'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
On a typical "modern" (ie late 20th century) train like the mainline EMUs I would normally catch when I was a commuter decades ago, the equivalent "cut out" is a glass sealed MCB in the cab, a driver who wants to get rid of this safety feature has to destroy a tell-tale glass seal and company regulations will make them write up why it was necessary then replace it - and of course the automation records each occurrence because why wouldn't it. The paperwork is a faff, so is getting a new unique numbered seal, so drivers actually choose the non-risky option when it's available.
On the steam loco, that "cut out" is operated by cutting a cable tie. The cable ties aren't unique of course, and so investigators found countless broken ties littering the dirty cab of the steam locomotive, because you just cut the tie, do what you want and before signing off try to remember to fit a new cable tie. No actual safety delivered.
Wasn’t even prospective, preventative action. There was pretty rash series of decapitations/fatalities in the past decade of people who think sticking their head out of a moving train is risk free that lead to this ruling being made mandatory.
They kicked off claiming it would ruin the ambience, but really it cost a very pretty penny.
They’d do anything to save a few quid; it’s amazing how they used to get cheap oil lube and coal from Russia, and since the war they’ve miraculously been managing to procure the same rates from new companies that have appeared overnight/moved production to sanction-less countries just over the border like Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan etc.
As for calling them “sanction-less”, you clearly have no clue what you are talking about. Spouting nonsense based on a rudimentary understanding of the geography and little else.
FYI this comes across a bit misogynistic! I'd word this differently
The driver being prosecuted and sentenced in court may also deter future drivers from doing that again, especially if someone can show they're being pressured from above to do anything unsafe again, someone much higger up will be very, very upset with them.
Meanwhile in Germany, there was a head-on between two trains with modern safety systems on the train because the _signaller_ was playing games on his phone - I'm not sure if it was actually candy crush - and pressed the "just ignore this red and go at normal speed on to the single line" signal button without following any procedures like checking whether there's a possibility that there's already a train there.
I understand the UK is weird because of route knowledge [a German train driver can expect to just operate a train to anywhere in Germany, a British train driver needs to be intimately familiar with any track section to be used for their journey, as a result the signals in the UK don't need to tell you e.g. "Go 50" but instead "The signal after next is red" because the driver knows "that's the signal in New Town, it's uphill from here, so I can do about 50"] But it seems like caution would be possible everywhere.
There was a time when, whatever buttons or levers you had, nothing goes on the single line until someone has found the token. You wonder whether a digital "TOKEN OUT" light would be possible on the signallers panel.
Driving at caution is great when you're looking out for a possible broken rail, tree on the line, or a huge maintenance trolley left behind by an incompetent overnight repair team (this happened not too far back), or when you're expecting a train ahead stopped or going in the same direction.
In the German case, you have a train going from A to B correctly going at linespeed under greens, so even if you signal the train from B to A into the section at caution, you're going to have a bad day. Perhaps lower impact velocity/energy, but I still wouldn't fancy the probability of survival under those circumstances.
Switzerland does caution if you're instructed to pass a red light, I think Austria does too?
Fun fact: in Germany, the now-infamous company Die-Lei GmbH lost their license to run trains after a few accidents where a side finding was that their trains kept running with PZB (a magloop system halting a train when running a red light) disabled, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers and weeks worth of operating time. It never was a contributing factor in any of their incident, but the persistence of these findings was enough for the railway safety authority to yank their license for good.
YouTuber and former loco driver Alwin Meschede has a (German) video series where he narrates the investigation reports and the final license yank order, while drinking a gulp of wine for each violation [1].
Who cares? This is a fucking train! DO NOT use a touchscreen!! Have we not learned anything from modern cars??
Which means developing and integrating new systems to support a tiny number of steam trains.
I hate touchscreens myself in vehicles. I hate them. But I'm just commenting on the fact that if the trains can't adopt a technology that already exists, they may have to suspend services.
This is a nice quirk that I would definitely someone to have strategically forgotten about during the privatisation process.
See, the privatisation says that there need to be lots of companies (otherwise we can't have a "free market" right?) but there's an inconvenient natural monopoly maintaining like, the actual railway track and so on - so, that natural monopoly was made into a separate company. At first the Tories kept pretending it would be profitable, but of course it's national infrastructure, how much does the USA get in direct revenue from its interstates? Nothing of course, they're a cost - you pay for them from public funds because they're a public good, duh. So in practice this is always in effect government owned and costs money even if sometimes it was notionally a "private company" that the government lends money to and never receives repayment.
