@Steveg58 You're Australian so I assume you're not used to all railways being grade-separated?

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@Steveg58 You're Australian so I assume you're not used to all railways being grade-separated? "Drive onto the tracks" isn't a thing you can allow to happen when trains routinely hit 300km/h or faster.

[valhalla@social.gl-como.it]

@cstross @Steveg58 I'm not sure whether it happens on the high-speed parts of the line (probably not) or close to the shared stations, but for some reason the Italian high-speed trains do manage to get stopped / slowed down because there are “unauthorized people on the tracks”

I'm not sure whether that's protesters, or a code word for “we had a team doing urgent maintenance on the track, but it wasn't really safe for them to be there, so officially they aren't”

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@valhalla @Steveg58 We get this happening in the UK. It's usually (a) graffiti taggers/teens trespassing near stations, or (b) suicides. The latter are No Fun for anybody (especially if you're on a train that gets delayed 3 hours then cancelled after police and ambulance crews pick lumps of human flesh out of the undercarriage and determine the brakes have been damaged).

[valhalla@social.gl-como.it]

@cstross @Steveg58 in my commuter time I only got “flock of sheep committed suicide on the track” and it was definitely enough

(I think it was only half an hour or so delay until the police got sure that the lumps of flesh weren't human, and it happened 2 km from the end station, so we eventually got there, but the bad part were at the beginning, when we felt all of the bumps and crunching noises and saw the bloodied surviving sheep)