I worked in rail for a bit, and almost got hit once. Saw many many near misses. People think “how could you not notice a train roaring towards you?!”. But these things can happen with alarming ease.
I used to be a blue collar worker that now works in the office. This is the same as the other unrealistic solutions I put up with regularly.
So now we are going to add another device, which adds another point of failure, that needs to be maintained and monitored constantly.
What happens if that device fails? Who is paying for the expense of this upgrade and the training for the conductor and ground workers to operate and monitor this? What happens if they are distracted while troubleshooting the device and the train approaches them anyways? What happens when the blue collar worker doesn’t give a fuck about safety and turns it off because it’s annoying? This is not a simple fix and rather it adds layers of complications to the entire process.
Especially when it would just be easier to I don’t know, maybe not run so many trains back to back all the time and ensure that the track is closed off? The real issue here is that the company does not want to lose profit, so they are willing to skirt safety concerns by continuing to operate trains while they are being maintained. However every time I make an argument like this it gets shut down and some new idiot tries to recommend more technology to solve something as simple as “turn it off”.
Thank you kindly. I’m actually a huge tech nerd at heart, so it kind of pains me to kill off something cool like that but when it comes to safety I don’t mess around. Simple and straightforward are usually the safest options.
If I sent my boys out to do something, I want them back home to their families later that night in the same condition I sent them there in.
When workers need to access a portion of railtrack (a block), they need to request a possession and isolation from the command center of the line. A possession means no train can approach less than two blocks from the block they will work on, and an isolation means the power is cut (most lines in Europe are electrified).
The procedure to perform this has been specifically designed to avoid miscommunications, with multiple back and forth between the operators on the ground and the command center to ensure one doesn't mindlessly make a mistake. Usually it's done by phone but I believe some lines now have apps for it.
This accident should not have happened. If the possession had been granted then at the very least the signaling system would have warned the train driver to stop several kilometers before he reached them. On modern lines the train would have stopped automatically, without human intervention. And signaling systems are extremely robust, they don't "bug" in a way that makes this possible.
To me this must be a human error. Either the workers worked without a possession (because they though it would be ok, the line was not operating at that time, it was a short operation, yadda yadda. The exact reason why possession requests are mandatory...) or it was an old line and the train driver was not paying attention to the point of ignoring several, big reg lights telling him to stop.
Either way, no GPS location sharing would have helped if someone disregarded safety instructions. :/
Source : I'm not an expert but I did an internship in a company who designs signaling systems in Europe and my project was specifically on the subject of replacing phone calls for possession and isolation with an app on a PDA.
Ferrovie dell stato has stated today towards RAI that the works should not have started until this train had passed. It looks very much like the workers did not have possession of the tracks. Some sourced claim that the manager had not received permission and was possibly not even on site.
Interesting is the fact that the train is in relatively pristine condition if you look at RAIs videos - they definitely didn’t already have heavy machinery in place or they did put it on another track (which is unlikely as the according to the Ferrovie statement the accident happened on the track they were supposed to work on). Another interesting fact is the speed of the train - which had two conductors onboard,btw: The train was doing 160km/h - this is not a speed you use in a segment that you expect works on another track to be done.
Personally if I had to bet money on one theory I would guess the manager (who was the one certified to work with Ferrovie) was not on site/not concentrated, the workers were told when the last train goes through/there was some miscommunication with the guys on scene and they either mistook another train as the “last” train or the “last” one was late/not in their schedule and they started simply by the clock.
Or someone in the control center fucked up beyond believe and that is much more unlikely tbh.
Anyway, those poor bastards, poor families and friends and even poor villages. They basically are all locals.
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn’t there the moment before. I looked down: “Rail? WTF?” and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife’s pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC’s pulling, and 2 Dash-9’s pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
One member of the group, who calls himself Crush, told the BBC that Tuesday’s attack flooded X’s servers with huge amounts of traffic to take it offline - the same blunt and relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques for which the gang is known.
Another hacking group member - Hofa - said the so-called DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was aimed at raising awareness about the civil war in Sudan which is “making the internet very bad and it goes down quite often for us”.
The gang has been accused by many in the cyber-security world of being a Russian cyber-military unit in disguise and causing cyber-chaos for the Kremlin under the cover of a foreign hacktivist outfit.
However, Crush explained that “a similar thing happened to our country and Russians stood with us so we wanted to pay them back”, referring to Russia’s support for the Sudanese government as it fights the ongoing civil war.
When challenged about the impacts on citizens, Crush defended the actions and said: “The reason we hit infrastructure is to teach the country and its rulers a lesson, and yes we have red lines, that is if our attacks harm a lot of innocents.”
Its most high-profile attack in June disrupted Microsoft services including Outlook and OneDrive, forcing the tech giant to issue a report with advice to customers on how to prevent being affected by the group.
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A former Conservative MP has asked to be removed from an award-winning academic’s research presented in a TEDx Talk that connects her to a slave-owning ancestor, the BBC can reveal.
In 2021, Mr Al Nasir presented a TEDx Talk in which he explained how he discovered his family tree, which can be traced back to the sugar plantations in Demerara, in what was then British Guiana and is now Guyana.
In emails to the University of Cambridge earlier this year, the former Conservative MP for Eddisbury in Cheshire makes clear she is not sympathetic to her ancestor, and describes slavery as appalling.
Mr Al Nasir’s research reveals the scale of the business empire which incorporated shipping, banking, insurance, railways, distilleries, and plantation slavery.
Asked by the BBC if any of this information was incorrect, Ms Sandbach said over half the estate was sold in the 30s and also pointed out that land owned by the family today had been added to and developed since the 1960s.
In one email, Ms Sandbach appears to threaten legal action, accusing the university of failing to protect her right to privacy.
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I feel like that’s fair. I’m certain I have ancestors who did things I would not be proud of if I knew, and I wouldn’t want people making the connection that I must somehow be also held responsible or that I condone their actions in any way. Unfortunately, we can see the Streisand effect in action here.
I think that it is fair to name her because it is a very good example of how people that committed what we would now think of as crimes have passed that systemic advantage on to all of their descendants. The descendants may feel blameless themselves but I feel like confronting that in some way is a small price to pay for their privileged position.
There was a study done about a decade ago now that showed that all of the descendants of large landowners in the Domesday Book were still continuing to live very comfortably, thank you.
Even, to push the point further, as a recipient of various social welfare benefits at various points in my life I have to acknowledge that the ability to form the welfare state was due to the systemic advantage of the UK as a whole that was built up during the days of empire and colonialism.
It’s not about individual responsibility, it is about the structural inequities that persist. No one is suggesting that living descendants are personally responsible. It is perfectly reasonable to point out that they are personally profiting.
I’d love to see that email where she tries to draw comparisons with the treatment of Victorian housewives. There is a lot to say about that but hard to know where to start without knowing exactly what she said. But if, for example, she thinks it is a good thing that women can now inherit property, she needs to think about how redressing that sort of imbalance is possible when the structural inequity is between and not within families. Taking the (imagined) point to its logical conclusion, her wealth belongs to the descendants of the enslaved people who created it but were prevented from owning it.
I think there is a way of providing these information as neutral, just as information. There is a way of talking about people that just describes what is happening without judging ob the information. Besides, this is a compelling example of structural advantages/ disadvantages. The former slaves family would be unlikely to make it to an MP position. That’s nothing personal about the PM, but how can you illustrate systemic issues like that without using specific examples. Now the question is, what does the MP make of that legacy? Trying to squash it, that’s not a good way of dealing with her family’s legacy. If it’s factually correct, the stronger approach would be to let us her from her about it.
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