Recent content by alxndr

Wet wooden sleepers are indeed like ice. Damp concrete sleepers with lichen on can also be very slippery, and harder to spot than wooden ones. A stray piece of ballast can catch you off-guard if walking habitually on sleepers. It’s much easier to have a blanket rule against it. Ballast is...

Unlikely to be anything in or out of the yard until mid morning so expect disruption.

Can the TrainSplit app be used for journeys wholly on ScotRail? I’d discounted it as it says e-ticket rather than m-ticket, but I’d like to suggest a way for my partner to avoid having to switch to the new app. I’m not familiar with e/m-tickets as they’re not an option for me.

PTS is needed for Off-Track (it’s the discipline relating to things that aren’t track, such as vegetation, fences, and drainage). Being colourblind shouldn’t cause an issue though, it’s mainly a problem for telecoms or S&T where being able to identify colours of wiring and signals is vital.

The boundaries of each discipline differ. The delivery unit boundaries tend to stay broadly the same between each discipline (although can different, Swindon pway/track and Swindon S&T used to have different boundaries so that made the boundary between Western Central and Western West* DUs...

The vast majority of S&T aren’t on call, that tends to just be in a few more remote areas where there isn’t 24/7 cover. Traditionally S&T will have staff on duty 24/7 either doing maintenance where still possible during the day or on standby for fault cover. If there were no staff in Edinburgh...

Scotland hasn’t had red zone working for a long time now, they outlawed it before everywhere else. There’s simply fewer S&T (and staff in other departments) around these days. My section lost 23% of our staff to “Modernising Maintenance” on paper, figures will vary from section to section.

The loops were long gone before 2016, other than the addition of the overheads and new signals/location cases there's been no fundamental change to the track there since at least 2013 (when I started there).

AWS magnets are typically 182m from their associated signal. Google maps agrees this is the case for both signals involved.

Agreed, they don't look signalling related. Not a style I've seen and signalling locs are typically (although not always in some older styles from the 90s which had integral locks) locked with a yale padlock.

I’ve left REB/relay room doors open to try and achieve some cooling, but never a loc. Locs are generally water tight, I can’t think of any which have actually let water in providing the doors have been shut. I have come across a wet dis box that we went back to the next sunny day and left it...

I did a fairly rudimentary experiment to test this with a bit of rail after we had ongoing issues with a particularly problematic bit of S&C. I can’t find the exact readings now but it didn’t make a big enough difference for us to continue with the idea of trying to rig up a system despite...

Slightly, nominal 108mm toe opening but thought rounding might make it easier for any lay people to visualise. Still within the acceptable range of 105-110mm, assuming they’re not the new mk3 variant of clamplocks there with wider toe openings.

Here are the actual figures for mainline railways from the ORR. Apologies if the formatting hasn’t come out well. https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/health-and-safety/rail-safety/table-5210-workforce-harm/ Time period Customer facing staff Infrastructure workers Other workforce Train...

No matter how good your eyesight you’re not going to see the lie of a set of points from 800m away and around a bend. Driver is not at fault here. You would need to be quite close to tell given that the toe of the switch opens approximately 11cm and it was a sunny day, so likely to be heat haze...