On 24 July 2013, at about 20:41 local time, a Renfe Alvia express on the Madrid–Ferrol service derailed on the A Grandeira curve at Angrois, roughly four kilometres short of Santiago de Compostela station in Galicia, north-western Spain. The train entered the 80 km/h curve at about 180 km/h; all thirteen vehicles left the rails and several overturned, and 79 people were killed and some 140 injured. It is the deadliest rail accident in modern Spanish history. (The toll was briefly reported as 80 because of a misidentification of remains; the confirmed figure is 79.)
The train was an Alvia Class 730, a variable-gauge set able to run on both high-speed and conventional lines. For most of the route from Madrid it had run on high-speed track equipped with the European train-control system ERTMS/ETCS, which can automatically enforce speed limits. As the line approached Santiago it transitioned to conventional track fitted with the older ASFA system, which warns the driver of restrictions but cannot itself slow or stop an overspeeding train. The A Grandeira curve sat just past that transition, where a long stretch of 200 km/h running gave way abruptly to an 80 km/h limit — and where the responsibility for braking in time rested entirely on the driver. In the moments before the curve, the driver, Francisco José Garzón Amo, was on the train’s telephone with a Renfe controller discussing the route ahead and consulting a document; he braked late and hard, but the train was still doing about 179 km/h when it derailed.
The official investigation was conducted by the Comisión de Investigación de Accidentes Ferroviarios (CIAF), the rail accident investigation commission within Spain’s Ministry of Public Works (Ministerio de Fomento). Its report attributed the accident to human error — the driver’s failure to reduce speed for the curve, distracted by the phone call and his loss of position — and treated this as the only contributing cause. That conclusion drew sustained criticism. In 2016 the European Commission asked the European Union Agency for Railways (the ERA, successor to the European Railway Agency) to review the inquiry; the agency questioned CIAF’s independence — the team had included staff from the infrastructure manager ADIF, the operator Renfe, and the consultancy Ineco — and faulted the report for emphasising the single human error while underweighting the systemic and signalling factors: the absence of automatic train protection at the curve, the abrupt speed transition, and the unaddressed derailment risk that contractors had earlier flagged.
The criminal proceedings reflected that wider picture. After a trial that began in 2022, a court in 2024 convicted both the driver and a senior ADIF safety official, finding that the failure to assess and mitigate the curve’s risk, as well as the driver’s conduct, contributed to the deaths.
On the morning of 25 April 2005, at about 09:19, a West Japan Railway Company (JR West) rapid commuter train on the Fukuchiyama Line derailed on a tight left-hand curve at Amagasaki, in Hyōgo Prefecture, just before the morning peak had fully cleared. The seven-car train entered a curve of 304-metre radius — limited to 70 km/h — at about 116 km/h. The leading cars left the rails and slammed into a trackside apartment building; the first car was driven into the ground-floor parking area and the second was crushed against the structure. One hundred and seven people died, including the 23-year-old driver, and 562 were injured. It is one of the deadliest Japanese rail accidents of the postwar era.
The train was a 207-series electric multiple unit running a rapid service. Minutes before the curve, the driver had overrun his stop at Itami station, putting the train roughly 90 seconds behind schedule. Recovering lost time was not a trivial matter at JR West: the railway ran an intensely punctual operation, and a driver who fell behind or made an error faced disciplinary re-education. In the moments before the curve the driver appears to have been preoccupied — his attention drawn to the delay and to a radio exchange about how the overrun would be reported — and he braked late and inadequately, using the service brake rather than the emergency brake until it was too late to slow the train enough for the curve.
The accident was investigated by Japan’s Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission (ARAIC), whose functions were later folded into the Japan Transport Safety Board, in report RA2007-3, published in 2007. The Commission did not reduce the disaster to the driver’s overspeed alone. It found the proximate cause was the train entering the curve far too fast because the driver did not brake in time, but it placed that error in a context that made it both more likely and more dangerous: JR West’s punitive retraining regime, known as nikkin kyōiku (“day-shift education”), which subjected erring drivers to humiliating non-driving duties and was found to have created fear that distracted drivers from driving; and the absence of an automatic train stop (ATS) system capable of enforcing the speed limit on that curve. The Finding is therefore Multi-factor.
The legal aftermath turned on whether senior JR West managers could be held criminally responsible for not having installed curve-protecting ATS. Successive prosecutions of former executives ended in acquittals, with courts finding the specific derailment had not been foreseeable in law even as they criticised the railway’s safety management.
On the night of 12 May 2015, Amtrak Northeast Regional train 188 entered the Frankford Junction curve in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia at 106 mph, more than twice the curve’s 50 mph speed restriction, and derailed. Eight passengers were killed and more than 185 people were taken to hospitals, several critically injured, from a train carrying about 250 occupants. It was the deadliest accident on the Northeast Corridor in decades and the event that forced the long-delayed completion of automatic speed enforcement on America’s busiest passenger railroad.
