Solar flares could cause delays on the railways | Hacker News Reader

Solar flares could cause delays on the railways

ianvisits.co.uk

38 pointszeristor17 comments

No mention of the Carrington Event of 1859?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Just for a brief tl;dr:

Before the completion of the Transcontinental RR (~1863), the first transcontinental telegraph was completed in the early 1850's... it's because of the length of conductivity that the morse keys were literally sparking during the Carrington Solar Disturbances (all the collected solar energy caused the relays to self-tap/arc).

More recently, Quebec has had several 201X localized brownouts, largely along their longer-distance, high-voltage lines (which ironically enough gather renewable/hydro energy). During more active times of the solar cycle (a cycle longer than a dozen years), there are still issues / risks of similar events occurring in real time.

Lloyds has a specific insurance that is for solar storm coverage (which could be a potentially trillions-of-dollars global interruption.

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Sweet Dreams

Is there any weather or earth phenomena that doesn't cause trains to delay? Heat, cold, wind, rain, fog, leaves on tracks, COVID, internet attacks ... If it is worthy of talking about it is likely to make the trains late. For all thier size, speed and power, they remain the most delicate of Earth's creatures.

Bear in mind the trains were delayed, not stopped: your youngest needing a pee, or seeing a horse, can easily cause the same devastating effect.

It's the uncertainty of train delays (in the UK) and your powerlessness as a passenger that's really painful. You get at least one of:

- delay announced increasing by 1 minute with every minute that passes

- no time given, just "delayed"

- trains that were delayed cancelled after 20 minutes wait

- except when you find another way, then they turn up

- additional stops, not announced until you're onboard (so useful to nobody)

- skipping stops/terminating early, again not announced

- announcements that the train will terminate early, only for the driver to announce he's heard nothing of the sort and carry on

etc...

I've been on a train twice in the last ten years.

On the one ride, it was hot so it expected to arrive about 45 minutes late. You can't go full speed on hot tracks.

On the same ride, there was construction, so we sat and waited for about 45 minutes in the middle of no where, in the dark. It was long enough they told us to just let our kids run around and brought the snack cart around for free.

That's a lot of delay for a 3.5h ride.

Ontario, Canada.

My in-laws use trains to travel between cities a fair amount. More delayed trips than not.

I have relatives like that too. They always want us to pick them up at the train station. I have never seen a Canadian passenger train arrive on time.

It says a lot that Ontario was my first guess when you started listing your complaints.

Not Amtrak, not some third-world country with a corrupt government... Ontario.

The LRT in Ottawa is going well too!

Who would have expect it to snow? Or be warm?

I didn't expect it to fall off the rails though. Not that soon.

Canada is not a train culture.

The tracks are a complex system that makes it possible to ride at high speed where the driver can’t see ahead if his braking zone is clear, but it is still safe. It’s full of failsafes to make that possible but these also cause the delays. For instance if a signal bulb burns out, that part of the track is automatically blocked until it is repaired.

There are a lot of delays but not a lot of accidents, basically the only accidents are those the system can’t catch, so people on the tracks and cars ignoring the signals.

Closing tracks for blown bulbs? Every basic exit sign above every door in every public building contains a redundant bulb specifically to prevent closure in the event of a dead bulb.

I’m sure most of HackerNews has some handwavy easy ideas for how to improve it. But as you can imagine there is a good reason the system is built on hard guarantees, not obvious shortcuts.

If your simple exit sign fails, it isn’t going to cause two trains carrying potentially thousands of passengers to collide head-on. If that happens it’s a major disaster that’ll be world news and there’s going to be questions to be answered, like why the safety wasn’t guaranteed.

If this was the case they'd just be waiting until the second bulb burnt out as well and then we're back to square one.

Keep in mind that this is UK-centric where the railway landscape is a shit-show on many levels. It's possible to make trains more reliable but that would require investment - if there's any country that's going to do this it's definitely not going to be the UK.

Yet somehow Swiss trains are on time (less than 3 minutes late) over 93% of the time and over 98% of connections are made. [1]

Nothing is 100% reliable but you work around this just like you install multiple network switches in a DC because one might just fail.

BTW, did you know that the SBB estimates around 10% of riders have an invalid, incorrect or just no ticket? This is however a percentage at which trying to crack down more the costs would outway the recovery in lost tickets. They realized that you can never have 100%, therefore turn styles and one way doors aren't a thing at Swiss train track. They randomly check tickets but there isn't a check at the door. You are responsible to make sure you have the right ticket.

[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...

No shit.

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