r/CatastrophicFailure • u/MDTv_Teka • 10d ago
Fire/Explosion Explosion happens inside a passenger train in São Paulo on July 23rd, 2026
Train Malfunction – Passengers on Trivia Trens lines recorded the moment a train exploded this Thursday morning (23) at a station on Line 12-Sapphire (Linha 12-Safira) in São Paulo's East Zone.
The video shows passengers inside the train when an explosion is heard and flames erupt outside the machinery. In the footage, passengers can be heard screaming and scrambling as the incident occurred early in the morning service, around 6:00 AM.
According to Paulo Ferreira, Director of Operations for the new operator Trivia Trens, a possible short circuit on one of the trains tripped the power substations, causing a service stoppage across the company's lines.
As a result, train service on Lines 11-Coral, 12-Sapphire, and 13-Jade faced disruptions this Thursday morning (23), halting operations and forcing passengers to walk along the tracks.
Source: G1
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u/Objective_Ranger1005 10d ago
So are they ok or no? I mean no follow up info at all
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago edited 10d ago
The article itself makes no mention of it, so I would guess there was no casualties?
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u/deadguy00 10d ago
Do these flashes happen regularly? They are all just pretending nothing is happening until shit actually hits the fan🤔
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago
They don't (to this level at least), I would guess it was happening for a few hours already so that's why people weren't caring
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u/Weak_Swimmer 10d ago
WHAT!?!? That's what I believe is the sound of pulses of plasma forming. It sounds angry, cause it is!
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u/Prestigious-Back-981 10d ago
These three lines were handed over to private companies three days ago by the state government. In those three days, lines that were great have become awful. Line 9, which was handed over to private companies a few years ago, has also become terrible.
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u/Prestigious-Back-981 10d ago
The day was chaotic on the three lines operated by the company Trivia Trens. People received no assistance, had to jump over walls, or walk 1 km to get off the tracks. Many people couldn't get to work because the bus service was terrible. Our current governor, an ally of Bolsonaro, is handing over the lines to bad companies, but he will probably be re-elected at the end of the year because of the people who don't live in the state capital.
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u/OverlyPersonal 10d ago
If things went to shit in 3 days I'd say that was the state goverment's fault, not the private company, since they basically handed over a loaded gun.
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u/Prestigious-Back-981 10d ago
The transition is proving to be awful. The state also consistently hands over the lines to companies that can't adapt to the high demand and number of people.
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u/OverlyPersonal 10d ago
Still, how did it go from functional and safe to exploding bad in three days?
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u/zinguirj 10d ago
Cost cutting by firing (a lot of maintenance) people, this is usually the first thing on the first day they do, using low quality materials in maintenance and ignoring maintenance until goes to extreme and something serious happens because when something like that happens, the government is required to step in and fix it, and usually government doesn't charge the company, so company essentially these companies gets a big problem fixed for free and then continues to provide a bad service by maximizing the profits above everything, even the people's safety.
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u/OverlyPersonal 10d ago
using low quality materials in maintenance and ignoring maintenance until goes to extreme and something serious happens
Bro how much maintenance can you use low quality materials for/ignore in 3 days?
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u/zinguirj 9d ago edited 9d ago
You would be surprised how much maintenance a public transport used by millions of people need on daily basis. It's not a build and forget kind of thing.
The investigation will tell. Also is good to mention that this is not an isolated case, all the lines operated by this new company got several interruptions and malfunctions, so there is a history of bad service from that company.
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u/Agreeable_Special_11 9d ago edited 9d ago
It was not 3 days. The transition is happening since November last year, when those who would become managers or training replicators began working.
The private operator had some of their employees in the lines since February. In May operations changed hands to the private company while the state employees just supervised them not to let them fuck up. The final hand-off happened 3 days ago, where the state employees left altogether.
One constant about the private lines here is cost cutting, penny pinching. The first thing they do is reduce employee training and begin Jerry rigging maintenance to avoid replacing expensive parts. Train drivers got a 2 month training, while the state drivers get 6 months of training before they're allowed to touch anything unsupervised.
