Ways for passengers to stop trains in emergency

[Recessio]

Riding home on a dusty Northern Line train , when the observant guard pulled the brake handle down as a passenger seemed to be trying to get onto an already closed up train which was moving down the platform , not too fast , but there was a very impressive stop .....naturally there were some very strong words issued.........

I'm always impressed how sharp a tube train can stop when it's accelerating out of a station. I was on a 92 once where a passenger had a bag stuck in the door and must've yanked it hard enough to trigger a full-anchors stop. Everyone standing in the carriage went down like dominoes !

 

[styles]

If anyone is ringing 999, could they not ask for BTP rather than just the police? I’m sure the operator could put the call direct through to them in the same way they can the coastguard for example.

No, BTP is not contactable via the 999 system. Evening if asking specifically for British Transport Police you will be routed to the appropriate Home Office force for your telephone.

There are industry internal 999 equivalent numbers for BTP (and emergency service interagency numbers) but no external facing number.

BTP specifically, maybe. A generic Home Office force maybe [likely, IMO] not. Ambulance NHS Trusts also have very differing policies between them and I would not be surprised if they’re scratching around for a telephone number for Network Rail, or if they’d default to asking BTP to help play Chinese whispers.

I find this to not match my admittedly one experience of calling 999 to report a sheep which had wandered onto the tracks. I don't actually recall if it was BTP I spoke to, but it was a BTP panda car which turned up a few minutes later! This was admittedly over a decade ago so maybe the policy or procedure has changed?

It is possibly worth noting this from the BTP's website:

Contact us​

By phone
Emergency 999

And from the British Transport Police Authority website:

British Transport Police (BTP) – 0800 40 50 40 or visit BTP’s website or dial 999 in an emergency​

It may be true that by calling 999 and asking for the police you'll be initially routed through to the local constab, but I'd stop short of saying that BTP is not contactable via the 999 system. Even if there's a "middle man" involved, or an extra call step, BTP can be contacted by 999, and the only reason I really raise this point is that members of the public who find this post should feel confident that in an emergency on the railways they can call 999 and the police will respond, instead of potentially taking time to Google a BTP or Network Rail emergency number.

There's some good advice in this thread about what people should do to get help in an emergency, but I think the average passenger is unlikely to look up the Network Rail emergency number or know what sort of light signal to make with the torch on their phone, nor trust the public to be able to recall and do this under the pressure of an emergency really. I expect the vast majority of people would do one of three things - use a passenger emergency alarm on a train or at a station, call 999, or wave frantically at the train if it's approaching. All of these would be acceptable really, and while a driver may know that two hands raised in the air is an emergency stop signal, I'm pretty sure drivers would take something like a frantic waving of arms to also be a signal to stop (assuming it didn't look like a child waving at a train to toot their horn!)

In some countries the hand gesture is hands held steady above the head, others it's flashing a lamp with an arm into and out of the torso gesture, and in others it's an arm making and up and down gesture. In some cases these signals actually mean completely different things in different countries, so I really wouldn't rely on passengers knowing this and I probably wouldn't invest money into signage trying to educate them of it either. It would probably just be safer to install passenger assistance points with [functional] emergency comms, and encourage 999 handlers to route to BTP for reports of things on the railways.

For those reasons, my advice to members of the public would be to use an emergency alarm on a train or at a station, dial 999, or make a gesture which looks like distress. I personally wouldn't even bother trying things like the Network Rail emergency number or the BTP's non-emergency numbers or even trying to remember which hand/lamp signal the UK uses.

 

[Intellectual98]

It only takes one, though. The German Eschede disaster was caused by a train not being stopped when people on board (including the guard) knew a tyre had become detached from a wheel and penetrated the passenger cabin. And a Caledonian Sleeper train was saved from disaster when the guard used it to stop the train from the coaches when the brake pipe hadn't been correctly connected to the loco in error and he realised it was approaching Waverley far too fast.

Yes, you might get time wasted if it's misused, though in the days when it always stopped the train it didn't happen *that* often as a malicious thing. But I'd rather have the facility.