Anyway, the numerous small private train operating companies (TOCs) would get an OK to use these monopoly lines along certain agreed parameters. So e.g. maybe your firm wants to run Plymouth to (London) Waterloo, once an hour from 0600 to 2300, somebody else needs the Southampton to Winchester stretch twice an hour from 0800 to 2200, they timetable all this so there's no conflict - if everybody runs to time. As a result there has to be a mechanism to handle all this arbitrary scheduling among any number of operators, even though most routes, most of the time have a single incumbent and nobody else. An enormous waste just because of ideology.
Three notionally profitable (though in fact never actually profitable) businesses can exist in this environment beyond the traditional TOCs which operate a regular scheduled train service ordinary people will use.
One is little private tours, like we'll buy one service a week from Waterloo to Winchester on a Sunday afternoon in the summer, we'll sell Famous Steam Tree beer on that train and charge £80 (no beer included) for all customers, plus £50 if you want an ordinary train home afterwards. If we can secure a genuine refurbished steam train we'll use that.
Another is private trains, closer to what you see in a Western movie sometimes. Jim and Sarah are very wealthy, they want to get married in a nice castle that's out in the sticks, for $$$ we'll sort out the authorisation so then their guests all just show up at the railway station in a city somewhere with like an airport and so on, they board the train, maybe it's a nice old steam train, maybe not, and we go direct, non-stop to the closest stop to the castle where the wedding will happen. This is crazy expensive, like, private jet expensive, but it is possible because of the "Open access" requirement where businesses can pay to use the railway lines.
The third, and one you're most likely to have glimpsed, are tiny rogue operators. Buy (well, lease) a couple of trains, get yourself routed for back and forth and offer novel routes. This would genuinely have been harder to arrange in the British Rail era, you'd need BR to decide it was worth having this weird new route. But the reason BR wouldn't have gone for this was that it was usually one person's weird dream journey and few actual customers wanted this new route, so it was unprofitable. For example a company operated from Wrexham and Marylebone, running a few trains per day, and I believe never breaking even in their 3-5 years of existence.
I can’t believe there’s nothing more they could have done to make this more aesthetically pleasing within the £9m budget, for which we appear to have got a robust PC case and an admittedly complicated sounding power supply.
Sure, fitting modern signaling equipment on a steam train isn't easy, but it also doesn't feel impossible. Building a brand new steam locomotive, again, sure you can probably do it, but it seems like a lot of expensive work, requiring skills that hasn't been employed in decades and it's probably not really worth doing, financially speaking.
Edit: Apparently it is not uncommon to build steam locomotives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotives_of_the_21st_...
They certainly wouldn’t be your only venture, more “you have a lot of money and love trains” but seats on these things can run for £2k a head and they run basically every day from Spring through to end of Summer.
https://www.picnictrain.com.au/
We had to stop & wait at various points on our return day trip for other passenger services to pass us. Had to wait for some freight services to clear a block at a few places too.
There was an auxiliary diesel unit not actively used apart from for power AFAIK (and additional emergency mobility should things go kaboom/excess wheel slip).
Maybe that has some the extra safety systems on it though.
That would be rare, usually the very first carriage has to have all the security systems.
They are/were also planning on adding it to 844 too.
Also couldn’t they just retrofit a battery somewhere instead of a new steam generator? It also seems like they reinvented the wheel making it rugged. Seems like they’re spending too much money on this project, but it seems to be private money so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: presumably the rest of the train also has power? Is the power draw from this system so intense it needs a new generator? Or does it need the resilience maybe?
Kindly hand in your tail coat, stovepipe hat and brass head-up-display monocle on your way out, sir!
HEP cars (aka 'generator cars') are a solution, but the UK never really had them, we had converted diesels called 'Ethels', which are functionally identical to the current practice of tagging a diesel locomotive at idle on the tail of the train, but all of those were scrapped.
* Ethel => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_25#Train_He...
People don't work for free. Industrial-grade items are expensive.
You can't just seal some components. You have to seal those components then conduct rigorous and extensive testing of those components to make sure they're actually sealed. Then you have to document the process.
An alternator on a steam locomotive isn't a little thing you can hold in your hands and get from an auto parts store for next to nothing.
Here is one of the two new "alternators" installed on 60163 Tornado: https://www.a1steam.com/tornado/news/tornado-details/doublin...
I'm a hardware guy. The number 1 thing software guys don't get about hardware is that everything you do costs a shit-ton of money. You can't just download a hardware IDE, register a hardware domain, and vibe code your way to a hardware startup.
Well, you can, but the technical term for that is "kickstarter scam".
Conversion 2 will be less expensive than 1, conversion 3 will be less expensive than 2, and by the time they get to the 500th conversion it'll be practically cheap.
> The cab was stripped back to bare metal because of the sheer number of new conduits, boxes and equipment and that was the only practical way to do it
And the system has to be homologated, which takes a lot of time to test in a unknown environment.