He said that when he had recently graduated and just moved from Norway to Sweden his first job here was as a technician for the local railway. One of his first assignments was a call where the computer controlling all the track switches had stopped working. Luckily there was a backup, but they needed him to fix it immediately.
He arrived, took a look at the computer and its backup running next to it. He started out by measuring voltages on both, comparing to see what the difference was. After a while some men in suits came in and asked how things were going. He said it was all good, they said it wasn't because now all trains had stopped. Apparently, he had short circuited the backup.
"And that's when I decided to go for a theoretical career!" My teacher happily concluded. The classroom was left in a stunned silence.
"Did it get a bit late last night? Can't keep your eyes open?"
Again, the student agreed. Rolf flashed a huge smile and in a singsong voice said "then I have something for you!". He walked over to his bag, pulled out a stuffed animal and a tiny embroidered pillow. (I have a grainy photo of them somewhere).
Rolf tiptoed up to the student, put the pillow in front of him, and as the student rested his head on the pillow Rolf gave him a pat on the head.
After this Rolf went back, said that if you're that tired it's better to sleep in your own bed. He resumed the lecture, picking up in the middle of the sentence where he'd stopped. No one slept in his class for the rest of the course.
I absolutely loved his classes. I bumped into him a few years ago when I was holding a recruitment thing for Ghost Games and it happened to be just after his lecture. I told him how much I enjoyed his courses.
-George Bernard Shaw
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach work here."
I agree struggling for basic survival as a public servant is not ideal, but be careful not to turn education into a lucrative opportunity where people come for money not passion.
Money is certainly not the only way to attract talent (though teachers still need to pay their bills) and in most schools i've attended the talented teachers were just ridiculously hindered by the bureaucrats defining their program and agenda. David Graeber's talk "Manageurial feudalism and the revolt of the caring classes" comes to mind.
'Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, teach teachers.'
I used to be so impressed at European train stations that they had a single sheet that would give the entire day's arrivals and departures, down to which track. I assume that behind that were schedules that weren't so far from being hand-calculated with equivalent sheets that told people and equipment where to be at what times.
I think we lose something when we jump so far forward that you cannot fall back gracefully without a system completely breaking down.
My guess is that the failure is related to signalling or some other knowledge that exists “between” the trains (and brains). Having systems that can negotiate right of way is necessary to increase the number of trains and the speed of each individual train beyond their pre-computer-era limits.
Having all trains stop for one day is probably a judgment call to lower the overall duration: Having all trains stop for a day is a pain in the neck, but you know when you’re done. If you could not wait, you could probably have (quite) a few trains run without problems. However, you would have to work for a very long time to get all the trains back to where they were to resume the regular time table. This would be the preferable option during a time of crisis.
There was a lot of extra impact because this system also feeds the passenger information so their app, website and information screens at the stations were not working either leaving passengers in the dark.
You might see this is an ironic comment, but it is as much that, and as much a technical statement of fact. Sometimes the trains arrive at the correct time ( +/- 10 min) so they correlate to what you are seeing on the screen.
But unless it's a delay of 1 hour or more, neither trains or tracks will be updated on the screens. It's just happen they sometimes coincide, so they might correlate, but only by coincidence. Trains schedule and train reporting on the train station are, I was told..."Run by different companies!"
-> Source: Conversation with platform manager at Amsterdam Central Station a few years ago. ( not that many years...)
Do not forget that there might several companies running on the same track, cargoa and passenger trains etc.
Managing a busy track is hell.
I live in Malmö so you have to understand I'm obliged to make a "well no wonder given the Danish counting system" joke here
> Fifty is halvtreds, which stands for halvtredje-sinds-tyve, meaning “third half times twenty”, or “two scores plus half of the third score” [2½ 20]*
https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-danish/e...
But if they don't work you don't take off, it's simply not worth the risk.
A crew is stranded in space, because of a computer malfunction and no one on board remembers how they used to be programmed.
It’s more than that: The trains are negotiated at political levels! The “8:18 to Marseilles” (fictitious example) could be a headline in the news if the region refuses to fund it, and the worker’s union may have striked to keep it, while inhabitants’ HOA has negociated with the city to keep it under 12€: They are the object of a convergence of fixed interests. They run for generations: the train I took as a kid is still arriving on the same track today (and in one stop, it stops at track E; tracks A-D were dismantled but never renumbered due to this legacy).
The good thing with rails is that they aren’t going away, and trains can be negotiated for decades, they’re far from being scheduled on-the-fly.
