London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours | Hacker News Reader

London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

metro.co.uk

86 pointsepstein91 comments

> Some frustrated travellers even smashed their way out the cold, dark trains and walked down the tracks to escape after getting stuck for more than three hours.

It's a shame train operators don't feel able to make the common sense decision to give the passengers the option to walk before the three hour mark, without requiring them to "smash their way out".

Obviously, some passengers won't be able to make the trek, and it's not without danger, but given the choice between walking over some slippery rocks and spending 4 hours without access to a toilet, I know which I'd prefer.

I was in a similar situation on a London train (different line) this month. The problem is that the operators genuinely do not know how long things are going to take. I agree that the TTR is obviously unacceptable, but the whole service is run on a shoestring budget and is constantly cancelled or late, so there isn't really the capital available to do better.

When you have a situation like this you run a worst case scenario and put in effect immediately.

Whether that is telling passengers that busses will be there in two hours or whatever, you work it out.

If something like this happens in a winter storm, it can become deadly.

> When you have a situation like this you run a worst case scenario and put in effect immediately.

Almost all of the time it's not a worst case scenario though. Most of the time it's just that someone has dropped their phone on the track and trains have been asked to stop so that it can be retrieved.

Worst case scenario management is expensive and dangerous (e.g. walking on tracks) because the net risk or net cost is beneficial in the face of a bad situation. It is a good thing that we don't jump straight to these sorts of solutions as it would be in general more dangerous and our services would cost even more.

Now, is 3 hours too long? Yeah probably. But these sorts of issues happen maybe once a year per line, it's hard to know when you're in one.

> Almost all of the time it's not a worst case scenario though.

While this is true, this would seem to be one of those cases where the people in charge should have known it was a worst case scenario fairly early on. In which case they should have activated the worst case scenario fallback plan much earlier.

In other words, it's not a matter of treating every scenario as worst case, but of quickly spotting the ones that are so fallback plans can be activated much sooner to avoid stranding people for hours.

> It's hard to know when you're in one.

The passengers and the driver of that train obviously didn't know--but somebody knew fairly early on that this wasn't going to be a quick fix, and that somebody should be responsible for communicating that knowledge to all the affected trains and telling their drivers to evacuate because this isn't going to be fixed any time soon. The big question I would be asking is why that wasn't done and why it isn't standard operating procedure in cases like this.

I’d imagine when you’re minutes away from losing auxiliary power without any idea when main power will return that’s an easy trigger for worst case actions.

Here it seems people were waiting 45 mins to an hour after that happened.

What winter storms in london would make a powerless train deadly in a few hours?

If we approached life with a worst-case scenario mindset, I wouldn't leave my house without first putting on full body armor with steel plate inserts, and a bomb-squad helmet.

Most of the time, it's not going to be a 3-hour stop, and anyone trying to walk the tracks is likely to create a safety problem for themselves and other trains.

At the time of the stop, if nobody knows how bad the outage is likely to be, there is no point in time when making the call to have the passengers all walk out is the right thing to do.

Transport for London has a budget of over 10 billion pounds, how is that a 'shoestring budget'?

If the cost for maintaining the infrastructure in 10x that, then it's a shoestring budget. You have to compare the budget to a baseline, you can't just evaluate it as an absolute. Yes, £10B looks like a big number, but what do you compare it to?

TFL is actually profitable, you could google that in less time that it would take to write this comment, these wild hypotheticals are just noise

uxp8u61q's point is not a wild hypothetical, and is a valid point regardless of the profit status of TFL.

- If your budget is $10 but it costs $100, that's shoestring.

- If your budget is $10 but it costs $1, that's not shoestring.

You need to know both values; shoestring is relative.

TfL was profitable pre-covid. It is not currently profitable because remote work and such have lowered ridership, only running a surplus this year due to government support.

> Yes, £10B looks like a big number, but what do you compare it to?

Other large cities with comparable transport infrastructure?

