Uf… I just saw the news. Yesterday night, at 11:30PM CET or thereabouts, in the Spanish village of Castelldefels, south of Barcelona, 12 people were killed and 13 injured when they were ran over by an express train. Possibly several of the wounded will die in the coming days.
Yesterday night (the night from 23 to 24 June) was the big celebration of St. John; in many places in Spain there is a tradition of celebrating at midnight by lighting fires and holding big parties outdoors.
The accident happened when a commuter train from Barcelona stopped at Castelldefels station, which is right next to a beach where there a huge party was going. The train was full with people who intended to celebrate there. They left the train, and there were so many travellers that the underground passage under the tracks towards the exit of the station became full, with people going through very slowly.
This made many people decide to cross the tracks themselves, which is expressly forbidden. As they were crossing, the express train Alicante-Barcelona barrelled through the station (where it doesn’t stop) at its cruise speed of 150 kph (roughly 90 mph). The train ran over directly a big group of people. It will be very hard to identify the dead, because apparently very little was left of them to identify.
Although it is not mentioned in any of the news reports that I have read, it seems obvious to me that alcohol must have been involved – many people would have been “readying” themselves in anticipation of the big all-night celebration at the beach.
It also appears clear to me that people, in general, do not comprehend how hard it is for a train going at full speed to stop in the case of an emergency. Especially at night, when the driver will have much less time to react.
I really feel for the victims and their families although, at the same time, I can’t help being upset by the blatant disregard for safety measures that the passengers displayed on that occasion.
We were just talking about this during a break at work, with people trying to come up with ways to avoid something like this (I work at an engineering firm, “fixing things” and “accident prevention” are something we breathe). But the thing is, you can only protect people so much.
The access tunnels or bridges should definitely be better than they are; in most stations, they aren’t wheelchair accessible (which includes not being big-suitcase accessible, pram-accessible, etc.). But in a station like Castelldefels, where fast trains go through every few minutes, “keeping the doors of the commuter train closed until the fast train has gone by” is not workable; building a tunnel over the tracks or fencing them off would mean that trains (whose doors aren’t always the same length apart) would have to be parked much more exactly and would still not keep people from jumping to the tracks: if the fences had a door which closes automatically (like the ones in airport trams), people would just go to the end of the fence, and if they didn’t, they’d just jump.
It is really very difficult to stop people from doing stupid things, especially if the stupid thing is a shortcut or ‘easy way out’. There is a train station back where I used to live, that had express trains coming through, and was up against a highway on the non-station side. They put up fences, people cut them, or climbed over or under them to get from the platform to the highway without walking two blocks to the road crossing.
Then they built block walls. That worked for about a week. Soon, trash cans were overturned to climb up high enough to get over the wall.
Unfortunately, having seen the results of speeding train vs. human body first hand, I can. Granted, in the accident I was witness to there was only one person involved, but still… I can understand why they’d have trouble identifying everything at the scene.
I used to get the train into London and at a certain station (Didcot) where I had to change sometimes, express trains would come through around 70-80 mph. It always put the living shits up me, even when I knew they were coming, and braced myself, knowing I was in no danger. There’s so much momentum in those things.
I can’t imagine what it must be like even to have been witness, let alone victim.
My dad and grandpa both worked with trains all their lives. The first thing we learned was never, ever cross tracks not at a crossing. My grandpa was an engineer and hit someone once and was devastated by it. There was nothing he could have done but that is small consolation.
A possible contributing factor is that it’s hard to judge the approach speed and distance of a train. They are slightly unfamiliar objects, and their large size and the distance at which people can see them can make them seem to move more slowly than they are really traveling (similar to the effect of a jet airplane appearing to crawl across the sky in the distance). See this link for discussion of factors, it partially supports my claim at least.
Possibly coincidentally, the cited page says that immigrants and young people are more likely to be hit crossing train tracks, and the press reports indicate the victims in Spain were young (14-26) visitors from South America.
As was stated in the OP, alcohol was almost certain to be a factor—Of course that dosen’t make it less tragic but it does show how so many could make such a poor decision en masse…
Hit by a train going 90+ miles per hour—Absolutely horrrific.
Apart from alcohol being involved, what happens in situations like this is that the first person to cross the line checks to see if a train is coming, and so gets across safely. Others see that person get across safely, and assume it will be safe for them, without checking to see if a train is now coming. So you soon get lots of people crossing, assuming that someone else has checked whether it’s safe or not. I’ve seen this with large groups of pedestrians crossing streets against red lights, and I can imagine the same thing happening here.
