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Munin posted:Having just been reminded of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alptransit] what are the current prospects of shifting more freight traffic to rail? There is always a lot of talk about the environmental and other costs of hauling so much stuff by truck but any attempt to promote rail over road freight seems to get shot down. I'd like to answer this one if I may? A lot of freight goes to unusual places without overhead power. This means it is more practical to haul freight by diesel the whole way than to change locomotive when you run out of overhead lines. This is why there are big plans to extend electrification in the UK network at the same time as clearing all the platforms, tunnels, bridges and viaducts for the heavier vehicle loads and bigger swept envelope of a freight train. This is quite a task, especially if you want to go through Standedge tunnel.
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May 10, 2012 21:31
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Ghost of Babyhead posted:That can't be it, they charge you to piss in the Gare du Nord as well, at the other end of the Eurostar. 30p seems to be the standardised cost of a poo ticket in all NR stations but I think St Pancras isn't owned by NR. Wikipedia seems to confirm this.
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May 13, 2012 17:48
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Bozza posted:My favourite story of railways in the Victorian era being shits to each other is that the platforms at Basingstoke are numbered backwards to the rest of the stations on that route, so the Great Western Railway platform wouldn't be number 1. Pontefract still has 3 stations because of Victorian competition. On the other hand, Huddersfield has a gigantic train parthenon because the competitors decided to join forces. Signalling right? I'll have 2 LOCs and a relay room please.
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May 14, 2012 22:58
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This just made my week. For content, the health and safety at work act came in in 1974, although legislation of its sort has been around since the factory acts of the 1800s. Rail has always had a poor worker safety record. Our track safety instructor used to delight in telling us about a time he had to flatten himself against a tunnel lining to avoid a train, watching carriage door handles whizz past his face and knowing that the guard van at the end of the train was often just a little bit bigger than the passenger carriages.
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Jan 8, 2013 00:13
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The beeb posted:...£10m to improve capacity at Harrogate station. It later said the money was actually being spent 36 miles (58km) away in Huddersfield Each reiteration of the figures gets trumpeted like it is extra money, rather than a dreary repeat of a 2 year old promise. Fun fact- Harrogate is a low point on the rail network, you go up (towards London) whichever way the train leaves the station.
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Jan 17, 2013 22:00
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Dual mode trains are probably going to get rolled out as part of the intercity express programme so that trains can, say, run to Edinburgh on electricity and then up to Inverness on diesel. The problem with dual mode is that when you're under wires, you're dragging round a heavy diesel engine and fuel tank that isn't doing anything except wearing out the track and taking energy to accelerate. This would be even worse with batteries, their energy density is around 1/30 of that of diesel. If we're going to store energy on board, this way would be much more fun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrobus
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Feb 4, 2013 22:16
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Zephro posted:'embark' is old marine terminology, though I wonder if it was also needless jargon back then. John Humphrys has a massive problem with trains terminating at platforms, fearing that they will cease to exist. Personally, I dislike being called a customer when I'm actually a passenger. One of these days, doctors and hospitals are going to have customers too. Gorbless the English language, may she rest in peace  For content, some of those old mechanical signal boxes still communicate with the adjacent box using coded bell rings. 2 rings for "train in section", 4 rings for "help I'm being attacked" etc.
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Feb 12, 2013 20:01
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So in the more remote signal boxes, on little used lines, things can get quite boring. One signaller I know was gluing the periscope onto an airfix submarine when the regional head of signalling popped in for a surprise visit. There's another story of a signaller who used to take visits from prostitutes...
