[sschueller]

It just takes one cargo company to fuck it up for everyone else.

The cargo car that had a wheel break in the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland created damage so bad that it will be closed until September 2024. 7km need to be completely redone at a cost of over 100 million.

All of this because some low cost cargo company ran their wheels way past expiration.

The train was inspected twice by humans and once by an automated system before it entered the tunnel but such catastrophic wheel failures are almost impossible to check for. It is up to the owners of these cars to ensure the equipment doesn't have too many km on it.

Additionally cargo cars are dumb pieces of steel so the train operator does not notice right away if a wheel is gone unlike with a passenger train. The locomotives have so much power they will easily keep chugging along dragging the damaged cars behind them ripping out the track.