As another poster mentioned, they are many, many independent variables in a railway system. In the old days, people recovered from problems by gut feel and experience was OK although there is usually no "right" answer. The newer systems apply some statistical anlysis and try and make the best decision usually with humans doing the last part.
I'm not sure about "because safety" though since signalling systems protect trains from each other and they only have automation in the sense of first train that arrives gets it route sets, the system cannot make trains crash unless there is a critical bug.
That said, train systems themselves usually maintain a ton of active operational procedures that remain part of staff training which would theoretically allow them to be more resilient and these procedures are kept current and you will often see them used in emergencies. I.E. on automated systems, trackway signaling often exists in the “not lit” off state and if the automated train control system failures, is often capable of lighting up for human controlled movement (usually required to be done at reduced speeds) of the trains during irregular operations like bringing stuck trains to the end of their lines and letting the people in them out at the next station. And any trains that still have a human conductor in a cab (or a cab for a human conductor at all) have procedures for that human to operate the train directly, even on segments of track where automated train control otherwise control all train movements.
We could try and run these systems in these degraded states under these emergency procedures, but most modern systems have safety analysis and engineering which focus on bringing the system to a safe halt state while fixing the underlying issue and returning to full operational state rather than messing around with rolling along in degraded states with unknown but assumed to be increased potential for catastrophic engineering failures with outcomes including loss of life.
(In the US it is generally illegal for a human being to operate a train unaided by some form of train control above 79mph. Most other systems have similar rules. We no longer trust humans themselves to operate these vehicles just because so many human lives can be at stake when they fail.)
Source: I did a stint working on system security and a little bit of electromagnetic compatibility safety engineering for rail systems. It was enlightening to see how the capital E engineers I was working alongside handle these concepts and design risk out of modern systems. The bulk of my work was in the US but the parts that weren’t were on systems that spanned multiple continents and/or train cars which were distributed worldwide. (To my knowledge none of my work has ever related to system discussed here.)
I would appreciate one of those post-outage "what happened" reports like with the AWS and Facebook outages last year. But outside of IT I don't think anyone really expects those over here. And there might be national security considerations preventing such disclosure until any chance of a repeat has been engineered away, at which point everyone will have forgotten.
> It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff.
...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole.
I don't know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands' timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew scheduling system.
> A typical workday at NS includes approximately 15,000 trips for drivers and 18,000 for conductors. The resulting number of duties is approximately 1,000 for drivers and 1,300 for conductors. This leads to extremely difficult crew scheduling instances. Nevertheless, because of the highly sophisticated applied algorithms, TURNI solves these cases in 24hours of computing time on a personal computer. Therefore, we can construct all crew schedules for all days of the week within just a few days.
Then I found more detail about TURNI's implementation in this[2] paper about optimizing crew scheduling for timetables.
> In the railway industry the sizes of the crew scheduling instances are, in general, a magnitude larger than in the airline industry. Moreover, crew can be relieved during the drive of a train resulting in much more trips per duty than typical in airlines. In other words, the combinatorial explosion is much higher. The latter has made the application of these models in the railway industry prohibitive until recently.
Cool stuff.
Finally, gleaning from ns.nl's careers page[3] everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I'd say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them.
[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~lex/files/Interfaces.pdf
[2] https://repub.eur.nl/pub/11701/ei200803.pdf
[3] https://werkenbijns.nl/werkgebieden/it/sap-specialist-bij-ns...
sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.
Those are pretty standard terms here in .NL. 36 hours is considered fulltime by most employers, including government and semi-government. Pension is offered almost everywhere and at least 4 weeks vacation is the legal minimum.
Maybe except for the _unlimited_ train travel but most employers do offer free train travel between home and work.
This also means that if an IT system goes down on a Sunday, a lot of employees won’t even pick up the phone until Monday 9 AM.
And I'm also sure they have a significant on-call setup of the IT teams for any out of office hours issues, just like every other large 24x7 kind of organization.
It is a great place to work. A nice atmosphere, good coffee and they embraced change (in this case Scaled Agile) better than most places I have seen. They are often listed as top-5 best places to work and I can see why.
How standard is that in the private sector or non former state owned enterprises? I haven't looked at the NL market in a while but most tech jobs I saw back then were 40h/week.
I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf "enterprise" software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to customize and integrate than it would to fully replace. An army of developers trying to keep a business running with the world's largest Swiss Army knife.
