Oops, new Miami station doesn't fit its trains

miamiherald.com

31 points·fuzzfactor··5 comments

As a software engineer, I sometimes thank the heavens that when we make mistakes, they are often relatively easy to correct.

IIRC there is such a thing as a clearance diagram which locomotives and rolling stock will be required to meet. I don't know how these are managed. The diagrams can include effects of track curvature in tunnels, etc.

From the article it sounds like the fixed platforms themselves were built out of spec.

They're managed with much effort, at least where I live. There are so many things near the track (in a sense that's why the track is built in the first place). Florida man may have skimped on the effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_gauge now go procrastinate.

Sure there is, but people (designers/builders) need to check it.

This - sometimes - simply doesn't happen, I can remember at least two similar cases, a "big" one in France:

https://www.cnet.com/news/engineers-blamed-as-france-orders-...

And a "smaller" in Italy (no English source I can find, sorry):

https://www.ferrovieabbandonate.it/linea_dismessa.php?id=226

https://www.comune.roma.it/PCR/resources/cms/documents/Incon...

basically the tunnel didn't allow enough clearance for a double track in certain points, so a single track was placed (temporarily, for Itala 90 world championship, some 30 years ago, the tunnel was used - with single track - for a few days and then closed, it will probably be reopened in 2022).

IIRC what happened in France was indeed that the platforms were out of spec, or perhaps the specs were out of platform. The rolling-stock people asked the tracks-and-platforms people for the specs, and got the latest version. The fact that several older platforms still in use were built to an earlier set of specs got lost somewhere along the way...

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