I'm amazed at the specificity of some excuses.
I got "a road vehicle colliding with a bridge earlier on this train's journey", and (forgot the actual text) "a bicycle on the rail earlier on this train's journey".
I got "a road vehicle colliding with a bridge earlier on this train's journey", and (forgot the actual text) "a bicycle on the rail earlier on this train's journey".
After all you’re much more likely to forgive ScotRail for getting home late if you’re told your train was delayed due to someone leaving a bike on the track, than you’re if you’re told nothing. A lack of explanation just comes across as either indifference to your situation, or incompetence. Neither is a good look.
The slippery varnish substantially reduces breaking performance, and increases breaking distances. That in turn means all of your safety margins vanish, and it’s no longer possible to operate trains at full speed, and at normal follow distances. All of that in turn means delays on an individual train basis, but also lower network capacity. Given that most of the UKs commuter rail operates at 80%+ capacity (basically the limit, before minor failures consistently result in catastrophic cascading failures), the result is that leaves on the rails is actually a pretty serious problem that’s tricky to solve.
I don't deny it's an issue. But it happens every year. It's like having trains that can't run when it rains.
At the end of the day, leaves cause issues for about four weeks out of every year. That makes it tricky to justify adding thousands of pounds of specialised equipment to every train, just to deal with four weeks.
Of course, you could find a solution to all these things, and have far more reliable trains. But the cost would be high, and it would require our government to actually want reliable public transport. So far, all the evidence suggests our government is only interested in subsiding private vehicles, because public transport "doesn't return a profit".
Edit: D'oh, already suggested up-thread. Rest of my comment still stands.
I'm sure even electric trains already have a compressed air system for brakes (though being UK, it might be vacuum).
If you really want to get fancy, have a computer vision system looking ahead that will only turn on the air when it sees leaves.
A train costs multiple millions of £.
So 'thousands' of pounds seems reasonable to keep them running properly for 1/12 of the year.
Are leaves heavy and sticky when just fallen? From my experience that seems to be the case when they've been around a while. The whole issue is that the network is running at near capacity. If they're being moved away every hour, it doesn't seem like you'd get that issue.
Ultimately it hasn't been done, so in some sense you are correct. I think it's more a case that they can't be bothered, rather than a technical or financial limitation.
Seems rather uncharitable. Given how much effort various rail companies put into providing a good rail service, seems rather odd that they got to leaves and decided “they can’t be bothered” anymore. I mean why stop there? Why bother running the trains at all? Why bother doing track upgrades or maintenance?
There’s 20,000 miles of train track in the UK. At 100mph it would take you 8days to traverse all of it. You would need 200 leaf clearing units running at 100mph 24/7 to clear leaves every hour. I can see why that might be a logistical challenge.