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Feb 13, 2013 21:35
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Today I think is an apt time to tell some things I know about overhead line electrification. Overhead line electrification began in earnest in the late 1950's with the West Coast Main Line. The wires run at 25,000 volts and are suspended from a mast at the side of the track, or a portal which bridges across the railway and usually carries the wires for several tracks. Typically, two wires run: the contact which the train pantograph brushes against, and the catenary, which keeps the contact wire nice and flat. Droppers hang the contact wire off the catenary at intervals between each mast. Contact wires are copper and about as thick as your finger. The contact wire actually zigzags left to right as you go along the track so it doesn't wear a groove into the train pantograph, though obviously both parts wear out occasionally and need replacing. Wires are run in sections are about 1.5km long, at each end they overlap with the next section and then head diagonally off the track to an anchor structure. As well as the catenary keeping the contact wire nice and level, the wires are pulled tight. On a typical contact/catenary pair, the load is about 2.5 tonnes. This can be applied when the wires are put up (fixed tension equipment) or by hanging weights from the wire at each anchor structure (auto tension equipment). Fixed tension can be problematic because the copper changes length with temperature; the tension in fixed tension equipment is not fixed. All the bits you need to build an overhead line system in the UK, from a threaded bar to an eight track portal with five anchorages and a side cantilever are described in a massive catalogue of parts. There are about 10,000 entries, all of which can be described by their reference number, like argos. The first generation of equipment developed is the venerable Mk 1 series. This was developed in the early days of electrification and is used on the West Coast Main Line and typically has masts about every 30-50m. What is important in this picture is that each track's contact and catenary are separately supported from the portals. This is called independent registration.  Fastforward now to the eighties. The East Coast Main Line is to be electrified, but the Department for Transport wants it done cheaply. The Mk 3 series of equipment is developed which increases mast spacing to about 60m. Fewer structures means less cost. Another cost saving measure is to replace the portals with headspans wherever possible. Instead of bridging the track with a steel beam, an arrangement of wires is used as the picture shows.  While this setup does satisfy the requirement of being a lot cheaper, it introduces a few problems. First, the stiffness of the whole arrangement is much lower. In high winds the trains have to run slower because the wires bounce about too much. Second, you can't push the pantograph against the wire as hard, which limits train top speed. Practically though, plenty of other things stop you from going fast enough that this is a problem and so really it is of minor importance. Third, when something does go wrong, like in this video, the pantograph tends to rip down not just the contact and catenary directly above it but the headspans and all the wires they support too. Say this happens just South of St Neots on a Tuesday evening. The high speed train in question takes a kilometre to stop (which is actually not very far at all), ripping out headspans and four tracks' overhead wires in a glorious sparky tangle. That disruption is only expected for 36 hours is quite amazing. Had there been money to spend on portals with independent registration, back in the 80's, perhaps only one track would have been closed by the accident, tl;dr pay more taxes, don't vote tory
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Feb 21, 2013 00:14
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Bozza posted:I highly recommend, if are going that way, getting Chiltern Railways new Mark 3 coaches from London to Brum. Original layout, none of this high density airline poo poo that plagues standard class on FGW et al. Mk 3 coaches? Are these the ones Grand Central ran for a while, with the low reclined, deeply upholstered seats that make you go "aaaah" when you sit down? The ones I plan my travel specifically to use rather than use the desperately painful, unpadded, workhouse issue snooze preventing spine-deformers that seem to be replacing them?
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Mar 25, 2013 23:50
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Here's another picture from the Rail Accident Investigation Branch, your one stop shop for gory train news. Given that the augers are 350mm in diameter, these guys are probably trying to drill piled foundations. There are exclusion zones over underground tunnels (and for about 10m off the central axis) that are meant to stop competent people doing this sort of thing. At least they found out now, rather than when the thing they were building collapsed. As far as who gets crucified for this, and someone will be, the responsibility lies with the client to provide contractors with information they need to do their job safely. As goddamnedtwisto pointed out, the best available information can still be patchy, contradictory, outdated or total crap. I've received 25 scans of the same blank drawing from National Grid in the past. 
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Apr 4, 2013 19:24
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JingleBells posted:The only person who I imagine really is annoyed about it is the bloke on streetview taking pictures of the trains - the new bridge looks much taller in the network rail article. You have higher parapets if the lines are electrified to prevent people dangling things into the wires, and also because modern bridges have to be able to stop people driving through the parapet That kid is going to need a stepladder
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May 20, 2013 19:38
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Brovine posted:It's not only trains that don't like lightning - planes, too. The BBC decided to go with a completely unnewsworthy story about a Ryanair flight that got hit with no significant damage, but there's always the odd lightning strike here and there, and some of them do end up causing visible damage. Still perfectly safe in most cases, though. Lightning is the attributed cause of that massive Chinese high speed rail crash that happened recently. Supposedly it struck a location case (lineside box of wiring) and caused all the signals to go green. Lighting caused it, along with a total disregard for safety. coffeetable posted:Isn't (Spain) this the kind of thing that should send alarm bells screaming everywhere? Or am I overestimating the amount of data a train sends back to a control room? I don't think we have any idea what (who?) was meant to be regulating the train's speed yet. There are many automatic systems which can control train speed but in Britain at least, they're only used in problematic or high risk parts of the network. For something analogous, check out how much chaos Morpeth has caused over the years
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Jul 25, 2013 18:47
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Cancelbot posted:In terms of rolling stock. Because I love I remember stumbling across a standard describing allowable "transient air pressure changes within the carriage"- effectively how hard your ears can pop when the train goes through a tunnel. If that's been limited, I should think that carriage behaviour like sway, ride roughness and running noise would be too. From a track point of view, bouncy, harder riding trains put more loads into the rails, track bed and structures and wear them out quicker. I did a walkout on Manchester Metrolink once, and you could see an oscillating wear pattern down the rail head where the rolling stock suspension had reached some sort of harmonic frequency.
