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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

#41

Post by jameshart »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #26
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…

Or a reprint of an official statement.

I would love to imagine a world where the TfL official statement said that they ‘left passengers in darkness while the driver drip-fed them information’.

PR guy’s last day, maybe.

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

#42

Post by ryanjshaw »

Cyphase wrote: post #24

Off topic, but the phrasing of the headline[0] caught my attention. Shouldn't it be, "Thousands stranded in dark for hours as London trains see power cut"? Is this not as clear cut as I'm thinking? Maybe it's a British English thing? [0] In case it changes for any reason, it's currently, "London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours".

It seems to muddle cause and effect. IMO it should read "Thousands stranded in dark for hours after London trains lose power."

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

#43

Post by pvaldes »

Similar problems in Spain with trains. Third event in the last 12 days [1,2,3]. After a 2023 with a chain of problems that normally don't occur

Sabotage would be my first candidate. Too much coincidences and deja-vues floating around.

[1] Nov 26 2023: "Traffic cut off between Atocha and Recoletos. 37 passengers evacuated after the convoy derailed"

[2] Dic 5 2023: "Another derailment on the Madrid Cercanías cuts the Recoletos tunnel and causes significant delays"

[3] Dic 8 2023: "Third departure from the track of a train at Atocha station"

Looks like something directly copied from the Catalonian independentist playbook. This is very rare on Madrid, but small incidences designed to cause delays and chaos were not uncommon near Barcelona a few years ago.

London events may, or may not fall in the same category, but... yep; same day. Suspicious.

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

#44

Post by tialaramex »

paganel wrote: post #35

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.

The power was cut because another train trashed the power line.

At a societal level the attraction of electricity is that it's fungible. Wind, Nuclear, Gas, Solar, the electricity is the same. If you need Natural Gas then too bad, no matter how cheap and readily available the Solar power or Coal is, you've got to buy Gas at any price from anyone who'll sell it to you. Individually this is at most a minor inconvenience but for a whole country it means too bad now your foreign policy is decided by people who can supply the fuel mix you need.

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

#45

Post by drexlspivey »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #31
MichaelZuo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

TFL is actually profitable, you could google that in less time that it would take to write this comment, these wild hypotheticals are just noise

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

#46

Post by jareklupinski »

Cyphase wrote: post #24

Off topic, but the phrasing of the headline[0] caught my attention. Shouldn't it be, "Thousands stranded in dark for hours as London trains see power cut"? Is this not as clear cut as I'm thinking? Maybe it's a British English thing? [0] In case it changes for any reason, it's currently, "London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours".

rn the Headline for me shows "Passengers cold and angry after four-hour powercut on new £19,000,000,000 rail line"

please stay clear; the basilisk is feeding

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

#47

Post by snvzz »

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…

>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 evacuation came.

Did they really need the heating, with packed trains?

The engineer should have turned it off, or set it to something like 16C.

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

#48

Post by stetrain »

paganel wrote: post #35

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.

Yeah I sure do hate how my electric car just coasts to a stop and leaves me stranded the moment there is a grid failure.

I just had to sit there and watch all those happy people in their combustion cars easily pumping gas at the gas station which also had no power.

Roads definitely never get shut down due to accidents either.

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

#49

Post by hedora »

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…

Welcome to our LLM-based news cycle.

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

#50

Post by jlg23 »

cameronh90 wrote: post #10
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 find it entirely unsurprising that passengers take matters into their own hands. It can be a safety issue to be stuck on a train for a long time, and often there are no or very few updates from the driver while you are stuck. In London, most times I get on the train, I’m expecting it to be a sub-10 minute trip. I may even be just wearing a t-shirt and shorts since I was heading to the gym. Others with health issues…

> Similarly when this happens in summer, you can bet many people don’t have any water with them.

When I lived there in 2010/2011, I regularly saw signs posted at tube stations "bring water, it'll be hot!".

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