My gut tells me that big names like SAP and Sales Force are easier to sell to executives, and it makes a company seem like it knows what it's doing. And maybe feeling pressure to choose a "respected" brand leads to fewer alternatives? Or maybe all the alternatives are quickly bought out by the behemoths. I really don't know. Maybe someone can enlighten me. It just seems like an enormous turd of inefficiency to me.
Buying an off the shelve package also buys you an industry-standard business process. The idea is that part of value comes from the process that you have to shoe-horn into. Some integration is expected (and provided for) but if you have to modify heavily, You're Not Using It Correctly.
Also, using an OTS package means less development risk (not every IT dept has 10x developers coming out the wazoo) and it also means that you have a huge reservoir of skilled labour if you need it. Not just for development but also on the business side.
Finally, if you're a big, publicly owned company, you likely have many financial / reporting constraints. The scope of your non-negotiable requirements may be bigger than you imagine.
I've seen people implement SAP in a couple of months. It's possible. It's still expensive and clunky though :-)
That whole situation convinced me pretty thoroughly that "enterprise" software is indeed a form of large-scale snake oil. I think most businesses can go a long way with just spreadsheets and email.
I've heard it said that SAP is sold on the golf course, not in the IT boardroom.
I have no idea how it works, but apparently it does.. sometimes…
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252435884/Chances-of-suc...
They're absolutely colossal in size
My ex-girlfiend's father is an engineer there in Baden-Wurttemberg - I'd characterise them as closer to something like Oracle rather than Salesforce
It was developed a very long time ago, it has a huge adoption in large companies and a few years ago when they migrated from R3 to Hana one of their own people told us in an architecture review meeting that they have over 300,000 built in reports to migrate.
In many cases companies are adopting SAP because "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". Anecdotical, the company where my brother works is implementing SAP and changed all existing networking gear with Cisco because "this is what big companies do". They threw away brand new equipment and spent several millions on the SAP implementation that is still not working, forecasting they will pay even more millions to make it work then millions per year to use it.
(and bloat, and McKinsey infiltration into many a large F100+)
--
They are old school, entrenched, but yu would jump off a cliff supporting any of this legacy stuff. It will persist as the inertia on huge systems is heavy.
But yeah - I wonder if they are signing any NEW business... aside from military bunker grade stuff (which will cost as much as the bunker to implement) I dont see a reason to implement (not because I am bashing, but because I dont know the modern business case reqs that would call for SAP)
[1]: https://blogs.sap.com/2022/03/11/what-you-may-not-know-of-pr...
people seem to believe that running trains is some simple thing. it is the exact opposite of a simple thing, even for small systems with only a few dozen trains
1 hour more than the standard French contract, and there are also far more holidays here..
> free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.
.. okay that's actually a great perk. IIRC the French national railway company, SNCF, provide only a limited number of tickets per employee (like 10 per year? someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Their UX is also atrocious though (websites are just shit at workflows, apps are weird and break easily, ticket machines are OK but with really bad touch screens, and train announcement screens are each running Windows XP(with literally hundreds, if not thousands of them on big train stations), while from what i recall NS was acceptable.
There is no UX: it's just a small sheet of paper.
For example, The Salvation Army is one of the biggest jokes in all of charitable history.
I wont go into details here, but I would NEVER give a dime to the Salvation "army" (of free slave labor under the guise of "salvation" (its a tax and money fraud to its core (I went through a SHIT ton of financial documents to see what their true operatin is disguised as. AVOID)
TL;DR: TSA uses its place as a church-like service to get special tax incentives, even the buildings in SF were donated to them. They run a for-profit-grey-market of boutiques they supply with "donations" they have running trades with China-Town in SF. They take subsidies, donations and other benefits. They require all that they "help" sign up for state benefits, sign the benefits over to their org, take the benefits, then feed donated & expired processed fod to their labor force.
They only take in able bodied. Force them to go to church each sunday. and make them use external addiction help, such as AA and make it clear they are not a treatment organiztion.
They maintain a very small amount of actual employees, and play on the egos of those in their "program" using military style rankings to appease the egos of the ignorant...
They then profit like mad, corruption is rampant and they feed all their "good" donatins to their side hustle of boutiques and other grey market.
Its a fn racket.
=---
The point being that if you DD a company/org, you can often find out a lot from financial public info, comments from even just a few employees etc..
What lead you to look into this? How did you originally suspect them of being fraudulent? What clues did you see in their financial documents?
