It has been years and years since an accident in the UK. Something truly went wrong with the automated systems.
The recent tom Scott video led me to believe it was only automated as a backup, everything else is done by humans as the first line of defense.
It kind of parallels the LaGuardia crash, where indeed as you say humans were running the show but automated alarm systems failed (more likely were completely lacking).
It isn’t automated in the sense you may be thinking. The signalling is still done deliberately, but say a path requires two signals and two sets of points to be set, the signaller can do it all as one interlocked set rather than doing the individual items.
Even more precisely I’m struggling to remember the last time the accident was two trains colliding.
RAIB just delivered the report on a fatal collision in Powys in 2024.
Reading up on that, it was brake failure and the driver not applying another set of emergency brakes. Operators did not intend for them to crash head on. This crash is a bit different in that two trains appeared to crash on the same line (out of 6 or more)
Not quite true. A bit more common than that but still rare.
I thought modern tracks were designed to detect this traffic and cut power to the trains, causing them to fail stop?