You, or any passing reader, can just spend 30 seconds with a search engine and find dozens of papers, reports, presentations, etc... doing this kind of financial comparison.

Do you not understand rhetorical questions? I know what the budget should be compared to.

Then why submit a reply that adds nothing to the conversation?

You might as well submit replies saying that rivers flow downhill instead of uphill.

That doesn't justify letting passengers sit in the dark for 3 hours. Most riders probably expect to last their trip half an hour, with the usual variance already factored in.

What are you talking about with "shoestring budget?". Over £2bn was spent on electrifying the GWML, nearly £20bn spent on the Elizabeth line (which included further upgrades on the GWML), and completely new trains on nearly every service were bought (at extreme cost). There must have been >£5bn spent on this line in the last decade. Per mile, it is probably one of the best funded lines in the world.

GWML is having constant maintenance problems. I don't think this is a budget problem, I think it's NR totally dropping the ball on keeping on top of stuff. NR is extremely poorly run and wasteful; I know many people who used to work for them but left to rejoin via a subcontractor (at a hugely increased cost to NR), to do the exact same job, because NRs payscales are extremely concrete so they constantly lose vital people to this - this isn't a budget problem as they're actually paying way way more for the same staff this way.

Subcontractors are also eating them alive because they have no senior, experienced management (see above problem). You have people basically straight out of uni "project managing" subcontractors for 7 or 8 figure contracts, completely clueless.

From my perspective as a passenger, trains constantly being delayed or cancelled due to problems with the track suggests the track is not being adequately maintained. It could be the case that there is sufficient money available and it is being poorly spent. I am not inclined to think this because there is a general trend of chronically underfunding public services, but I don't have specific knowledge about national rail.

Incidentally, I don't think NR is free to set its own pay scales, so it may well be the case that the money wastage you describe is mandated by the same government that funds it.

So people walk out after a 10 minute outage, then it’s fixed, but you can’t turn power on because a few people have decided to go for a stroll?

yes, because what if one of those people is touching the power rail? What do we know about the demographics of the people walking? How do we know they all made it out, or is someone lying down somewhere on the track?

There's no power rail. It's overhead power - that was the problem. According to the union a manager providing strike cover was responsible for damaging the overhead lines - https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/gwr-train-cables-p...

That seems slanderous by the Union. They are suggesting that (likely a senior instructor) caused the collision and one of their members would have avoided it.

Hence the different protocols needed for a 10 minute outage and a 3 hour outage.

You can't tell at the 10 minute mark whether or not power will be back in 10 more minutes, or in 3 hours.

In software incident management the rule of thumb is that at the n minute mark, in general, expected outage duration is 2n minutes.

But you can tell when 3 hours have passed and decide upfront - as a matter of policy - where to draw a line.

And at the 4 hour mark, the passengers were rescued. It would be ironic, of course, if the rescue train hit any one of the geniuses that smashed windows and started walking the tracks.

And where would you draw the line?

Once you detect that electricity supply is damaged and that it’s over 10 miles and you know how many trains have stopped moving … you know it won’t be 10 minutes. It can’t take long to figure out what trains have stopped moving and where electricity has been cut.

I find it entirely unsurprising that passengers take matters into their own hands. It can be a safety issue to be stuck on a train for a long time, and often there are no or very few updates from the driver while you are stuck.

In London, most times I get on the train, I’m expecting it to be a sub-10 minute trip. I may even be just wearing a t-shirt and shorts since I was heading to the gym. Others with health issues may not have brought the medication/food they need.

Similarly when this happens in summer, you can bet many people don’t have any water with them. I’ve personally been stuck on a broken down train during a 35c+ heatwave with no AC. Elderly passengers were showing signs of heatstroke and, with no communication, it does feel desperate.

> Similarly when this happens in summer, you can bet many people don’t have any water with them.

When I lived there in 2010/2011, I regularly saw signs posted at tube stations "bring water, it'll be hot!".

London underground is heat saturated. Which also means free heating for deep heat pumps.