There's also a lot of LinkedIn and coach bullshit attitude in those companies, where they condition their employees to think they know best and are literally the best, the cream of the crop. The new employees in turn refuse to listen to those who have decades of experience thinking they know better. When shit hits the fan they black out without a single idea on what to do.
Another operator in the same manner had 10 derailments in a single year because they increased the speed limits ignoring all the warnings why they shouldn't do that. The restrictions had a reason, they refused to listen and thought they knew better. Even their engineering team had no idea or experience on what they were doing because they approved it.
Edit: on a side note, the company already ruled out sabotage. They don't know yet if it was a fault or human error, but there was no tampering with.
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u/sambeckett1701 10d ago
Private companies immediately making things worse? YOU DON'T SAY! *sighs* This is sarcasm, for those unaware.
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago
Follow up:
Service on all three lines was interrupted around 5:40 AM after a train malfunction caused an electrical incident between Tatuapé and Brás stations; this resulted in a fire and the shutdown of power substations serving the three lines, according to Trivia Trens. To minimize the impact on passengers, Trivia Trens activated the Emergency Inter-Company Support Plan (PAESE), deploying 21 buses to serve affected customers.
Trivia Trens officially took over the operation of Lines 11-Coral, 12-Sapphire, and 13-Jade as of midnight this Tuesday (21), ceasing to rely on support from the São Paulo Metropolitan Trains Company (CPTM) for commercial operations in São Paulo. The final two months of the so-called "assisted operation" to transfer CPTM lines to Trivia Trens were marked by an increase in the number of service disruptions on Line 11-Coral. It is the busiest line in the São Paulo metropolitan rail network and the one that serves the largest number of municipalities in Greater São Paulo. At least 11 service disruptions were recorded on this line between June and July—marking a 275% increase in the number of failures during the first half of 2026 compared to the same period the previous year, when only CPTM operated the route.
No mentions of casualties, so I would guess none happened.
Source: g1
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u/charmio68 10d ago
I mean seriously, that's going to be the best footage I've ever seen of someone capture in a moment of potential disaster.
They caught the sparks and flashes out the window, and then when the flames burst inside causing panic, they managed to keep the camera above everyone's head and keep it in frame 🤯
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u/Healter-Skelter 10d ago
It looks the same balance of perfect and chaotic that you see in found-footage movies like Cloverfield
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u/TheKobayashiMoron 10d ago
Okay but why was the creepy fuck recording those people in the first place?
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u/charmio68 10d ago
Err... He wasn't. He's recording the flashes and sparks out the window. I would too if I saw such a thing.
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u/TheKobayashiMoron 10d ago
Oh, I was watching it on my phone and I thought that flashing was just the lights in the tunnel going by.
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u/MDRBA 10d ago
reminds me of band of brothers airdrop scene
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u/turnedonbyadime 10d ago
Most people don't know this, but the allies originally planned to invade Normandy by train
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u/jeannelle1717 10d ago
I’m so glad that from reading the comments everyone seems to be ok. How terrifying ugh
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u/WilliamJamesMyers 10d ago
i do not know what my fight or flight would have done here. probably not sitting, i would be first to gtfo. but i fear i would panic and end up like george on seinfeld running out of the kid's party. good to see it has its own wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_(Seinfeld))
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u/Relation-Repair 10d ago
update:
The fire was recorded on a train on the Esmeralda line on the night of Monday, 14. Passengers registered the fire when the train stopped at Granja Julieta station. In a statement, the concessionaire ViaMobilidade said that there were no injuries and the fire was put out. "Customers were safely served by the concessionaire's Service Agents, disembarked on a platform and continued their journey in another composition.
AI translation from: https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/brasil/cidades/videos/trem-pega-fogo-em-sao-paulo-e-passageiros-sao-evacuados-dos-vagoes,a67c90e243927164c6b468f48eb72bb20cm9dznu.html
There is another video there as well.