For example, I tend to look at Charity Navigator and for Salvation Army, they mostly get dinged by not having an independent board (which to be fair is a clear red flag) but not much more, so as someone who does want any contribution I make to charities to go toward their cause, I'm very interested in any methodology around researching a charity.
I knew someone who worked briefly at the Salvation Army. They said it was shockingly efficient and effective at its charitable mission.
Learned a lot about db best practices to make these systems resilient and reportable but the whole “the database is the system” angle was very much a “every problem is a nail to this hammer” situation.
And we can assume that a position in the IT department just opened up...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derailme...
Thanks!
The other part of my guess is that they have a SQL db which is stored on /likely/ a windows server instance. I’d even surmise that this instance may be hosted on Azure but that’s speculation, not a good guess.
On Sunday there is also not as much pressure to get things running as there would be on Monday. Or perhaps this is the incentive to pay now and get things fixed on time for the work week? In that case Friday night would again have made more sense unless the attackers have some very specific insight into how much slower restoring without paying is.
My alternative theory is an expired certificate that makes some core systems just not talk to each other anymore. The announcements on the stations, for example, were also out, and they lost control of the mobile apps (couldn't make the apps show that trains didn't run, the in-app scheduler showed all was A-OK), and that sounds quite dissimilar from the core train operation service, making me think it's more of an infrastructure than a specific system's problem. On the other hand, once the app could be controlled again (assuming this singular underlying cause), you'd think they could then also start putting train service back in place and that didn't happen for hours still.
I can't really make the pieces fit together for any theory, so then presumably something multi-faceted (one thing tripping one or two other things so it escalated from restarting one component to not being able to restart the trains anymore the whole day).
Before you can get the actual service up and running, you need to get trains and personnel to the right locations. So I don't think this discredits your theory as much as you think.
Well, as long as you're clearly stating _this_ part of your otherwise validated and highly likely pre-post-mortem is speculation... </s>
That especially. I wonder how expensive that thing is going to cost.
This was, however, not due to a computer glitch, but problems in SBB's electrical grid, which lead to overload of some of the lines and then to a complete shutdown of the entire grid.
Warnings were displayed on control consoles, but were drowned in 1000s of other meaningless warnings (there's a lesson for an UI designer here).
I was in the ICE from Basel to Zurich at the time and after fuming for a few minutes I figured: "What can you do?" and moved to the bar wagon. There we had something of an impromptu party until there was no more power for the cash register and they stopped sales.
In the end it was a (relatively) funny adventure for most and a huge embarrassment for SBB. I don't think they like to be reminded of that faithful day.
[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-train-network-shuts-down/...
Funny how the entire system has ground to a halt and the bartender is still worried that their cash register receipts and inventory won’t reconcile and shuts that part down too.
It can even be considered a national security issue in the case of food, medicines and other vital services.
Card imprinters did exist in Europe (Italy) just fine, but they are not used since (at least) thirty years.
Most cards that are presented to the cash now have no embossed numbers (most people have the national payment circuit called Bancomat/Pagobancomat, sometimes coupled - on the same not-embossed card - with a Visa or Mastercard debit).
So in 99% of cases there is no way to "extract" money from cards without using the card reader and if electricity or landline/internet connection are down, it is a problem, though there are a number of battery powered and GSM/cellular connected POS/terminals that may give a few hours of autonomy.
Since several years sales to the public MUST be recorded on an electronic cash register[1], there is something like a "special emergency exception" where you can annotate manually on a paper registry sales, but as often happens the exact procedure is not largely known and I believe most people would not risk a (hefty) fine should they do any mistake in these cases and prefer to close the shop.
[1] which is BTW connected via internet to the Agenzia delle Entrate, the governement agency that deals with taxes, and data from the cash register is transmitted daily to them automatically, though there is a few days time tolerance in case of connection issues
The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a backup in place in an increasingly interconnected world where a glitch can take out any nationwide system.
Not a native English speaker. So it's easy for me to confuse the terms. You're right, of course.
Note: I do not consider words like 'unfortunately' and 'extremely unpleasant' apologetic. Also, I understand there are cultural differences between the Netherlands and the USA- no joke.
How would "We are trully sorry for this incident" make it any better ?
I do mind the fact that they don't pay the people their money back if they try to find alternatives to get to their destination. That's 100% unacceptable.
When it became insincere or boarderline fradulent.
"We deeply regret this one incident" - you regret getting caught and it has happened many times before and will happen many times again.