London trains are mostly third rail powered rather than overhead line, right? You really don't want people walking on one of those. Like, you don't want people walking on any train line, but particularly not one with a third rail.

It's very hard to tell with the Metro's haphazard writing style, but it sounds like the passengers walking on the lines were on the Elizabeth line. That's one of the Transport for London lines which uses overhead power rather than third rail.

These are mainline trains between Paddington and Acton Main Line which use overhead power lines, not a third rail as with Underground services.

fourth*. Underground uses 2 rails for power delivery. A lot of the rest of SE London/Kent uses 3rd rail.

The old-style "tube" trains are all DC third rail IIRC, but the newer trainsets such as the Elizabeth and Thameslink are all overhead AC. So this would actually be one of the few metro trains where it would be remotely safe to walk the tracks provided all the trains were stopped...

The Elizabeth line also has an actual walkway for emergency (and presumably also maintenance) purposes.

The newly built sections under central London, but lots of the Elizabeth Line is using older track.

The line by paddington has long sections where the tube runs in parallel, in one of the pictures you can see a lot of people walking towards a tune depot and somebody is crossing one of the lines with a middle rail which is part of their DC electrification system (I assume this had been turned off - but this may have been turned off because they realised people were on the line, not the other way round).

In this case, one quote I've seen is that a train's pantograph was "caught up" in the overhead wires and dragging them along, which makes it sound like some were now on the ground target than overhead.

If not all trains are stopped, aren't they in danger of collision if they remain on the train?

I'd really hope that modern signalling prevents trains entering signal blocks with other trains in (or can't confirm there's no train in) them.

As in actively prevents, locking the brakes at the previous block, rather than allowing drivers to miss or ignore signals.

We've had plenty of issues with this to learn from in the history of railways for it not to be a high priority.

E: aye seems that way :)

> In order to prevent a train from entering an occupied block, each signal has a mechanical ‘trainstop’ next to the track. This device applies the brakes of any train which tries to pass a stop signal.

https://madeby.tfl.gov.uk/2019/07/24/behind-the-scenes-signa...

The issue is during evacuation, people may not have the sense to stick to the track their train is stuck on, and may spread out into a parallel track.

That is an issue for sure, but I'm responding to the possibility of a train hitting another where the passengers have opted to stay on the halted train

The walking passengers may enter a block that their train has already cleared. So you can't really assume that wherever they walk will be locked.

The comment I'm responding to is concerned of the risks of staying on a halted train. No walkers in this hypothetical.

That is for sure an issue, but not the issue I'm responding to

No, not in the slightest.

It s probably also illegal. They could prosecute you for trespassing on the rail way if you are not supervised.

I used to commute into London before Covid and there were times when we were delayed so long that I thought we might have to resort to cannibalism.

I'm frankly astonished it took people 3 hrs to smash the windows and get out. I'd have politely asked the operator to open it up and let us all out after the 1h mark and if they didn't I would smash the shit out of a window and crawl out. No chance I would sit in there for 3 hours.

Are you British though…

But why smash windows? The doors aren't speed locked because the train isn't moving, so you can just use the emergency release on the doors and then pull them open. It's not trivial but neither is smashing a window, and the doors are closer to ground level (most adults should be able to sit on the door sill and lower themselves to ground level fairly comfortably)

They didn't smash the windows. Look at the photos, and not the text of the article.

Sure, though you have to shut down the whole line because it's not all overhead electrification, there are sections where tube lines run past and have 3rd rail electrification (and may even have been running).

The whole lot has to be shut down, you have to get all the people on all the trains to a safe place and then make sure it's safe before turning everything back on.

Not saying it's impossible, just that it's not the most straightforward.

Based on the photos, "smash their way out" appears to mean "open the door with the clearly marked manual override level", and "stranded" appears to mean "had to cross a couple tracks, and walk to the nearest gap in the fence".

The text of the article suggests they had to use the emergency windows / break stuff, and that they were stuck in a tunnel without a pedestrian evacuation route (which would be illegal even here in the US where we hate trains).

