Assuming this is an accurate picture of what happened, then firstly I've a lot of sympathy for those trying to manage the situation, from the no doubt cold NR supervisor on the ground to those in the remote Ops room with facts flying, multiple situations, rule books being thumbed, people trying to make decisions and the delay, rumours and change plus the need to coordinate with all the various agencies, all no doubt with higher up/external organisations demanding information and so on. As a military person I've a fair bit of experience with difficult and complex situations which depart from planned normality, both on the ground and in HQs, and even with the best will in the world and lots of training, it is only ever going to be semi-organised chaos at best. The quality of decisions in that environment comes down to training (thinking clearly under stress), knowledge and experience (what the rules are, how you can bend and break them) and sheer luck. The more of each, the more likely you are to make good judgements and the situation work out ok rather than a catastrophe.
Having said that - reading the above I'm struck with the repetition of something that clearly wasn't working, and how we in the military world beast ourselves with "if the plan isn't working, change the plan". Now we don't necessarily have a great record of actually implementing it in the breach, but its underpinned every aspect of my training, and pretty much sums up what we do in situations. Have a plan, try and implement it, but crucially, keep evaluating it. If things aren't going right, then change the plan.
In this situation, the plan to clear the ice and get the trains moving was clearly a good plan at the outset, and would deliver the desired passenger (& operator) result (win-win). However, once it starts taking a bit longer than planned, and once you've had to widen your isolation area due to people getting off (which rightly or not, they did), then your plan is pretty much in tatters. Trying to keep to that plan, recovering the people, re-securing the trains to potentially re-apply power whilst de-icing, is an obviously losing battle. It would have been a major effort to coordinate working out what was going on and to respond to it in the way they did, and can only ever have taken time, measured in hours (which fits the timelines). In that time, people, having already seen an example of what they can do to "self help", will only ever do one thing: follow on sooner or later.
Criticise the people getting off if it makes you feel better, but its human factors coming up against a Rule Book. As a student of reality, human factors will win every time in terms of what happens. A rule book that doesn't account for human factors is a bad rule book. Or at least, if implementation of the rule book doesn't given scope for suitably experienced and qualified people to go "out of limits" then it is a bad system.
In this case, once they'd realised people had de-trained somewhere and the implication of an inability to regain the situation (especially after the first time round the loop trying to re-secure only to find others had detrained), I suspect a decision to abandon their attempts to recover train movement and focus entirely on a more controlled evacuation would have been the better option than trying to push the snowball back uphill.
Finally: a key part of our military process is communication. Keep communicating to people what you are doing, and more so, what you are trying to achieve. That way they are much, much less likely to strike off on things that they think will help them/everyone (but don't) and much more likely to have the patience to wait until you task them. This is a problem as we train people to use their initiative and that doing something is better than doing nothing. Except that often it isn't! hence keeping everyone informed of the what and the why helps avoid confusion and counter productive activities. Which given the situations are already extremely confusing and of course "the enemy has a voice too" makes life quite challenging. So as above - I've considerable sympathy for the operators here, but it does appear as if an earlier recognition that the situation was departing control (and a timeframe of 3-4 hours is a perfect example of how things can rapidly start to drag on as you have to wait for answers and coordinate with people who then need to physically move locations etc. and so start to lose your momentum and control of events) and a change was needed. Ultimately, the failure to recognise and adapt led to what I would say is an inevitable human factors outcome since people will always run out of patience and start to take control of their own destiny - their perception of risk at that point being very distorted by the natural drive to "take control" and the positive feelings that activity releases. Throwing criticism at them is unlikely to achieve anything, and rather masks a systemic failure to include the people aspect in the operator's planning. Which is reflected in the many comments that support the pax actions - ultimately this railway business is all about people, not things and rules. Forget its about people, forget they are essentially mental (we talk about making things "squaddie proof" for very good reasons borne of experience) and you are not going to have a happy outcome.
Err, sorry for waffling!
