Understandable from Your point of view - but the trajectory that India is going on, clearly any sane person knows that it will lead to improvements only -
Agreed, with qualifications.
I believe that improvements will happen. In fact, the improvements required are already widely known, and have been PARTIALLY implemented.
I am sorry, but I have not paid full attention to this thread. There are two questions with regard to rail safety, one of them is the state of the railway tracks themselves, and jointly with that, the ability of rolling stock to accommodate transit at various speeds. The other is the precautionary methods governing use of a particular segment of track.
Regarding speed, it is unsafe to run trains, passenger or freight, beyond 130 km.p.h or so (there are several combinations to be considered, as different sections of track are of different ages, and on the stock side, there are coaches that have been built at different times and to different standards of safety). My personal appreciation of the situation is that we have been distracted into making the Vande Bharat trains a leading feature of our railways. This is a mistake, and the management time and effort to run these would have been far better spent in passenger safety, passenger comforts, including the cleanliness of toilets and their maintenance, and provision of food on board to acceptable budgets and rigidly maintained standards of cleanliness and hygiene.
This accident, however, had nothing to do with running speed and safety at various running speeds. It does have to do with the expenditure prioritisation. Money spent on developing the Vande Bharat coaches and their running way ought to have been spent on railway safety. Here we come to the second feature of running trains safely, that is, the use of particular segments of track.
We cannot have two trains using the same segment of track. To guard against this, the original method was manual signalling. Trains were sent through manually, by manipulation of the signals, to either cross through a nodal point (eg a station) or to rest on a loop line while higher-priority traffic (passenger trains vs. freight, express trains vs. passenger trains) passes through.
Obviously this was severely affected by human error. The Railways then came up with Block signalling. This defined the segments between two stations to be defined as Blocks, roughly 10 to 15 kms each. Trains were not allowed into a block if already occupied by another train. This was an early method, and necessarily blocked 10 to 15 kms of track at a time.
The update to that was two-fold, Automatic Signalling, and Electronic Interlocking.
In Automatic Signalling, instead of restricting control to signals near stations, signals have been installed at much closer (~ 1 km) intervals, and the segments of track to be frozen have been shrunk to 1 km segments, in place of the earlier 10 to 15 kms.
In Electronic Interlocking, all signalling points are networked, and the status of tracks monitored electronically. The problem is that major parts of the network are third-party ownership parts, and much of these networks are copper-wire dependent, not as fast and not as reliable as fibre. So one of the many initiatives taken up was the conversion of the entire network to fibre optic. THIS IS WORK IN PROGRESS, FAR FROM COMPLETE YET.
Finally, the very robust method of ensuring safety known as Kavach.
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