Could be worse, Patrick Stewart accidentally said "electrical fraud" instead of electoral fraud regarding investigations into the latter for a few MPs in 2015.Yes, true - I meant electrics
The less reporting is more that accidental injury/death from OLE is much less likey, vandalism or illegal interference with the railway being the main reason for getting near to a conductor that is for most of its length 4+ metres above the ground. With 3rd rail, the lethal voltage is within contact of anybody trespassing on the track plus inadequate care taken on station platforms. Authorised staff access is for that reason far more hazardous near 3rd rail than under OLE.
So, in effect, we have a de facto ban on new third-rail, but no reported evidence to support it?
You could do an FOI request to the ORR for the evidence on which the third rail restrictions are based, if you actually want to know.
People keep making this argument, but it is simply not in line with reality. It is also a weird position to take that something is either safe or unsafe, given that there is a scale of things that have different levels of safety and risk. This is not a binary position, but a continuum.
ORR’s position is consistent with Health and Safety law. If it wasn’t, there’d have been legal challenges to it.
Would you support all domestic wiring installations only complying with pre 2018 edition of bS7671 being "ripped-out", because they likely have a non-metal consumer unit, or even lack surge protection? There have been several reported cases of deaths from fires caused by wiring that complies with earlier standards.
Indeed. Thank goodness the law has moved on significantly since electricity supply first became widespread for private homes.
As with all improvements in safety requirements, stopping a bad practice from being extended is absolutely necessary, but this is backed up removal or upgrading existing inadequate safety installations 'ALARP'. I would imagine that the argument for renewing equipment and conductor rails on a long-established may one day be subject to a safety review, rather than a straight 'is it financially worth it' assessment, thereby forcing some 3rd rail routes to be upgraded to OLE or switch to BEMU operation.
There are several hundred 150/156 units knocking around at nearly double that age...
Given the scale of housing development planned for Uckfield, that capacity may not be available to the railway by the time it ever got built! Although good to know they are doing something about the power supply, because the area is going to need it.
Southern’s fleet are very much capable of making it to the 2050s so it will be a long time before a new fleet is even worth considering. And of course we are already seeing newer rolling stock 387s cascading out the oldest electrostars so you could imagine the DfT kicking the can down the road with the turbos as well.
The RSSB (Rail Standards and Safety Board) finds conversion to 25kV AC attractive. RSSB "Replacement of the 750V DC system with 25kV AC appears to be both feasible and economically desirable. The economic case is likely to improve as energy costs increase over time. The affordability of the change has yet to be determined. To make such a change is a very significant decision to be taken by industry and government (as funder), and would require a large amount of further work to develop a whole industry business and implementation plan to take account of the impact on train operators and the industry's customers."
While it is economically desirable, it is not financially viable while costs are still starting at £2.5m/stkm for a fitment, let alone conversion, and there's a vast amount of the country that isn't electrified at all.
Just because it is old doesn't change the facts of the report.
It will fundamentally alter the economics of it, even if the electrical and structural elements haven't changed. Unless you are going to try and claim that nothing since 2010 has happened in economics?
However electricity has also gone up in cost so there would be increased savings to counteract the increased cost to install as well as you could also reduce number of units you need to run a service as it will take less time to cover the same service with an AC unit than a DC unit due to the better acceleration rate and higher line speeds possible.
On the southern region the benefits of an AC unit against a DC unit will be marginal if anything. Uplifting of a handful of miles by 10mph is going to make no difference to the number of units required to run the services. I'm sorry but the benefits of converting a DC service to AC are almost exclusively hypothetical. The benefits of converting a DC route to AC would be to allow Diesel to AC traction conversion, but this is of questionable value when proper Bi-Mode units are rapidly coming into squadron service.
Could units be charged at Uckfield off of a short third rail section (as opposed to a charge device like at West Ealing), that is only live when a train makes contact with it? While such an arrangement would be difficult on a long route like the WEML, I think it would work very well at a terminus like Uckfield.
Even then I’d expect any reduced running times to get banked as yet more padding and yet more dwell time. The whole industry is shot-scared of trying to accelerate anything.
