Major disruption on UK rail network after 'cracks found on high-speed trains' | Hacker News Reader

Major disruption on UK rail network after 'cracks found on high-speed trains'

news.sky.com

12 pointsedward7 comments

> The company added that there would be "only an extremely limited service with no alternative means of transport available" for those routes.

These trains only first came into service in 2017 on GWR. I'm surprised they got rid of the Intercity 125 sets - which had been in service for 40 years on these routes - so quickly.

Of course it costs money to maintain the old rolling stock, so you don't want them sitting around, but they've replaced around 50 sets in the last 4 years. I would have thought they would have done it slower to avoid issues like this (GWR was the first train company to use this series).

They're very capital intensive so it's understandable that they got rid of the old trains. The new train sets seem to be around £20 million each[1]. They're also not owned but rented by the train operating companies.

[1] Very hard to find accurate prices, so that was got by dividing the number of sets by a contract price, probably only order-of-magnitude correct.

No alternative means of transport is surprising. Taxis are still in operation in the UK. The National Rail conditions of carriage specify the operator's obligation to passengers when services fall out as:

28.2. Where disruption prevents you from completing the journey for which your Ticket is valid and is being used, any Train Company will, where it reasonably can, provide you with alternative means of travel to your destination, or if necessary, provide overnight accommodation for you.

  > A GWR spokesperson told Sky News there have been reports of "hairline cracks on the suspension" of the trains but insisted the issue "doesn't affect the structural integrity of the carriage".

Is the suspension considered part of the carriage, or is this doublespeak?

They're part of the bogies and likely can be separated in a straightforward way.

I'm guessing this is probably the usual fight between media trying to overexaggerate stories like this, and PR departments trying to downplay them into nothingness.

GWR's PR might be expecting some a newspaper to release a inflammatory story like "Foreign built trains are so dangerous that they will explode if the hit a bumblebee", and so they will try and put out preemptory statements trying to guide perception and downplay the severity of the situation.

And the media will be expecting GWR's PR to be putting out equally disingenuous releases like "we redefined the metric system for the purposes of measuring cracks and now all the cracks are within acceptable tolerances", so they'll be trying to guide perception to make it as hard as possible for GWR to do that.

Maybe I'm too cynical but but given that this is a fairly new story, I'd assume that GWR's statements would be entirely doublespeak as you say, and media fearmongering to be entirely speculation. There hasn't been enough time for anyone to do enough sleuthing to work out what's really happening.

I guess we'll find out in time whether this is really a big problem or just a flash in the pan. Being a safety critical engineer I'm much more interested in the nature of the problem rather than the scale of the disruption, but quite often the media stops being interested as soon as the problem is fixed. So unless this ends up being a long disruption (like boeing's recent groundings) I guess we'll probably never know.

Planned obsolescence gone bad?

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