The real screw up was probably lack of training of the people on duty. They should have evacuated the train (i.e., opened the doors, and had conductors guide the passengers with flashlights) after an hour, at the most.

Britain obviously wouldn't build a new tunnel without an evacuation route, but the existing tunnels can be 100 or more years old and lack them.

That's exactly why I read the article! I wanted to see the statement from the train company explaining how they're fixing that!

There isn’t really a way short of fixing this short of building brand new replacement tunnels at great expense.

You can’t really widen the tunnels, because the tunnel lining itself is the structure preventing water seepage, cave-in, etc.

It should also be noted that the London underground (the space underground, not the rail system) is extremely convoluted as people have been building stuff there for centuries.

It's not that common sense. The railway is responsible for its customers, and a lot more bad stuff can happen with people walking on the tracks than in stuck in cars. Getting cold and hungry is not the same as injury or worse.

The tracks may still be in use by other trains, it fact it may be how help and alternative transport arrive.

On another forum, someone who was stuck on one of the trains commented that staff were just walking past the carriages not attempting to convey any information to those stuck on board, which compounded the frustration.

Railway staff will complain about the people who got off the trains because we don’t have a customer focussed railway in any way shape or form. Staff are 300% safety focussed and will expect passengers to spend an indefinite amount of time on the carriage with no food, water or toilets.

It’s simply unacceptable for 7 trains (1000-5000 people) to get stuck on an extremely busy and well-funded part of the railway network in our capital city and there not be an army-style, rapid-response team dispatched to help the vulnerable. Senior management know that the British will just put up and shut up - we should be much more American in these situations.

A report will be produced, “lessons will be learnt”, then the gradual degradation of our railway will continue.

Edit: for context, regarding high expectations: a 23 minute journey in rush hour on this route is around £27 ($34)

Off topic, but the phrasing of the headline[0] caught my attention. Shouldn't it be, "Thousands stranded in dark for hours as London trains see power cut"? Is this not as clear cut as I'm thinking? Maybe it's a British English thing?

[0] In case it changes for any reason, it's currently, "London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours".

It seems to muddle cause and effect. IMO it should read "Thousands stranded in dark for hours after London trains lose power."

I agree actually; that's even better. I was only referring to ordering around the "as".

rn the Headline for me shows "Passengers cold and angry after four-hour powercut on new £19,000,000,000 rail line"

please stay clear; the basilisk is feeding

That's the headline visible on the page. The <title> is what we're discussing here.

“New”

That rail line, and Ladbroke Grove in particular, dates back nearly 200 years.

That's referring to the Elizabeth line, which opened in 2022:

> "Trains stopped running between London Paddington and Heathrow Airport in the rush hour after damage to overhead cables, shutting down the £19billion Elizabeth Line and causing major disruption to National Rail and Heathrow Express services."

This point notwithstanding, it's not clear whether the 'cold and angry' passengers were those on the Elizabeth line - I doubt it, as the class 345 trains used on it have at least a 190Ah battery in each car that should stop the temperatures from getting too uncomfortable.

> the class 345 trains used on it have at least a 190Ah battery in each car that should stop the temperatures from getting too uncomfortable.

mentioned in the article

"Eventually, the battery backup running the train’s heating and light services ran out, and passengers were left in darkness for another hour-and-a-half until the evacuation came."

you can see in the picture it's a 345

you can also see it's at the throat leading out of paddington, i.e. the Great Western main line

The failure was on the GWML, it affected services to places like cardiff, Devon, Oxford, as well as the “Elizabeth line” branded trains running on the line.

There’s nothing new about the line. Obviously the overhead power wasn’t there in 1840, and indeed the rails were at a different gauge, but the failure was in the GWML, on a Paddington to Cardiff express on the Down Main. The failure was on a track the Elizabeth Line trains don’t even use, however due to the type of failure a massive section of overhead power had to be shut off

> Singer James Blunt and TV star Rachel Riley were caught up in the carnage

Carnage? I think the Metro staff need to borrow a dictionary.