The train was a scheduled evening service from Washington, D.C., to New York City: one ACS-64 electric locomotive and seven Amfleet passenger cars, with a single locomotive engineer at the controls. There was no mechanical defect, no track failure, no obstruction. In the seconds before the derailment the engineer advanced the throttle and accelerated hard, as though the train had already cleared the sequence of speed-restricted curves that follow the departure from 30th Street Station. It had not. The locomotive and all seven cars left the rails; three cars overturned, and one was crushed and torn open.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated and adopted its findings on 17 May 2016 in railroad accident report RAR-16/02. The Board’s probable cause was operational and human: the engineer accelerated to 106 mph entering a 50 mph curve because he had lost situational awareness, his attention most likely diverted by radio chatter about a nearby SEPTA commuter train that had made an emergency stop after being struck by a projectile. The Board found that the engineer believed he was at a point on the line where higher speed was authorized. It identified the absence of a positive train control (PTC) system on that stretch of track as a contributing factor — a safeguard that, the Board concluded, would have prevented the accident had it been active.
The legal arc ran for nearly seven years. The engineer, Brandon Bostian, faced charges that included involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment; after a series of dismissals, reinstatements, and appeals, a jury acquitted him on all counts on 4 March 2022. Amtrak, which accepted responsibility for the derailment, reached a $265 million settlement of victims’ claims in 2016.
On the morning of 31 January 2003, a CityRail Tangara interurban train left the rails on a tight curve in a rock cutting near Waterfall, about thirty-seven kilometres south of Sydney, killing seven people — including the driver — and injuring some forty more. The train was travelling at roughly twice the speed the curve was rated for. The reason it was travelling so fast was that the man controlling it was already dead or dying, and every system that should have stopped a train without a functioning driver had failed to do so.
The train was set G7, a four-car Tangara of the State Rail Authority’s CityRail network, running the early service from Sydney’s Central station south toward Port Kembla via the Illawarra line. At about 7:15 a.m., as the train ran through the descending, curving territory near Waterfall, the 53-year-old driver, Herman Zeides, suffered a sudden and fatal cardiac event. He did not brake, did not ease the power, and did not react to the approaching curve. The train accelerated to around 117 kilometres per hour and entered a curve rated for no more than 60. It derailed, the leading cars striking the rock walls of the cutting.
The reason the driver’s collapse did not stop the train was a defeated safety device. The Tangara’s “deadman” control was a foot pedal that the driver must hold within a defined range; releasing it or pressing it fully was meant to cut power and apply the brakes, on the assumption that an incapacitated driver’s foot would slip off. Investigators found that the unconscious driver’s body weight held the pedal within its active range, so the system read a live, attentive driver where there was none. The guard, the train’s second safety-critical crew member, was not monitoring speed and did not intervene with the emergency brake in time; the inquiry found the vigilance and guard-alerting arrangements inadequate to catch a silently incapacitated driver.
A Special Commission of Inquiry was established under the Honourable Peter Aloysius McInerney, who had also led the inquiry into the 1999 Glenbrook accident. McInerney’s final report, delivered in January 2005, located the immediate cause in the driver’s incapacitation and the resulting overspeed, while finding that an underdeveloped safety culture and a reactive approach to risk had left the railway without effective defences against exactly this scenario. The finding for this file is Driver — the proximate cause was the incapacitation of the man at the controls — but the report’s force lay in showing how predictable that single point of failure was, and how poorly the system had guarded against it.
At 7:34 a.m. on 18 December 2017, on the very first day of revenue service over a newly opened bypass route, southbound Amtrak Cascades train 501 entered a 30-mph curve near DuPont, Washington, at about 78 mph, derailed off a railroad overpass, and fell onto Interstate 5 below, striking highway vehicles. Three passengers were killed and 57 passengers and crew were injured; eight people in vehicles on the interstate were also injured. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated and, in report RAR-19/01, attributed the derailment not to a mechanical or track failure but to an organizational failure: the transit authority that owned and prepared the route had not effectively mitigated a known hazardous curve, had inadequately trained the engineer, and had begun service before positive train control (PTC) was operating to enforce the speed.
The accident occurred on the Point Defiance Bypass, a re-routed inland alignment of the Lakewood Subdivision that Amtrak Cascades was using for the first time that morning. The line ran from track posted for far higher speeds straight into a sharp 30-mph curve where it crossed over Interstate 5. The engineer, who had limited experience over the new territory, did not begin braking in time and took the curve at roughly 78 mph — more than twice the posted limit. The train’s locomotive and cars left the rails on the overpass; several cars plunged onto the freeway.
The NTSB’s probable cause centered on the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority — Sound Transit — which owned the line and was responsible for preparing it for service. The board found the probable cause to be Sound Transit’s failure to provide an effective mitigation for the hazardous curve in the absence of operative positive train control, which allowed the engineer to enter the 30-mph curve far too fast because of his inadequate training on the territory and on the newer equipment he was operating. PTC, the federally mandated overlay that automatically enforces speed restrictions, had been installed in parts of the corridor but was not yet active in the curve where the train derailed. Had it been operating, it would have intervened to slow the train.
The board concluded the derailment was preventable and faulted the rush to inaugurate the bypass before its safeguards were complete, identifying failures by multiple agencies in planning, training, and oversight. The case sharpened national pressure to finish the long-delayed PTC rollout, produced civil litigation and settlements, and kept the bypass closed for years before service resumed under positive train control.