Know When to Run: The Story Behind the Xmas Kings Cross Problems | Hacker News Reader

Know When to Run: The Story Behind the Xmas Kings Cross Problems

londonreconnections.com

119 pointslelf13 comments

When the trains are screwed I tend to just swear a lot and imagine that rail engineering meetings consist of crack addled muppets riding around in clown cars. It's interesting to get an actual behind the scenes explanation. They should publicize this kind of thing more, it's good PR.

What I would really like to know is, what's the story behind the London<->Norwich line being frequently down at weekends since I started using it regularly about 15 years ago? Every now and again it seems to go back to being mostly functional, but the rail replacement buses are getting recommissioned again. What's up with that?

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch turns out really good reports on pretty much every acute dangerous failure on the railway:

http://raib.gov.uk/publications/investigation_reports.cfm

Two major incidents in my neck of the woods were the drill bit that came through the roof of my regular commuting line:

http://raib.gov.uk/publications/investigation_reports/report...

And the runaway engineering train where the crew on board jumped off as it went through an underground station:

http://www.raib.gov.uk/publications/investigation_reports/re...

But of course these are restricted to incidents that put lives at risk. As you say, it would be really interesting to read reports like this on other kinds of failures.

Superb reference. Well written too.

The rail accident investigators, are very very good engineers. They area ready attend any accident across the UK in a mater of hours. They even have powers of arrest.

> They even have powers of arrest.

Source?

A lot of the X civil service org have some odd grandfathered powers BT's an d the royal mail internal security have more powers the average function in an ordinary PLC has.

Not Bruce Sheniers resignation statement and notice how careful he is to be nice to BT security.

everyone in the UK has powers of arrest afaik - you don't even need to be a citizen.

however, i'd imagine that these guys are instructed on how to use it, unlike the wider populace

I'd say the line's open most weekends (I sometimes travel to Ipswich for the weekend). Stuff wears out and weekends are the best time to do engineering work, so you'll always end up with a certain number of closures (on a 4-track line they can sometimes close one track pair at a time, but that line is 2-track north of Chelmsford). Some of it may be Crossrail-related work (I understand there are changes to Bow Junction planned). But I'm not conscious of it being worse than any other line.

they don't seem very good at emergency response ie unable to sort out the minor flooding at Farringdon recently - how hard is it to quickly get some pumps in to clear the problem.

It was messed up on Saturday - they had an entire day and night to sort something

Wow great piece of analysis. Quoting: Engineering train crew and contingency at times of peak work will be treated with the same level of nationwide cross-project scrutiny and planning as other resources in short supply, such as signal testers and overhead line engineers.

Also: Contractors will be required to test any new equipment in an off-the-railway environment before it is used on live railway work.

The NYC MTA has Youtube videos (http://www.aetherltd.com/communicating.html) and a Flickr feed (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mtaphotos). They're offered with little commentary; most of the videos are just raw images of construction, repair work, and emergencies. You get a sense of the huge construction and repair efforts required for a major subway system.

Oops, wrong Youtube link. Should be: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHkn788ZQJO45542MXbv...

surprisingly interesting...

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