> It’s one of the reasons I think the “prioritizing profits” narrative rings hollow. Any profits they would have preserved by not-stopping for the first hotbox detector? Already burned by the costs of the closure and the response so far. If anything, chasing profits better would have prevented this.
It's not about this incident, it's about all the other times they did the same thing and got away with it. Every train that didn't stop in a similar situation and didn't cause a major problem was a win to the company. Whatever stopping a train costs, they saved that amount every single time they didn't do it, and if they did this regularly that number probably adds up.
There's a concept in risk management called the swiss cheese model[1] where you think of your layers of protection like a stack of swiss cheese slices. Every individual layer has its holes, but as you stack them up the number of paths through the whole stack gets smaller and smaller. In a sufficiently protected system, causing a major problem should require multiple layers to fail or be bypassed.
The trick of course is that this also generally means that when commercial pressure and/or individual laziness leads to one or more of the layers being bypassed it won't usually cause an immediate problem because other layers are still covering most of the holes, but the safety margin might now be a single layer instead of three so one more failure can cause a catastrophe.
Layers of protection cost money so it's not exactly rocket surgery to understand why those focused on profits, especially those who are primarily interested in short term profits, constantly apply pressure to bypass or shortcut those layers as much as people feel they can get away with.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model