, so either two humans failed in a row or the protocols are severly flawed. Investigations must clarify this.
Somebody elsewhere in Internet had a theory that the driver might have accelerated after seeing a green pre-signal. The Iryo had stopped right in front of the signal, so the next block was free of trains and its signal would therefore show green. And that means, so does the pre-signal on the previous block.
There is nothing super spectacular against passing a red signal with oral instructions from the dispatcher. The instruction typically has to include the identifying number of that specific signal, so you need a separate instruction for each red signal that you pass. This also includes a reduced speed limit, typically around 40 km/h. But, in some places in Spain, it might be as high as 100 km/h. If that was the case here (there’s no proof it was!), then the driver has had some maybe two kilometres of time to accelerate from 100 km/h until the crash site. That translates to maybe one minute of full-power acceleration from 100 km/h. If the assumption of 100 km/h limit when passing red lights with oral instructions is correct, then the train driver may have followed the procedure completely correctly. Of course, since the first wagon of that train has pretty much disappeared, you cannot ask the driver many questions. You can see 7 wagons of the 8-wagon-long train in the El Pais photos but the 8th wagon is nowhere to be seen. Except that in the last wagon of the Iryo train, you can see a little bit of the letter V from the AVE logo on the AVE train, so apparently the AVE train’s first wagon has penetrated the full length of the Iryo train’s last wagon and is simply hiding inside the red walls of the Iryo train.
The crash took place after a curve to the right. In a video made from a train’s driver cabin some years ago, it took 7 seconds from the spot where the accident site becomes visible to the train passing that site. A train doesn’t slow down very much in 7 seconds.
Apparently the crashing driver blindly followed the order of retaking full speed with no regards to a red light that should have been denoting an occupied track, so either two humans failed in a row or the protocols are severly flawed. Investigations must clarify this.
Somebody elsewhere in Internet had a theory that the driver might have accelerated after seeing a green pre-signal. The Iryo had stopped right in front of the signal, so the next block was free of trains and its signal would therefore show green. And that means, so does the pre-signal on the previous block.
There is nothing super spectacular against passing a red signal with oral instructions from the dispatcher. The instruction typically has to include the identifying number of that specific signal, so you need a separate instruction for each red signal that you pass. This also includes a reduced speed limit, typically around 40 km/h. But, in some places in Spain, it might be as high as 100 km/h. If that was the case here (there’s no proof it was!), then the driver has had some maybe two kilometres of time to accelerate from 100 km/h until the crash site. That translates to maybe one minute of full-power acceleration from 100 km/h. If the assumption of 100 km/h limit when passing red lights with oral instructions is correct, then the train driver may have followed the procedure completely correctly. Of course, since the first wagon of that train has pretty much disappeared, you cannot ask the driver many questions. You can see 7 wagons of the 8-wagon-long train in the El Pais photos but the 8th wagon is nowhere to be seen. Except that in the last wagon of the Iryo train, you can see a little bit of the letter V from the AVE logo on the AVE train, so apparently the AVE train’s first wagon has penetrated the full length of the Iryo train’s last wagon and is simply hiding inside the red walls of the Iryo train.
The crash took place after a curve to the right. In a video made from a train’s driver cabin some years ago, it took 7 seconds from the spot where the accident site becomes visible to the train passing that site. A train doesn’t slow down very much in 7 seconds.