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Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that if we stressed Britain’s rails to the same degree as those in very hot countries, there would be the risk of increased tension on the rails in the winter.

This doesn't make sense, relative to many European countries the UK has much milder summers and winters.

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The Swiss railway has a (DE/FR/IT only) page at [0] to explain what they do.

- Start adjusting the tension on tracks starting in March when it gets warmer

- Use more expensive concrete sleepers where high forces appear (as TFA mentions)

- Cool exceptionally problematic parts of the track with water from tank cars

So in summary:

- spend money

That could explain why Network Rail isn't keen on doing any of that.

[0] https://company.sbb.ch/de/medien/dossier-medienschaffende/so...

It’s amazing how many problems are solvable simply by spending money.

A very Swiss attitude.

Like that time in 2016 when a Swiss town paid a 290k CHF fine rather than house Syrian refugees [0]!

[0] https://lenews.ch/2016/06/16/swiss-town-pays-instead-of-taki...

Yes that's shameful behavior. Good thing there are 5000 other communes that take their social responsibilities seriously.

Similarly in France there's a minimum percentage of social housing cities larger than X have to have, and some rich cities prefer paying the fine to actually building the required amounts of social housing.

It's amazing how many problems are solvable when a society chooses to solve them.

Note that the Swiss railway is charged fines for lateness to be paid to the state - so while I wouldn't say it's impossible that they just went and decided to take these measures to prevent rail buckling proactively, it's just as likely that they did the cost vs. payoff math.

So yes, society did solve this problem by electing officials who put those clauses into the railway's operating license - but there are a lot of steps in there that shouldn't be overlooked.

> - Start adjusting the tension on tracks starting in March when it gets warmer

And of course this also implies adjusting the tension on the tracks starting in October or so, too!

Despite saving all that money, the UK has the most expensive train ticket prices in Europe:

https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/train-prices-across-e...

And most of that money (apart from the recently nationalised operators like Northern, ScotRail and LNER) goes back to the foreign-ran railways (Abellio/Netherlands, Amey/Keolis/France, Arriva/Germany).

It's ace!

And the least generous seat pitch and the slowest journey times on trunk routes.

In the UK, the railway in summer breaks because it gets too warm. In winter it breaks because leaves get on the line or it is too cold. If its snowing, forget it. For a country whose national pastime is the weather, we don't deal with it very well the second it shifts out of its bland average. We spend the whole year wishing it would get hot and sunny, and then freak out the second it does.

Sounds like Seattle!

you could argue that that's because we have such mild weather. in other countries typical changes in the weather are a bigger deal, so it's less appropriate for small talk. this would go some way to explaining why trains stop running when it's very rainy/hot/cold/leafy/snowy. we don't expect the weather to be drastic, and it rarely is, so we're not prepared for it when it happens.

I have no idea whether any of that is true (I doubt it), but it was interesting to write out.

British weather is indeed often milder than that of other countries, but it’s also often much less predictable. In some countries it’s pretty reliably hot and sunny all summer and snowy all winter.

In Britain, reliably, once per day it'll rain. Only the rest of the weather is unpredictable.

Not in the past few weeks!

this may go even further as to explaining it's popularity as a conversation topic

And for a country that invented the railway too! (Although also meaning we have the world's oldest system, and a very expansive system at that - even after the Beeching cuts)

> In winter it breaks because leaves get on the line

This is something that media talking heads harp on about, leaves don't break the line they cause wheels to slip. It's like criticising road traffic for not handling oil spills

Except leaves falling in Autumn is a known event that one would presume thinking human beings would factor in. If oil fell from the sky onto the road for several weeks each year, I think people would cry very loudly for a solution.

There's a pretty simple solution to this as well (which actually is used for the most part) - cut down the trees which are right next to the railway.

The article explains that European countries replace their tracks between summer and winter

That seems inconsistent with my experience, unless they manage to do it completely without disturbing traffic.

A lot of the re-tensioning can be done overnight; there's no actual replacement, just changing the level of (pre)stress the steel is under.

All I could find is this paragraph:

> Some countries regularly have extremes in temperature that affect their railway. They may adjust their rails between summer and winter, or have other measures in place to manage the effects over the long term.

Which, when paraphrased, says: "Other countries may or may not do something else".

(Which, when paraphrased, says the PR person had no effing clue.)

Also "adjust" does not mean "replace".

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