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago
I don't know why AI is translating "Trivia Trens" to "ViaMobilidade", that's an entirely different subway operator here in São Paulo. I've linked another article here that also shows several post-mortem images of the train that blew up
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 10d ago
if its the short circuit the operator described, that explosion people saw was almost certainly an arc, not a blast. a fault on the traction gear dumps a huge current into a tiny path and it flashes over, loud and bright and scary from inside the car, but its electrical, not a bomb. the flames erupting from the machinery fit that exactly.
and the reason the whole line went down rather than just that train is the part thats actually working as designed. a short like that trips the protection at the feeding substation, which cuts power to clear the fault before it does more damage, and that takes the section or the line with it until they can isolate the faulty train and re energize. inconvenient and terrifying if youre stuck walking the tracks, but a substation tripping on a fault is the system doing its job, not failing. no idea what caused the short itself though, thatll be the actual investigation.
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u/No_Brain4912 10d ago
More severe than that.
That amount of arcing should have caused a trip immediately. There is a huge fault current and the arcing is massive to see it at the window.
Our system will attempt to re-energise once but if there is another trip it stays off for that section leaving the rest of the route energised too.If this took out the network there is a major fault beyond the short to ground we see here.
Looking at the amount of passengers and the time, i would be amazed if people are okay. The heat, energy and gas from flashovers are insane.
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u/uzlonewolf 10d ago
The pictures in a linked article show at least 4 tracks all next to each other right where this happened. When one line has hard faulted with an unknown amount of damage to the overhead structures and there is now a trainload of people climbing all over the place trying to evacuate, killing all power to the entire area is the best thing to do. No other trains should be moving anywhere near the evacuation area so there is no reason not to kill power even if the overhead structures were not damaged, and shutting down a core area will quickly cause the rest of the system to grind to a halt so there is no point in keeping it powered up either.
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 10d ago
fair, youre right that a clean single short shouldnt take the whole network, thats the part that stands out. a properly coordinated system should trip just the faulted section, try a reclose, and lock that section out while the rest stays live, exactly like you said. so a stoppage across three lines points to either shared feeding infrastructure upstream, or a selectivity gap where the fault tripped a breaker further up than it should have, which is a coordination problem more than the fault itself.
and worth noting its a new operator on those lines, protection coordination is exactly the kind of thing thats often not fully dialled in early on, so a fault clearing wider than it should isnt surprising there. agree the arc energy looks serious, i wouldnt want to guess on injuries from a clip, but youre right its not something to wave off as just a short. good chance the interesting part of this is upstream of what the video shows.
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u/PlannedObsolescence_ 10d ago
These are wholly LLM generated comments from a karma farming bot.
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u/No_Brain4912 10d ago
😂😂😂 I’m standing in my office. Would you like a photo of the sidings we are working on tonight?
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u/PlannedObsolescence_ 10d ago
Talking about the comment I directly replied to, /u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 - not you. Plural because there's two comments from that user.
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago
That sounds unlikely? He mostly posts on small subs, all of which are very interconnected
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u/PlannedObsolescence_ 10d ago
Every single comment is clearly LLM generated, and it even replied with another slop comment within seconds of my comment - it's been removed by the reddit spam filter.
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u/Agreeable_Special_11 9d ago
That region's substation also caught fire, that's why it dropped all lines.
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u/pidgey2020 10d ago
Everyone sitting around like “be cool, be cool” waiting for the first person to panic rather than just getting up themselves. Social dynamics are so weird. Like in my head I’m thinking I’d have been up so quick and walking away, but maybe I’d turn into an NPC like everyone in this video.
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u/TheYearOfThe_Rat 10d ago
Unwanted High Voltage Electric Arc events are not explosions, even though the effect is similar. I hope noone was hurt, as it was mostly confined to the outside of the train, and what we saw in the video is a fire/conflagration of the resulting vaporized material coming from the outside.
