Spanish Train Derails - More Than 70 Dead

30,000+ people will die in traffic accidents this year in the US alone....Drive safe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year

Did you have any (logical/sane/rational) reason to post this completely unrelated, off topic reply?

I think SolarEagle's comment is well related to the tragedy being discussed. There is no need to shelter the derailment tragedy, it is not trivialized by mentioning a far more widespread transportation problem here in the US.

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Our sympathies go out to the families of the more than 70 people who died aboard the derailed Spanish train. This accident is half a world away for most of us. While this doesn't lessen the tragedy, it would still be a better use of time to work on fixing the problems that face us locally and immediately, first.

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My sympathies also go out to the families of the more than 80 people who died in auto accidents in the US today. I appreciate Solar Eagle for reminding me of a problem upon which I can have a far greater influence.

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I don't think that relates to this subject at all. 70 over many years doesn't equate to 80 every day. Spain Train Crash Kills 80 in Worst Accident in 40 Years

Sad none the less.

Where is 'over many years' coming from?

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About 80 people died in the train accident in Spain that day. About 80 people died in auto accidents in the US that same day (or on any arbitrary day in recent history).

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The deaths are tragic. I don't thing the families of the dead would be meaningfully more or or less aggrieved based on whether the cause was a train accident or an auto accident.

Interesting to know if there's any truth in the rumours that it went into an 80 km/hr restricted bend at over 190 km/hr (and if so, how?).

...and if so, then what might be done to prevent recurrence.

Sadly, there are some places on the world's railways where tragedy seems to be able to strike more than once and lessons from accidents are not turned into more solid preventative measures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_accidents_at_Morpeth

The difference in approach between road incidents and those involving other modes of transport is striking. Road incidents, although more frequent and having a numbers-of-deaths-per-year basis, are simply less newsworthy for reasons that are not clear. In the UK, around 1900 deaths per annum is a figure to be anticipated and while any number larger than zero is too high, there does seem to be an inevitability and acceptance to it that is missing in modes of transport involving buying a travel ticket; purchase of the ticket seems to have an unwritten expectation of arriving at the destination on time and without injury whereas the expectation is seemingly absent during purchase of road fuel. The difference is a couple of orders of magnitude and an object of great curiosity.

The latest news items, two days after the incident, are highlighting excessive speed as being the most prominent factor and yet to the credit of Engineers there are many things that can be, and are, installed to prevent such things.

The investigation continues to attract interest across the globe.

Of course road deaths are regrettable, but I'm not sure they can be fairly compared with things like rail and air, as road vehicles interact much more closely with people in the normal environment. I remember reading some years that inland transport deaths per mile travelled have been fairly constant for hundreds of years (I don't say it's true, but it sounds reasonable). In earlier times people were killed by being kicked by horses, or drowned in canals, etc. About 30 years ago there were about 5000 road deaths per year in the UK, so we appear to be doing OK, yet regulations keep getting stricter and penalties for infringements higher (not to mention the fuss about speed over the last 20-odd years)

Also when drink is involved we are told it is "a drink-driving accident", but in the other cases nobody ever mentions that everybody was sober, although only about 10% of road accidents involve drink. Logically, we should bre getting sober drivers off the road!

Since all these high speed trains have data recording equipment just like commercial airplanes, I find it hard to believe that it was just an a**hole who decided to take the curve with more than double the rated speed. Am I alone on this one too? On the released video, I see that The FIRST passenger car after the (heavier) engine is the one that derails and triggers the disaster. And since I (arbitarily) exclude the case that the train was accelerating at the time, it should be decelerating, so the first passenger wagon looks it was "squeezed" onto the front car by the inertia of following cars and that was that caused its derailement. I have no doubt that on these high tek trains, the braking effect is distributed on every individual car according to its weight loading, so something like that should not happen. No? Anyway my sympathies also to the victims and their families. S.M.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23486086