On May 21, 2015, an incident in the Rodalies traffic control centerinstalled in the França station of Barcelona, left out of play the railway system of Catalonia. “It is as if the control tower at an airport broke down,” a Renfe official summed up then. This Friday something similar happened again, but in this case the error was not in the Centralized Traffic Control (CTC), but in updating the computer systems linked to this command center and that allow communication with the trains. But the ‘software’ has not failed, but the ‘hardware’. And for reasons that are still unknown. To understand us, as if a company changed the operating system of all the computers in its office and then they did not start, but with the difference that the railway error has affected about 80,000 people.
There is an addition that does not help calm things down: in Sants there is a replica system of the França station for cases of breakdown, but it is not operational, and as confirmed by the president of Adif, Maria Luisa Dominguez, it would not have worked either because it depends on the same program. What is usually done in these cases is to move the damaged CTC personnel to temporary command control, which is more rudimentary but equally functional and allows the circulation of no problem trains. That is, from França to Sants. In this case, it has not been possible.
Dominguez explained that the CTC “has not fallen”, as it did in May 2015. Among other things, if it had collapsed, all the signals and traffic lights of the Catalan railway network would have turned red. And that has not happened. What has happened is that the computer system upgrade that allows communication with the trains has failed, so the transmission with the train drivers has been blown up. And that, as is obvious, it’s a dangerbecause no matter how automated the system is, without direct interaction they cannot be launched notices to convoys. In other words, the airport control tower knows exactly where the planes are and where they are going and can decide to divert them to one runway or another, but it cannot talk to them.
New version
The sequence, reported by the president of Adif, has been as follows. Shortly after one in the morning, company technicians Atos Unify have proceeded to install the new version of the program. It had to be one routine operation, 45 minutes at the most. After ten minutes, however, the system has failed and there has been “an absolutely anomalous cut“. First eyebrows raised. After another attempt, at 2:50 a.m. it was decided to reinstall the system from scratch, that is, to change the damaged hard drives that did not allow it to continue, to return to the base configuration and ‘backup’ dump to put it back into service. At this point in the film, the company involved had already transferred more personnel to the CTC.
The trains were supposed to start running at 4:30 am, but given the impossibility of communicating with the trains, the service has been cancelled. Starting at 7:30 a.m., the restore the circulation of Rodalies, medium and long distance. Half an hour later, after a heart-stopping night at the França station, the operation of the Centralized Traffic Center has returned to normal. With the computer running and the latest version of the software installed. But with 200 trains without leaving and 80,000 very bad-tempered travelers.
no conclusions
Asked about the causes, Domínguez has assured that it is soon to come to any conclusionbut has pointed out, first with some hesitation but later with certainty, that the damaged hardware was installed by Atos Unify itself in 2021, which changed a old model from 2003, placed by Siemens. I mean, the computer was new. As it was an operation that should have taken about half an hour, and since this technical maneuver had never failed until now, it was not thought of doing it on the weekend. The contractor, in fact, won a public tender to carry out these statewide updates. And to date (it was recently installed in Castellón and Madrid), everything has gone well, according to Domínguez.
The president of Adif has I apologize to all those affected and explained that in the next few days they will talk to Renfe to see how they are can compensate, since, given the thickness of the breakdown, they have not been provided with alternative transport. “Today’s is not usual or routine, but they can occasional damages occur which are not different from those recorded in other nuclei of suburban trains”. That is to say, that according to Domínguez, as sustained to questions from journalists, in Catalonia there are rates of punctuality and breakdowns similar to those of, for example, Madrid.
chaos in 2015
Related news
As for the CTC, the chaos of May 2015 led to a public contest that allowed to renew the technology. Adif’s call was won by Siemens in October of that same year. In July 2017, the França station received the then Minister of Public Works, Inigo de la Sernawhich was made flesh in Barcelona to supervise the installation of the new system, for a cost of €7.4 million. Siemens also took charge of the first 20 years of maintenance, but the computer system, Adif clarifies, is part of another contract. Although other Adif sources point out that the ‘software’ used is also from this same company, which performs the updates in coordination with the Adif communications staff.
The company, through a statement made public in October 2015, assured that the modernization of the CTC “with technology Controlguide Rail 9000 from Siemens Rail Automation will offer better technological features that will increase the flexibility and ease of the system to allow future extensions”. They also promised “a man-machine interface optimal and guaranteed to meet “the supervision and control needs for all the lines of its Rodalies network”. All a waste of technology that did not take into account that on September 9 everything would fall again after the update of a simple computer system.