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Sep 1, 2013 22:33
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about NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness) are there set standards that the trains must abide to so that they're not a bouncy, loud hellride?
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Brovine posted:Bozza, OHLE related question: Just to the north of Coppermill Junction (Tottenham Hale --> Liverpool Street/Stratford), there are some strange spirals, balls and discs attached to the cables that run between the top outer corners of the overhead line masts. What are they for? I'd like to try to answer this one, if I may? You could be talking about some kind of decoration to increase visual presence. I've seen red warning triangles fixed to overhead wires (ok earth wires if we're being precise, they don't carry current except when something goes wrong) where a road runs parallel and close to the railway. These would be to stop someone on the road driving say a hedge trimmer or telehandler, or just a long load, from hitting the wires. Or you could be talking about the OLE switching. Overhead lines are divided into sections so that bits can be powered down and replaced, or safely worked around. To allow this to happen, you have a mast which supports a gigantic, high voltage version of your lamp switch. In this case, the spirals and balls and discs would be on a gantry reaching across the tracks. Or you could be talking about some sort of point discharge rig to prevent lightning strikes, but this is a guess.
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Sep 9, 2013 19:20
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coffeetable posted:The central problem in my eyes is that HS2 supposes more people should be working in London. £42bn of investment in the North would go a long way towards correcting the brain drain half the country suffers. I really don't buy this argument against HS2. My friends whose brains drained into London didn't relocate because the journey was easy, they went and stayed because it was hard. From (admittedly statistically irrelevant) personal experience, the rapid rail journey from home to the capital means I can work successfully on London projects from a base in the provinces. I earn money on Crossrail but I spend it in Settle. London will always get investment, because investment begets itself- we invest in better transport links, which allow more workers in, so we build more offices for the workers, which need better transport links... and so on. Regardless of whether that runaway expansion is right, it happens, and HS2 would allow a lot more people to tap London work but spend their earnings somewhere else.
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Sep 25, 2013 00:28
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Brovine posted:...On the Chingford line I saw a hell of a lot of different designs of OHLE masts/gantries - at one point I think there were five different styles in the space of six masts. Oooh, interesting question. OLE masts come from a standard catalogue so they are in theory reusable, however they are usually So, OLE masts can be different sizes if they're supporting different numbers of wires. At a junction especially, you might see a 152UC 'I beam' mast, then a 305DC 'back to back channel with channel crosspieces' then a 4 angle 'lattice' mast, then a paired UC '2 I beams joined together' mast. That there would be going up the sizes from a puny "i can barely support one pair of wires" to all out pants bursting "I span up to 32m and I can support six sets of wires plus four end of wire anchorages with a three tonne transformer hanging off each side". You might also have seen signal gantries, which again would be common near junctions. These can be all sorts of designs. OLE masts though, always have one of these on. The plate with numbers, I mean, not the "danger overhead live wires" sign. That usually goes without saying. 
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Nov 21, 2013 00:28
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Lofty132 posted:If a member of Traincrew becomes pregnant for my company they are to be taken off their duties immediately (since a member of staff once alleged she lost her baby due to falling on a train that jerked suddenly). Our union (TSSA) newsletter had an article a while back about Spanish staff fighting for and winning maternity rights just like these. The reason they did it was because the miscarriage rate among train staff who worked through pregnancy was something like 30%. I think. I read it a while ago.
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Dec 30, 2013 13:29
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StarkingBarfish posted:So CERN is planning on building a 100km collider in the (far) future as an upgrade to the LHC. Thanks for this! My favourite graph is the one on page 20, which shows that although construction costs have been going up, the risk of a higher total cost has been decreasing. I don't know why they don't point this out with the HS2 cost estimates: everyone shits the bed when the cost rises from a projected £40Bn to £45Bn, but actually the numbers are probably going from £40Bn +/- 40% to £45Bn +/- 20%
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Feb 15, 2014 20:55
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So, HS2 is going to be poo poo-canned "temporarily" so we can buy more dredgers for Somerset. http://www.nce.co.uk/opinion/the-choice-between-resilient-infrastructure-and-hs2/8659100.article?blocktitle=Comment&contentID=647 NCE posted:The choice between resilient infrastructure and HS2
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Feb 21, 2014 00:38
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Bozza posted:RIP Big Bob Pictures would be awesome, thanks for the article. It's like they're bending over backwards to avoid mentioning the term "Civil Engineer", not that we get bitter about these things or anything...
