Severe overhead wire damage near Peterborough 23/09

[Chris M]

There would have been a greater risk, certainly. How much greater is a very difficult question to answer, as it will depend on a number of factors.

Based on the assumption that there will come a point in every incident or delay to service, no matter how minor, when passengers will self-detrain. There are only two ways to avoid this:
1. Get the train moving before the point is reached (what happens in almost every incident).
2. Detrain the passengers before they detrain themselves (what happens in almost all the rest of the incidents).
This probably sounds overly dramatic, but given that (unless the train is adjacent to a platform) the railway will normally have at least a couple of hours to get the train moving again, the tipping point is rarely reached.

There are things that are going to, generally, increase reduce the length of time before passengers self-detrain. For example:

• Fire or smoke on-board
• Hot, dry weather
• (Perceived) short distance to a station (particularly if visible from the train)*
• Apparently benign local area (e.g. urban or flat rural)*
• crowded train (probably approximately inversely proportional to the number of available seats)
• lack of concrete information from on-board staff (regardless of the reason for this)*
• lack of obvious reason for time spent stationary*
• lack of water and/or food on-board
• non-working toilets
• Other passengers detraining

There are also things that will increase the length of time:

• Train movements on adjacent lines
• Cold and/or wet weather
• Very rural location*
• (Perceived) long distance to the nearest station*
• Very obvious danger visible from the train (fire, flood, dangling OHLE)*
• Audible, frequent and informative announcements*
• More seats than passengers
• No shortage of food or water
• Working toilets
• Nobody else self-detraining

*From the perspective of a passenger who knows nothing about the railways, and nothing about the incident other than what they have heard over the PA.

These are not exclusive lists, and I have not attempted to put them in any order, not all will apply in all situations, not all are equally significant and it is never going to be possible to put hard numbers on any of them.

 

[Pete_uk]

I wonder has long before the first serious de-wire on the Great Western

 

[gavin]

I wonder has long before the first serious de-wire on the Great Western

Will depend on how good a job they do take HS1 that rarely has OHL damage if they do it to that standard it could be a while

 

[Darandio]

And not forgetting any de-wirement might not be a failure of the infrastructure...

 

[Domh245]

Regardless of how or when it happens, at least the independent registration design of the Series 1 equipment used on the GWML should mean that they can keep other tracks open to traffic whilst the dewirement is fixed, unlike the headspan designs of other schemes.

 

[joncombe]

Got the most pathetic response to my complaint over the handling of this incident by VTEC, specifically why they didn't provide any food or drink for more than 7 hours (their passengers charters says they will provide refreshments if delayed for more than 60 minutes).

In times of disruption we may remove all catering facilities and this is purely down to health and safety. If we operate a crowded service due to disruption staff will not be able to navigate through the carriages safely with hot food and hot drinks.

Yes the catch all "health and safety" which seems to be used as an excuse for not doing just about anything these days. Of course the train I was on never had any buffet even when it left Leeds so it was not closed. Neither did I ask why they didn't provide HOT food/drinks just why there was none provided. They could, for instance, have provided something at one of the stations we were stuck at, but didn't do that either.

The charter also has this to say about alternative transport

We will arrange alternative transport to get you to your final destination if:
• the next connecting train is 60 minutes later than the one you should have caught; and
• alternative transport will get you there quicker than waiting for the next train

Well in this case the delay was around 5 and a half hours so I don't doubt that alternative transport would have been quicker. To which VTEC responded

We will do our upmost to get our passengers from their origin station to their destination and sometimes this may mean we have to bring another service into operation, as I understand was the case on this occasion.

If we are unable to provide another service we will look at replacement bus or taxis, if neither of these are available we may then look at hotels for our passengers, as you were able to get to your destination on this journey we would not have offered any of the above.

So it seems that a taxi or bus is a last resort and they would rather leave passengers hanging about for many hours whilst they arrange another train instead.

Seems like a classic fob off. Is it worth escalating to Transport Focus? Or would that be a waste of time too? The initial response ignored all the above points and was basically just "here's a voucher, now go away". I replied that they had not answered why they didn't offer any alternative transport (or even arrange for ticket acceptance with other TOCs) and the above is the response. And this second response also makes it clear they are not really interested in how people are looked after in the event of disruption.