"We are sorry, we have learnt the lessons and it will never happen again" - no you havent and yes it will.
"Thank you so much this is delicious" - umm try tasting the food before lavishing your praise.
5* uber ratings for everything - need I say anymore?
Is there any reason to assume that this is a fact? Usually in these situations, NS is pretty good about paying people back.
/s
About the only thing they could maybe have done was to fall back on back-and-forth shuttle trains between major node stations. But that would only provide a very basic service, with incorrect train materiel being used for the normally expected number of passengers. It would be just enough to get passengers and personnel home. I would like to see something like a pen-and-paper schedule that they can fall back on, but they don't have it. (They did something like that at the first corona lockdowns, although with more planning involved.)
Also probably worth noting is that trains here are used fairly frequently, however unfortunately this isn't the first time trains are stopping - for example snow is a common reason for delayed/reduced service. (Snow isn't very common here in the NLs)
That’s ludicrous, I wish people helping other people this way was more common.
Better to force the operators to fix the boom arm / whatever other cause of power glitches with fault codes like this. Even if they false-trip when there are grid level outages.
Being unable to accelerate or unable to use regenerative braking is not in any way a safety problem. Either situation can happen at any time. (Electric trains have banks of resistors used to dump the unwanted kinetic energy when it's not possible to return it to the power supply, and this was the normal method for decades before regenerative braking became common.)
On AC-electrified railways (especially those with their own independent power supply network like Germany/Austria/Switzerland), resistors are actually rather uncommon on stock capable of regenerative braking, because the OHLE not being able to accept regenerated power is a relatively rare occurrence. Though of course in that case the conventional friction brakes are of course fully rated to bring the train to halt, only with a bit more wear and tear.
DC-electrified railways are a different matter – transmission losses are higher, power supply sections are smaller and substations often not capable of returning any surplus power back into higher network layers of the power supply systems, so the OHLE/third rail not being able to accept the power generated by regenerative braking happens much more frequently and so trains continue carrying braking resistors as a fallback system.
For instance, running high speed rail without computer signalling would be a huge risk there's no sense in taking ( due to the speeds involved, by the time you see anything of issue like a train or damage in the tracks in front, it's too late to stop).
Scale creates problems that are partially solved via software systems, which only handle a subset of the existing variety and new variety introduced by scaling. This makes the systems leaky with regards to unhandled variety and incredibly rigid (i.e., not robust) against exceptions, exceptions that could often be readily be handled by humans. By software being a snapshot of some small group of humans' knowledge of a system, it is completely unable to respond to live operational exceptions. Stafford Beer's work is interesting background on this type of thing.
> A much more efficient automation.
There are many, many examples where that is both not true and true. For the not true cases, just see literally any customer service interaction with a large company in the past half decade. I suppose this could be arguable though if one asks the question "efficient for who?".
Another example I love, that is even less ambiguous, is restaurants (traditional, not fast food) that require waiters to take orders on touchscreen PoS systems, instead of taking the orders on a notepad and inputting them later. The touch screens are incredibly slower on a bigger party ordering appetizers, a main course, drinks and desert - it takes forever to navigate back and forth and find the right item, and usually has to be done again and again for each diner. By comparison, a notepad allows the waiter to write down exactly what they hear, often just making small extra notes to indicate duplicate items.
Of course, this particular one could be improved by arranging the menus more naturally for someone taking orders, and several other conveniences (such as always keeping the current order on screen, to easily tap to add "oh, and another beer for me", "I'll have the same desert as her" etc).
You want the train company to keep 2x-3x personnel on hand just for days like this? Not to mentioned transition time.
[0] Extremely rough off-the-cuff estimate. They were obviously automating as they went along during the years.
The usage of certain lines at a certain time is calculated in periods of 6 seconds!
We're waaay beyond normal human coordination capacity.
It's now Monday morning here and the trains are back to normal in time for rush hour. So it's not really a big deal.
> The IT failure occurred at the end of the morning. It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. This system is important for safe and scheduled operations: if there is an incident somewhere, the system adjusts itself accordingly. This was not possible due to the failure.
If I had to guess, it probably was an issue with scheduling/timetable software rather than anything to do with the trains, rails, etc. Nothing exceedingly seriously or difficult to correct.
"Due to the enormous impact of the failure in the IT system, it is unfortunately not possible to run any trains today." // => "Due to the enormous impact of the failure in the IT system, NS cannot run trains today."