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Mar 16, 2014 19:37
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thehustler posted:Is there any way to explain that away as "necessary because of how important London is" - ie, proportionally would you expect that level of investment? You could argue some of it away as the cost of construction. An item of infrastructure is always going to be more expensive to create in London than say Burnley. The cheapest way to get a railway across London nowadays is by mining it through fifty odd metres underground with a giant mechanical worm, for example.
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Mar 31, 2014 19:56
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LemonDrizzle posted:Network rail fined £53m for being very naughty boys and making all the trains late: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28191430 quote:The regulator did, however, note "a number of significant successes" over the past five years. In relevant news, the signalling centres which are replacing all these hundreds of little signal boxes are now quite intimidating places. They control so much infrastructure from one place that 3m high electrified fences start to seem like a reasonable precaution. We're also having to rename all the railway tracks because when you ring up to take a possession on the, for example, "Down Main", instead of getting through to the quirky fellow in a glorified garden shed half a mile down the track, you get someone in a command bunker a hundred miles away who controls twenty "Down Main" lines.
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Jul 7, 2014 19:24
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Bozza posted:The loving goods loops are an absolute nightmare for this. York. Consultancy rather than NR but by a bizarre quirk, we're the remainder of the LNE Civil Engineering Design Group which got sold off with privatisation. A few of the senior guys still have the BR perks like free rail travel and the pensions. Oh the pensions...
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Jul 9, 2014 17:38
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Bozza posted:Been thinking about maybe going for a Senior Project Engineer job in York next year's maybe. Any good? York's nice. Just very nice, you know? Provincial. It's crawling with railway firms and handy for the great outdoors, so I'm here and happy for the foreseeable future. The SPE guys I've worked for all seem to get jobs that aren't what they've specialised in - you get SPE (Sigs) guys managing earthworks schemes and SPE (PWay) guys managing bridge replacements. I don't know if that's cause you seldom know which discipline is going to be the biggie when a project starts, or because they've gone into delivery instead of design, or because someone got pregnant, or something else. Whatever, if you enjoy signalling design and want to stick with it I'd make drat sure that's what you're going to get, not some track drainage scheme involving 18 months of discussions about newts. Creeping design nationalisation though? I thought you'd just spun off a load of NR design capacity into a separate company, so it could compete with the private sector?
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Jul 13, 2014 22:47
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Network Rail posted:At a general meeting today, 97.3% of Network Rail's 41 Members (the company's equivalent of shareholders) voted to change the company's articles of association. http://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/News-Releases/Network-Rail-Members-vote-for-change-213c.aspx So it seems the government has been forced to accept that it owns the railway network.
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Aug 30, 2014 12:14
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Anyone else heard the rumour that NR have spent all their money for control period five - the money that was meant to last until 2018?
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Jul 21, 2016 20:20
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Bozza's a signalling engineer. Politely, they're like the witch doctors in the railway engineering tribe. They traffic in a world that touches only lightly on our own, concerning themselves with the rites of flank protection and the proper ways to appease the sighting committee. Something as mundane as a collapsing wall wouldn't even register. What you've got here is a typical railway geotechnical engineering headache. It's a Victorian era earthwork which was almost certainly designed using the "suck it and see" approach because more advanced methods didn't exist then. Typically they have a terrifyingly low factor of safety and the railway network is littered with these timebombs, just waiting for an extremal rainfall event to flop over. Dawlish, Farnham and that one in the Midlands where the tunnel mouth came down last year are all recent examples. This one is compounded because it's likely that the railway land doesn't extend beyond the cutting. Network Rail have no right of access to the land adjacent or right to control what gets put on it. You can see from the aerial picture that the slope failure plane extends back probably five metres from the cutting so anything closer than that- portakabins or fridge mountains for example, is going to add load to the cutting walls. Some poor bastard is going to spend the next five years of week nights between about 0200 and 0530 (when the electrified wires can be isolated because the trains aren't running) spidering over every single square foot of these walls trying to work out how the hell to tell if they're going to fall down before said poor bastard is retired and safely out of blame's way.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:27
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A load of electrification has been kicked into the next control period (post 2018) because the one in the Western region is going horrendously over budget. We're delivering one scheme for the price of three. I think that region is getting resignalled too because it makes sense to while you're stringing up overhead wires - old signalling systems aren't immune and you more or less have to replace them. As far as padding timetables goes, it was reported in Private Eye that the London to Newcastle train is timetabled to take 20% longer running from Durham to Newcastle than the London to Edinburgh train is over the same section. The only reason for this is to allow it to make time up on the last leg and not be recorded as late. The change is going to align the rail definition of late with the passenger definition of late which I think is a good thing, though inevitably there'll be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about it.
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May 8, 2017 21:47
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