[D_Alex]

>It's not as safe as flying

In France and Japan, HSR has had zero fatalities in the entire period of operation.

In China, HSR had AFAIR one fatal crash, with 40 fatalities. Per passenger-mile, Chinese HSR is twice as safe as US air travel.

[fredoralive]

France has had one fatal crash on an LGV, but it was during initial line testing where some safety systems were bypassed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckwersheim_derailment

[littlestymaar]

TIL.

At first, when seeing it was in 2015 I was extremely surprised I didn't heard about it at the time. Then I saw the date: Nov 14th 2015, just the day after the ISIS terror attacks in Paris, France's 9/11. Of course we barely heard about a train crash at that time…

[pjerem]

I remember this day because I worked in a company that made software for train networks.

It did briefly made the news but not for long due to the terror attacks and also there wasn’t any passenger on this train, it was a train testing.

In fact the story is even more tragic when you know that the day before, they also were too fast in the same turn and in the records you hear something like « few, that was close, better take care next time ».

However, for sure this crash should have never happened but it only happened because they were testing the limits of both the train and the track.

It’s literally like a test pilot crashing an airplane while testing all the limits : it should never happen but they are still there for it not to happen in commercial flights.

[fransje26]

> However, for sure this crash should have never happened but it only happened because they were testing the limits of both the train and the track.

No. It happened because they were under-prepared and disorganized, and thereby didn't respect the speed restrictions for the segment of track they were on.

They crashed entering a 175 km/h segment at 265 km/h, which is well above the 10% overspeed they were theoretically testing that day.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>In France and Japan, HSR has had zero fatalities in the entire period of operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckwersheim_derailment

[Xylakant]

I would not consider an accident during a test run with partially disabled safety procedures a regular part of operations - on a normal run, the train should have slowed down or stopped automatically before derailing because it did significantly exceed the design speed of the track.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Nobody said only in revenue service.