"Although the cause of the failure has now been resolved, the impact is considerable. To be able to start up reliably, systems must be updated and trains must be brought to the right place. That takes time. For our passengers, this is extremely unpleasant news." // => "Although we have fixed the cause of the failure, the failure impacted most of our customers. To fix this failure so that trains would start reliably, we needed to return all trains to a central depot, which took nearly 12 hours. We apologize for the extremely unpleasant interruption."
"The expectation is that tomorrow morning the normal timetable can largely be resumed. The night trains can still run." // => We expect to resume minor operation with night trains first and then major operations tomorrow morning.
"The IT failure occurred at the end of the morning. It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. This system is important for safe and scheduled operations: if there is an incident somewhere, the system adjusts itself accordingly. This was not possible due to the failure." // => The IT failure occured at 11am in the scheduling system, a major requirement for safe operation; if train operations are interrupted at one location, the system normally reroutes other trains to prevent collisions. This system failed.
"The international trains are not affected by this failure. For information about the timetables of other transporters, passengers can consult the websites of these transporters." // => The failure did not affect international trains. If you have an inquiry about other transportation services, please consult those services.
"The journey planner is updated." // => We updated the journey planner accordingly to account for the interruptions.
// Generally the use of "passive voice" indicates poorly-taught grammar, however the use could also indicate desire to avoid responsibility.
"Who are we? NS is active in the public transportation sector. We encourage the use of public transportation and keep the Netherlands moving. Our travellers are our 1st, 2nd and 3rd priority in all of our activities, and we do our utmost to make their trip as pleasant and sustainable as possible from door to door."
This is also fascinating. I would expect to find "NS (Netherlands Service) provides rail services for the entire country". Instead they choose vague grammar, more the idea of NS rather than what NS actually is.
"I am a programmer" => "I encourage the use of computers to provide solutions for common business problems". Just a strange use of grammar.
The soft dictatorship works very well, Hungary will go even more down in the future. I'll probably leave Hungary before Hungary leaves EU/NATO and gets into a war.
So Hungarians residing in Netherlands could have been able to vote at Hungarian embassies/consulates in Netherlands (if they made it to the embassy).
We’re of course all too familiar with this process from several consequential court cases deliberating its efficacy and merit in generational memory. Whether it’s sensible has been argued with elections on the line.
edit: It was a joke. :/
Other systems that might normally provide safety critical redundancy could be providing the sole measure of safety, with no other redundancy available in case one of those fails.
“Unsafe” is always defined based on context.
Edit: and to be clear, we're not talking about holding down a resetable circuit breaker to avoid being late, we're talking about the rail network of an entire nation being inoperable for a day.
There was an incident a few years ago where a LIRR track crew member stepped in front of a train going 78mph and died.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
The employee that died had been on duty for 38 of the 50 hours leading up to the fatality. One of the NTSB's recommendations is to implement software that avoids worker fatigue:
"The FRA encourages the use of certified biomathematical models, such as the Fatigue Audit InterDyne Model and the Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool (FAST) by railroads to help them develop work schedules for safety-sensitive employees that align with healthy work-rest scheduling practices; however, these safety measures do not apply to roadway workers. 14 The work schedules developed through biomathematical models avoid many pitfalls causing worker fatigue that arise from excessively long work hours, highly variable work shift times that disrupt human circadian rhythms, and infringement on sleep opportunity times."
TL;DR: it's not about the trains crashing into each other. It's about sleepy people making bad decisions that gets them or their colleagues killed.
I'm not from the NL, but I have travelled there by train. My feeling is that they have very dense traffic, but in a relatively small country most trains don't travel more than 2 hours. That means each driver and each conductor needs to make 4 different trips a day. And because they need breaks they proably switch trains during a working day. If all this planning has been computerized for many years it just means that nobody knows what to do next if the computer screen remains blank. Probably they don't get a printout in the morning like it was some decades ago. No idea how adaptively the system would react during the day dependening on delays and disruptions.
Just guessing, maybe some insider knows more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_signalling#History_of_...
Conspiracy theories are so fun.
If it is true that Netherland's and Italy's transport infrastructure were also down I wonder if Russian supported hackers are to blame.
It's been Russian hackers so many times last few years (Hunter Biden's laptop, Trump elections, etc...), it's a sure bet this time it's the same.
/s
Nobody ever got fired for blaming Russians.
See also : assassinations - maybe the death of the top polish government & military and Total's CEO in plane crashes were just freak accidents, but a nagging suspicion that Russia was involved will always remain...