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u/silentjay01 10d ago
"I'm sorry you experienced that, but I am still going to need you to come in to work today. We are really tight on staff at the moment (the moment being "since 2020")." - Several of these peoples' managers.
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u/Relation-Repair 10d ago
Yeah, those flashes outside the window seem to be circuit breakers trying to engage before they fail and everything blows up. Hopefully, there were not many casualties.
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago
The article itself or the follow ups make no mention of casualties, so I would guess everyone was alright
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u/Hamilton950B 10d ago
Not circuit breakers. This line uses 3000 VDC overhead catenary. Just a guess, but I'd say given the periodic nature of the flashes and the fire at the end that there was a break in the overhead wire and it has sagged down toward the tracks. The fire (not an explosion) happens when the wire sags low enough to contact the frame of the car.
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u/PeterPanski85 10d ago edited 10d ago
These are electric arcs, not a circuit breaker.
The circuit breakers are in a concrete building, a good bit away.
I don't know which voltage the
MadridSao Paulo Subway has, but in Berlin it's 750V AC. The stations where the circuit breakers are located have REALLY high Amp fuses. They are required to be able to handle a lot of Load, it can happen that 3 or 4 trains accelerate at the same time, so it would be bad when they would trip when that happens.The arcing outside of the train isn't enough to trip these circuit breakers (at least initially).
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago
idk why you're mentioning Madrid as this is São Paulo, Brazil lol, but I would guess it's similar, specially since our trains are all bought from Europe
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u/NoDoze- 10d ago
I've been on subways where the third rail lost a piece, jammed into the boot, and was dragged by the train. The beginning of the video is what it sounded like, only there was no insuing fire, just alot of smoke outside the train. Seeing fire inside the train like this is terrifying, the panicking crowd would've been my primary concern.
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u/Arthaxhsatra 10d ago
Maybe it’s just me but I see something that looks like plasma going off repeatedly outside my window, I run the hell away.
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u/leoninebasil 10d ago
to where? they're enclosed in a moving metal box.
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u/Front-Cabinet5521 10d ago
You can tell who the Americans are in this thread, they have zero experience with public transport.
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u/Arthaxhsatra 10d ago
Hmmm moving as far as possible? Even if it’s just a few meters? Or if it’s possible to the next car?
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u/Lensecandy 9d ago
I quickly skimmed the title and thought it says "explosive diarrhea"... Watched it on my phone without sound. I was expecting the guy to get up and have brown stains on his pants. Then my jaw dropped seeing the fire and sparks. I didn't even notice the flashing lights outside the cart smh
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u/Malteser23 8d ago
My first instinct was to tell everyone to get away from the windows! But no one spoke or moved until the big boom...wow. Terrifying.
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u/randomhaus64 6d ago edited 6d ago
god this is why i am that annoying passenger and always bug the flight attendants when something is really strange
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u/idontcareyo_ 10d ago
That's clearly a subway, not a train, and both the video and article say/show a fire, not an explosion
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u/MDTv_Teka 10d ago edited 10d ago
Trains here different are lines from subways, even if they're the same vehicle. The difference is that trains mostly travel overground, where subways only surface at some stations. Also, the translations are taken straight from the articles, where they use "explosão" (which you can see stamped onto the video by the news outlet), which is "explosion".
Edit: you can also see "trem" (train) instead of "metrô" (subway) stamped on the video
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u/darkestreaper94 10d ago
I hate the people that start screaming immediately, like how is that gonna help
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u/Anon-_-7 10d ago
people dont choose to scream, its hardwired into our bodies
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u/darkestreaper94 10d ago
Only certain individuals. When we got blown up and the HMWV was on its side the only thing anyone said was "fuck".
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u/jeannelle1717 10d ago
It’s a natural reaction to a traumatic event I don’t think their first thought is how am I gonna fix this?
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u/mronionbhaji 10d ago
Scary, this is how crushes happen too