Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image

It's a bit of a non story, even with the fake image.

From the article:

  Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.

...

  Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains.

  "They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said.

  "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."

Standard responsible rail maintainance is to investigate rail integrity following heavy rains, earthquakes, etc.

A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection.

The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned?

Currently on HN: Railroads will be allowed to reduce inspections and rely more on technology (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550

https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspecti...

on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc.

Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.

They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology. They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions. Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are.

Having said that, if it was 2020 and you told me that making photorealistic pictures of broken bridges was harder than spoofing the signals I just described, I’d say you were crazy.

The idea that a kid could do this would have seen even less plausible (that’s not to say a kid did it, just that they could have).

Anyway, since recently-intractable things are now trivial, runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.

> They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology.

Yes. That doesn't do much to detect a stone from a parapet rolling onto the line though.

Hence the need for inspection.

> runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.

I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.

If anything urban rail is in a better position today as ideally camera networks should hopefully rapidly resolve whether a bridge is really damaged as per a fake image or not.

> I'd argue not - whether it's an image of a damaged bridge, a phone call from a concerned person about an obstruction on the line, or just heavy rains or an earthquake .. the line should be inspected.

Ideally? Sure.

But when someone can generate plausible disaster photos of every inch of every line of a country's rail network in mere minutes? And as soon as your inspection finishes, they do it again?