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London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

metro.co.uk

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Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#31

Post by uxp8u61q »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #22
YawningAngel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a similar situation on a London train (different line) this month. The problem is that the operators genuinely do not know how long things are going to take. I agree that the TTR is obviously unacceptable, but the whole service is run on a shoestring budget and is constantly cancelled or late, so there isn't really the capital available to do better.

Transport for London has a budget of over 10 billion pounds, how is that a 'shoestring budget'?

If the cost for maintaining the infrastructure in 10x that, then it's a shoestring budget. You have to compare the budget to a baseline, you can't just evaluate it as an absolute. Yes, £10B looks like a big number, but what do you compare it to?

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#32

Post by binarysneaker »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #25

I think there's some rather below-the-belt plagiarism going on here: Metro: The rush hour service lurched to a stop last night and left passengers onboard the crowded carriages for hours, as the driver drip-fed what little information they had to passengers. Eventually, the battery backup running the heating and lighting ran out, and those on board were left in darkness for another hour and a half until the evacuatio…

Not necessarily. Sometimes news articles come from a source such as the Associated Press and are rewritten or reworded before publication.

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#33

Post by stuaxo »

michaelt wrote: post #2

> Some frustrated travellers even smashed their way out the cold, dark trains and walked down the tracks to escape after getting stuck for more than three hours. It's a shame train operators don't feel able to make the common sense decision to give the passengers the option to walk before the three hour mark, without requiring them to "smash their way out". Obviously, some passengers won't be able to make the trek, a…

Sure, though you have to shut down the whole line because it's not all overhead electrification, there are sections where tube lines run past and have 3rd rail electrification (and may even have been running).

The whole lot has to be shut down, you have to get all the people on all the trains to a safe place and then make sure it's safe before turning everything back on.

Not saying it's impossible, just that it's not the most straightforward.

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#34

Post by stuaxo »

yabones wrote: post #17
rsynnott wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London trains are mostly third rail powered rather than overhead line, right? You really don't want people walking on one of those. Like, you don't want people walking on any train line, but particularly not one with a third rail.

The old-style "tube" trains are all DC third rail IIRC, but the newer trainsets such as the Elizabeth and Thameslink are all overhead AC. So this would actually be one of the few metro trains where it would be remotely safe to walk the tracks provided all the trains were stopped...

The line by paddington has long sections where the tube runs in parallel, in one of the pictures you can see a lot of people walking towards a tune depot and somebody is crossing one of the lines with a middle rail which is part of their DC electrification system (I assume this had been turned off - but this may have been turned off because they realised people were on the line, not the other way round).

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#35

Post by paganel »

And they want to move everything to run on electrical power (cars, heating), pure madness.

Btw, I've just had a half-hour power-cut here in downtown Bucharest, it was fun getting up all those stairs with two bags of groceries but at least I hadn't got stuck in the elevator.

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#36

Post by tialaramex »

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #18
michaelt wrote: post #2

> Some frustrated travellers even smashed their way out the cold, dark trains and walked down the tracks to escape after getting stuck for more than three hours. It's a shame train operators don't feel able to make the common sense decision to give the passengers the option to walk before the three hour mark, without requiring them to "smash their way out". Obviously, some passengers won't be able to make the trek, a…

I'm frankly astonished it took people 3 hrs to smash the windows and get out. I'd have politely asked the operator to open it up and let us all out after the 1h mark and if they didn't I would smash the shit out of a window and crawl out. No chance I would sit in there for 3 hours.

But why smash windows? The doors aren't speed locked because the train isn't moving, so you can just use the emergency release on the doors and then pull them open. It's not trivial but neither is smashing a window, and the doors are closer to ground level (most adults should be able to sit on the door sill and lower themselves to ground level fairly comfortably)

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#37

Post by jameshart »

vkou wrote: post #28
lotsofpulp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the different protocols needed for a 10 minute outage and a 3 hour outage.

You can't tell at the 10 minute mark whether or not power will be back in 10 more minutes, or in 3 hours.

In software incident management the rule of thumb is that at the n minute mark, in general, expected outage duration is 2n minutes.

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#39

Post by ryanjshaw »

vkou wrote: post #28
lotsofpulp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the different protocols needed for a 10 minute outage and a 3 hour outage.

You can't tell at the 10 minute mark whether or not power will be back in 10 more minutes, or in 3 hours.

But you can tell when 3 hours have passed and decide upfront - as a matter of policy - where to draw a line.

Re: London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

#40

Post by quietbritishjim »

yabones wrote: post #17
rsynnott wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London trains are mostly third rail powered rather than overhead line, right? You really don't want people walking on one of those. Like, you don't want people walking on any train line, but particularly not one with a third rail.

The old-style "tube" trains are all DC third rail IIRC, but the newer trainsets such as the Elizabeth and Thameslink are all overhead AC. So this would actually be one of the few metro trains where it would be remotely safe to walk the tracks provided all the trains were stopped...

In this case, one quote I've seen is that a train's pantograph was "caught up" in the overhead wires and dragging them along, which makes it sound like some were now on the ground target than overhead.
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