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Comment by yangyang | Hacker News Reader

And yet the Docklands Light Railway, also in London, and also under TfL control (though operation is outsourced to Serco, soon to be Keolis/Amey) has run without drivers (but with "train captains") for its entire history, over 25 years. And it does travel underground in places.

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Did they always have train captains ? I know there have been incidents (like a gang of kids chasing someone onto the tracks to be run over), that might have made them introduce "train captains".

According to Wikipedia they've always had them. Doesn't having someone like this on the train mean it's not really "driverless"?

To a point. They walk up and down the train, do the door opening / closing, check tickets here and there, and occasionally drive the train (though it always seems painfully slow when under manual control).

I don't know how they'd do it on the tube. Presumably door closing would still require manual control.

> Presumably door closing would still require manual control.

What for? The doors can be on a timer (station-specific if necessary)

People getting stuck in doors, holding doors open, etc. etc. - though I wonder if it would be more efficient to have a person per train or a person per platform for that.

Indeed - quite a lot of stations already have platform staff for checking doors and notifying the driver that it's OK to close. I suppose it would depend on the ratio of active trains to stations as it which is most efficient. I believe TfL have committed to manning all stations after the closure of ticket offices so having platform dispatch staff may be a useful use of labour.

That did occur to me after I posted - someone on the platform would be much more useful - able to directions to people, etc.

Vancouver's Canada Line (fully automated) opens the doors fully and then tries to slowly close them if it detects an obstruction. A similar system could be in place.

They'd probably never close in some stations, like Victoria at rush hour :-)

Yeah there's attendants at every station, they're just not always out on the platforms. I've seen them bitch people out for doing it. There's also announcements really frequently telling people not to hold doors.

I asked a PSA why it's slow and she told me that when under manual operation the train is "off the grid", so to speak, and is speed limited for safety reasons (other trains no longer know where it is)

The door closing works well for the DLR -- the PSA checks all the doors are clear and then shuts them all at once. This probably isn't viable for a tube because platforms are smaller and more congested.

Just an anecdote: I use the DLR multiple times per day and after a few years using it I finally got stuck on a door the other day. I pushed the button to open the door, it started opening and when it was around 80% opened, I was entering the carriage, when it suddenly closed really fast. I got sandwiched on my shoulders and then on my right foot. The door didn't open, I had to force myself to remove the damn foot painfully. It did hurt. Can't imagine what could happen if it was someone weaker (like a child or an elderly). Oh, and my red snickers turned black.

They definitely had them before that incident (which was at Shadwell IIRC).

SideburnsOfDoom mentioned that:

> Driverless trains work well enough on the DLR in East London, and are probably an inevitable step in 21st century London.

He / she edited after I replied.

My apologies. Most of my edits are to fix typos or for sentence clarity, but I did add that part just after submitting the first version.

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