Accidents on the railroad do not occur as often as on asphalt roads. Trains move each in its own way. Mechanisms for managing rolling stock on the railroad are constantly being improved. Systems designed to prevent train wrecks usually have several degrees of protection. After all, railway passenger transport is different in that in the event of an accident a large number of people are immediately threatened.
In order for an accident to occur, as a rule, a coincidence of several factors independent of each other is required, as happened on July 24, 2013. A major railway accident in Spain on this day claimed the lives of 79 people.
Railways of Spain
Spain has a perfect and fairly extensive railway network, which evenly covers the entire area of the country, and also connects it with its closest neighbors on the continent. If private railway organizations are engaged in transportation at the local level, then inter-regional and international flights are operated by the state-owned company RENFE.
In Spain, as in Russia, the railway gauge differs from the European one (the distance between the rails is even wider than ours). But unlike the Russian Federation, in Spain there is a second, European railway network, parallel to the national one. This avoids the lengthy and costly operation of “transplanting” wagons to other platforms at border crossings. Moreover, the Spaniards went further - some carriers operate trains that have the technical ability to change their own gauge from native to European.
Timeline
The tragedy occurred on a high-speed railway less than five kilometers from Santiago de Compostela Station. A train crashed along the Madrid-Ferrol route. Alvia locomotive brand refers to models with high speed characteristics.
In the evening of July 24, it became known that eight wagons of this train went off the rails. Since the accident occurred at high speed, many people were injured or died as a result of the rollover of cars.
In addition, a major railway accident in Spain was preparing new challenges for its victims. In some of the overturned cars, a fire broke out. People stunned by the fall were blocked in burning cars. Vehicles, as a rule, have a sufficiently large combustible load. Fire spreads quickly, but the arrival of fire brigades and rescuers takes time. Experts say that most of the victims had no chance to survive.
This major railway accident in Spain caused the death of 79 people, about 150 received various injuries and injuries. The next day, a nationwide mourning was declared in the country.
What caused
The largest railway accident in Spain, of course, immediately became the subject of a thorough investigation. The train was run by an experienced driver named Francisco José Garzón Amo. On the site where the tragedy occurred, the railway tracks make a sharp turn. Because of this, in order to avoid excessive overloads from centrifugal forces, the speed on it is limited to 80 km / h. As the investigation showed, Francisco José did not slow down (the normal cruising speed of the train is about 200 km / h), as required by the timetable. Studies have shown that one hundred train at the time of departure of cars had a speed of 230 km / h.
However, the cause of the railway accident, as it turned out, lies also in the failure of automation. If it were in good order, the driver would first receive a signal about speeding, and then, if he did not take measures, the speed of the locomotive would be reduced by force.
Long before the tragedy
Unfortunately, this disaster was not the first accident on the railways of Spain. The presence of a large number of people in a confined space makes them easy victims of not only circumstances and unprofessional actions. So, in the capital of the country on March 11, 2004, in the morning when there were a lot of people in urban and suburban transport, three suicide bombers in electric trains activated hellish mechanisms. Spain did not count 192 citizens as a result of this terrorist attack, but more than two thousand were injured.