Railways Blog

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Rail workers flee runaway train

Railway workers had to run for their lives when a runaway train hurtled down the line towards them.

The locomotive travelled for two miles after setting off from Edinburgh’s Waverley Station before coming to a halt, it has been revealed.

The driverless engine only ended its unscheduled journey when it was switched into a siding in the east of the city.

Sounds like a repeat of the accident a few years back at the very same location when a driverless class 37 locomotive ran away down the grade at Edinburgh Waverley after being uncoupled from it’s train. That time it ran head-on into an approaching passenger train, causing quite a few injuries as well as writing-off the poor class 37

Typically the BBC have got the photo wrong – it shows a class 66 diesel rather than the class 90 electric that actually ran away.

Boing Boing has a story about rural Russians are making homebrew railcars to run on abandoned tracks, powered by motorbike engines.

I wonder if Patrick Crozier would approve?

The endless saga of the flaws of Virgin Train’s “Operation Princess” has taken yet another turn.

The traditional drama of the foundering hot-air balloon has been given a new twist by Virgin Rail, with staff on a grotesquely overloaded train asking for volunteers to get off.

At least 20 disgruntled passengers agreed to leave at the next station when Virgin warned that the alternative was to cancel the journey for everyone.

With the replacement of 7 coach trains with 4 coach Voyagers this is becoming an all-too frequent occurrence.

It may be this gross overcrowding was the result of cancellation of a preceding train, in which case moving to an airline-style compulsory reservation system isn’t going to help.

If Virgin Trains wants to retain it’s credibility, it needs more capacity on these services, which means longer trains. The sort of crush loads you get on short-distance commuter runs isn’t acceptable on long-distance services. I wonder how many passengers on that train will take the car next time?

A new body is to investigate rail accidents.

The Bill takes the investigation of rail accidents away from the Health and Safety Executive and fulfils key recommendations of Lord Cullen’s inquiry into the 1999 Paddington disaster.

The Railways and Transport Safety Bill will set up a new, independent Railway Accident Investigation Branch, putting rail on a par with the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and the Marine Accident Investigation Branch.

While it’s good riddance to the HSE, I can’t see what was wrong with the old-fashioned Railway Inspectorate.

Independent Argument quotes from the Lord Mayor’s banquet speech given at London’s Guildhall on Monday

Here in London, our status as a world financial and legal centre depends not on the domestic economy but on the goodwill of our international businesses. And that brings me to the question of transport. It is dire, and so bad that we are approaching the time when the financial pre-eminence of the City may become imperilled.

Crossrail and Thameslink 2000 are stalled; the East London line is mired in arguments. Much of the infrastructure of public transport is crumbling.

I take the Tube every day of my working life. Virtually every day I am delayed. Journey times are up to twice what they were two or three years ago. Millions of London’s workers are inconvenienced. What a waste of time, what a waste of productive time, what a way to treat people.

What we are seeing here is the consequences of failures to invest 10-15 years ago. Michael Portillo’s decision to cancel Crossrail (the Paddington-Liverpool St underground line taking main-line trains east-west across London) has cost London dear. And then everything stood still for years for the ridiculous ideology-driven privo-fragment-isation of the railways.

If all the money spend on accountants and lawyers during privofragmentisation had instead been invested in new trains and new tracks, London wouldn’t be in half the mess it’s in now.

Is this what happens when you let Volvo drivers loose on trains?

BBC NEWS | England | End of line fears for mail train

It looks like the famous Post Office Railway will join the Travelling Post Offices into oblivion. For those that have never heard of it, it’s an automated narrow-gauge railway running beneath the streets of London that originally connected seven Post Office sorting offices.

Hopefully it won’t end up going for scrap. If it can’t be used as a freight line, perhaps it has a future as a passenger-carrying tourist attraction?

Patrick Crozier of UK Transport mourns the loss of Euston Station in the great act of philistine vandalism in the 1960s. But Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops reminds us of the present day threat to the fourth arch of London Paddington, with the plan to replace it with another faceless office block with a dingy underground vault for the passengers.

What’s the economic value of beautiful buildings? How much does Birmingham’s economy suffer from the fact that people’s first impression will be the fume-filled claustrophobic underground vault of New Street station?

The problem with bean counters is they always assign a value of zero to anything that can’t be measured.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Twelve dead in France train fire.

Today’s hardly been a slow news day, so this story is getting buried a bit. From what I can gather from the BBC report, it sounds remarkably similar to the fire at Taunton 20 years ago, when a small fire in a heater killed ten people by carbon monoxide poisoning.

I remember the initial furore over the fact that some of the train doors were locked, until it was revealed that all the dead were still in their cabins, poisoned in their sleep. Everyone that actually woke up made it out.

Initial reports suggest today’s French tragedy was also caused by a faulty heater; but since five Americans are among the dead I expect at least some warbloggers to blame this on ‘Islamofascist’ terrorism.

Update
Steve Karlson asks what what there was to burn in what looked like a very modern steel-bodied sleeping car. From the Guardian report on the disaster:

The sleeping car was built in 1964 but had been extensively renovated in 1999 and overhauled again last year, Deutsche Bundesbahn said, adding that its age would not in itself have been a factor in the blaze.

I recall reading somewhere that the coach still had wooden interior panelling, which probably fed the fire. (Can’t remember where, otherwise I would have provided a link)

In the Taunton fire I mentioned earlier, a pile of bed-linen had been placed on a heater in the end vestibule (which had inadequate guards). When the heater came on after the train was connected up to the locomotive’s power supply, the linen caught fire. It was the smoke from this, in a confined space, that caused the carbon monoxide that killed the ten fatalities. I don’t think the fire itself spread much beyond the vestibule. Like Nancy, the smoke was the killer