Specifications

MidJourney art, generated with the prompt: train in a tunnel

A friend of mine found an article about some problems they are having with the Spanish railway, and it’s almost worth reading just because of the headline: Trains in Spain stuck mainly on the plain after tunnels blunder (non-paywalled version here, though without the clever headline). The gist of the issue, if you don’t want to read either version, is that Spain spent €258 million on new trains that they discovered do not fit through the tunnels they have to go through.

The article laid the blame on the government rail company, which is probably correct, and some senior officials have been fired, which is better than firing a bunch of low level people, though some of those got pink slips too, I’d imagine. The final paragraph had the most damning statement, though: the newspaper that broke the story claimed the government knew about the problem for a year and half without doing anything.

This story is a classic example of non-engineers evaluating an engineering blunder, one that comes down to the wrong specifications being given to the design engineers. It could also have been that the design engineers got no meaningful specifications at all, which happens more often than people might realize.