As usual, his tweet on the subject is excellent - https://nitter.net/JamesBlunt/status/1733129524467163589#m

I think there's some rather below-the-belt plagiarism going on here:

Metro:

  The rush hour service lurched to a stop last night and left passengers onboard the crowded carriages for hours, as the driver drip-fed what little information they had to passengers.
  
  Eventually, the battery backup running the heating and lighting ran out, and those on board were left in darkness for another hour and a half until the evacuation came.

BBC:

  Commuter Mikey Worrall described the train as "lurching to a stop" and then a long, several-hour wait in semi-darkness as the driver drip-fed what little information they had through to passengers.
  
  Eventually, the battery back-up running the train's heating and light services ran out, and passengers were left in darkness for another hour and a half until they were evacuated from the train.

Or a reprint of an official statement.

I would love to imagine a world where the TfL official statement said that they ‘left passengers in darkness while the driver drip-fed them information’.

PR guy’s last day, maybe.

Or a reprint of some generic news report.

Meh. It's a factual article about an unfortunate event, there isn't much room for creativity here, and everyone is piecing together the facts from information shared with each other.

I'd rather the reporting about things like this spread as fast as possible rather than wordsmiths spending pointless hours figuring out how to reword the same fact to sound "original".

If it was a creative piece or a documentary I'd agree with you, but this is just a dumping of facts.

Not necessarily. Sometimes news articles come from a source such as the Associated Press and are rewritten or reworded before publication.

>Eventually, the battery backup running the heating and lighting ran out, and those on board were left in darkness for another hour and a half until the evacuation came.

Did they really need the heating, with packed trains?

The engineer should have turned it off, or set it to something like 16C.

Welcome to our LLM-based news cycle.

And they want to move everything to run on electrical power (cars, heating), pure madness.

Btw, I've just had a half-hour power-cut here in downtown Bucharest, it was fun getting up all those stairs with two bags of groceries but at least I hadn't got stuck in the elevator.

The power was cut because another train trashed the power line.

At a societal level the attraction of electricity is that it's fungible. Wind, Nuclear, Gas, Solar, the electricity is the same. If you need Natural Gas then too bad, no matter how cheap and readily available the Solar power or Coal is, you've got to buy Gas at any price from anyone who'll sell it to you. Individually this is at most a minor inconvenience but for a whole country it means too bad now your foreign policy is decided by people who can supply the fuel mix you need.

Yes, I know that electricity transport/distribution is very fickle, that was my point.

Yeah I sure do hate how my electric car just coasts to a stop and leaves me stranded the moment there is a grid failure.

I just had to sit there and watch all those happy people in their combustion cars easily pumping gas at the gas station which also had no power.

Roads definitely never get shut down due to accidents either.

I hope you created a petition to mandate gas powered elevators.

I personally had a single blackout in my 30 years on this planet, I think that's a fair price to pay for 24/7 light/heating/water/&c.

It’s a tragedy that industrial policies as important as these are pushed worldwide by people as cushioned as your example is, and, yes, that is part of the madness I was writing about.

The great tragedy of ... electricity ? Tell me more

Similar problems in Spain with trains. Third event in the last 12 days [1,2,3]. After a 2023 with a chain of problems that normally don't occur

Sabotage would be my first candidate. Too much coincidences and deja-vues floating around.

[1] Nov 26 2023: "Traffic cut off between Atocha and Recoletos. 37 passengers evacuated after the convoy derailed"

[2] Dic 5 2023: "Another derailment on the Madrid Cercanías cuts the Recoletos tunnel and causes significant delays"

[3] Dic 8 2023: "Third departure from the track of a train at Atocha station"

Looks like something directly copied from the Catalonian independentist playbook. This is very rare on Madrid, but small incidences designed to cause delays and chaos were not uncommon near Barcelona a few years ago.

London events may, or may not fall in the same category, but... yep; same day. Suspicious.

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