You can point to some situations where it could have helped, then I can point at Huntingdon, where an alarm stopping the train would have trapped everyone on board with the attacker, including the driver who typically would need to walk back and reset an alarm on older stock, and significantly delayed the emergency response. There's no perfect solution, but in my experience, being able to see what is happening, talk to someone if safe, and continuing to the next station is a much preferable experience to needing to walk back into a completely unknown situation to reset an alarm.

In our latest derailments this summer for instance, I doubt a passenger could even stand up to reach an alarm with it bouncing along the sleepers.

 

[styles]

You can point to some situations where it could have helped, then I can point at Huntingdon, where an alarm stopping the train would have trapped everyone on board with the attacker, including the driver who typically would need to walk back and reset an alarm on older stock, and significantly delayed the emergency response. There's no perfect solution, but in my experience, being able to see what is happening, talk to someone if safe, and continuing to the next station is a much preferable experience to needing to walk back into a completely unknown situation to reset an alarm.

In our latest derailments this summer for instance, I doubt a passenger could even stand up to reach an alarm with it bouncing along the sleepers.

I think it's a compromise situation really. You want passenger alarms so that if the doors are accidentally left open or someone takes ill etc then you can contact the driver.

At the same time, they're not going to be much use if your train derails and falls over because the driver is going to know anyway so no passenger really needs to sound an alarm unless they think the driver has gone unconscious (but that's what all the dead man's switches are for anyway).

That's not to say that drivers need to treat every signal from a passenger (whether it's an emergency alarm, a red flag, two hands in the air, or some frantic waving) is a requirement to stop; it's just a way of alerting a driver or someone else with control that there may be an issue.

I'm sure I looked into the issue of penalties imposed for misuse of passenger alarms at TfL recently and their response was that they had zero prosecutions in the past 5 years or so. It's a bit like 999 - people only really get punished if they very obviously misuse them. Almost all cases of passenger alarm use are either what a passenger believes to be an emergency, or an accidental press. The operators don't want to penalise people for using them for what they may consider an emergency but the driver determines is not, etc because being penalised could discourage them for using them in a future when it is actually an emergency. The occasional false alarm is better than a dropped fag end causing a fire and a passenger not wanting to use the alarm because they think they'll be landed with a £1,000 fine (or whatever it is on the standard scale at the moment!) So, on balance, I think it's better to have them than not, the vast majority of passengers are actually quite sensible, and the driver or train manager can decide whether it requires an emergency stop or just carrying on to the next station or maybe even no exceptional action.

Edit: here is the TfL response I had seen: https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-ar...r/tube-emergency-alarm-penalties-improper-use

Date: Friday 6 January 2023
Since 2016, TfL has not pursued a prosecution or issued any penalties related to improper use of the emergency alarm.

 

[Lockwood]

I took the opportunity today to talk to some of the BTP outreach team.

It took a while for the question I was asking to be understood, probably because they were not expecting it.

999 will not connect a member of public to BTP. In an emergency, dial 999 and that will connect to the relevant Home Office force. They will be able to respond to an incident quicker. If the incident is on or near the line, they will send the incident to BTP as they will not have the relevant training etc to access the track.

You can directly contact BTP by text on 61016.


I think this is pretty much where this discussion was going, but I went for a primary source.

 

[saismee]

I took the opportunity today to talk to some of the BTP outreach team.

It took a while for the question I was asking to be understood, probably because they were not expecting it.

999 will not connect a member of public to BTP. In an emergency, dial 999 and that will connect to the relevant Home Office force. They will be able to respond to an incident quicker. If the incident is on or near the line, they will send the incident to BTP as they will not have the relevant training etc to access the track.

You can directly contact BTP by text on 61016.


I think this is pretty much where this discussion was going, but I went for a primary source.

The best solution is to tell a member of staff. I remember a time that someone ran on the tracks between platforms quite near to a train approaching, and because a member of staff witnessed and called it in, trains were stopped before he had even made it onto the other platform.

It's obviously not possible at every station. In the event that a passenger went over the edge, I would start by calling 999, then show visible distress at the far end of the platform. I think your chances of success depend entirely on whether the train is booked to stop or not.

I certainly wouldn't be jumping down to help someone unconscious as I doubt I would be able to lift them over the rails.