The continental approach to Safety

[RT4038]

I worry about the trade offs between safety on the railway and more general public safety. If the railway enforces certain standards, that are very costly, ticket prices rise to pay for them and people then take the economic choice of moving to less safe transport options. Does that mean we've improved public safety? Comparisons with less wealthy countries in eastern Europe may not be optimal but I've travelled lots in Germany were unfenced mainline railways in the countryside are common. No wonder reopening a railway in Britain is so expensive with all that steel security fencing, footbridges and lifts.

I think it unlikely that the UK is going to relax 'safety standards' on railways, nor even have any kind of debate on the subject of relaxation. If anything, it is likely to go the other way. It is telling that gradually continental railways are moving towards stopping people having access to tracks etc. I wonder why that is? There is more than enough disruption on our 'secure' railway from suicides and trespass incidents, unless you think we should adopt the Indian Railways attitude towards this?

 

[Bletchleyite]

I think it unlikely that the UK is going to relax 'safety standards' on railways, nor even have any kind of debate on the subject of relaxation. If anything, it is likely to go the other way. It is telling that gradually continental railways are moving towards stopping people having access to tracks etc. I wonder why that is? There is more than enough disruption on our 'secure' railway from suicides and trespass incidents, unless you think we should adopt the Indian Railways attitude towards this?

I think there are two sides for this. Clearly having people walking all over a 125mph+ high speed railway is a bit silly. But equally, I don't see why tram principles shouldn't be applied to branch lines, as the risks are clearly very similar. That doesn't mean walking your dog along the line, but it does mean things like low platforms and walking across on the level at stations, just as the "hybrid tram" systems like Metrolink allow. A bit like the Swiss narrow gauge systems which operate rather more like tramways than railways in a lot of ways.

 

[Richard Scott]

The crossing in the OP does have half barriers.
You can still see trains moving off with doors closing as described above in Italy, Romania, France, Switzerland etc. As stock is modernised this will disappear.
The Swiss have introduced grants for station conversion to the new standards for disabled access. Larger stations on the RhB have been rebuilt with subways. The most dramatic rebuilds are on the MOB with lavish stations and wide platforms with canopies at Montbovon and Chateau d'Oex
A huge station rebuild is underway at Andermatt on the MGB.
Things are changing in Czechia too - google Smrzovka to see a classic small junction station rebuilt.
Take a look at YouTube for some wonderful Romanian videos of wayside halts and ancient practices preserved but with modern stock. It's all very relaxed there and rail travel is a gentle pleasure. Modernisations are proceeding rather slowly in Romania but the new island platforms are replacing traditional layouts as lines are upgraded. Sinaia is a good example.

Doors closing in Romania! I've seen many a train leave with doors open that remain open for the journey!

 

[RT4038]

I think there are two sides for this. Clearly having people walking all over a 125mph+ high speed railway is a bit silly. But equally, I don't see why tram principles shouldn't be applied to branch lines, as the risks are clearly very similar. That doesn't mean walking your dog along the line, but it does mean things like low platforms and walking across on the level at stations, just as the "hybrid tram" systems like Metrolink allow. A bit like the Swiss narrow gauge systems which operate rather more like tramways than railways in a lot of ways.

I am pretty sure that there is already some kind of legislation that would permit this (otherwise how do tram systems operate?) , but the downside is the maximum permitted speed will be that of 'stop on sight', which would rule out almost all of the UK network. It is not just the 125mph+ railway, it is the 25mph+ railway, and on curves in cuttings even less.
Our current 'blame' culture ('somebody else is responsible for having allowed us to get hurt') just will not allow for any relaxation.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I am pretty sure that there is already some kind of legislation that would permit this (otherwise how do tram systems operate?) , but the downside is the maximum permitted speed will be that of 'stop on sight', which would rule out almost all of the UK network. It is not just the 125mph+ railway, it is the 25mph+ railway, and on curves in cuttings even less.

Those kinds of branch lines do exist, of course, and the addition of track brakes to the vehicles used could increase that 25mph a bit.

I'd suggest it a concept definitely worth looking at if there are any branch-line "Beeching reversals". That and cheap DC OHLE, but that's one for another thread.

 

[RT4038]

Those kinds of branch lines do exist, of course, and the addition of track brakes to the vehicles used could increase that 25mph a bit.

I'd suggest it a concept definitely worth looking at if there are any branch-line "Beeching reversals". That and cheap DC OHLE, but that's one for another thread.

If, for instance, there was to be re-opening of the Leuchars-St Andrews line, a tram like operation as you suggest would be perfectly adequate . Longer lines, requiring faster speeds, would have to comply with normal pallisade fort requirements!

 

[Train jaune]

F
£800k for new footbridge and lifts at Horton in Ribblesdale. I do wonder if that's the best use of public money

 

[Bletchleyite]

£800k for new footbridge and lifts at Horton in Ribblesdale. I do wonder if that's the best use of public money

The reason for it is that a new freight flow will result in the line being blocked for fairly long periods. I suspect the freight is paying for it otherwise it wouldn't be happening.

 

[30907]

The reason for it is that a new freight flow will result in the line being blocked for fairly long periods. I suspect the freight is paying for it otherwise it wouldn't be happening.

And the local community pushed for it, IIRC from the thread on this.
Only slightly OT: level crossing safety is being tightened up Europe-wide - in (normally relaxed) Czechia branchline trains will suddenly slow from 50km/h to 5 because someone has done a risk assessment on an ungated crossing on a field track with appalling sightlines....

 

[duesselmartin]

It seems to me at times that all that safety regulation seems to make the common Sense of people obselete. Should it not be common sense that you should not Go around a barrier? That you use the footbridge and not cross the tracks beside it?
I am rather amused of Eurostar's safety video telling people how to get off a train at a station.
How did WE manage without it?

Martin

 

[Bletchleyite]

The problem is that common sense is, as you might say, often not actually that common.

 

[Jamesrob637]

Isn't there another thread entitled "Health and Safety in a different land?" on this forum? Pretty sure somebody there mentioned that long tunnel between Villach and Jeseniče whose name evades me right now (although I have travelled through it once) and the state of play in the former Yugoslavia.

 

[MarcVD]

Just some food for thought : rail is already the safest day to day mode of transportation. Therefore, any money spent to make it even safer is in fact going to be counter productive :
- either those expenses will drive the price of train transportation up, and will therefore send people back to less safe modes of transportation where they have 10 or 100 more chances to get killed;
- or the price will not go up but then it would have been way more efficient to spend this money to lower the price or enhance the service, as this would have attracted to rail more customers and thus reduce the death toll in other modes of transportation.
I'm not against technical progress, but not conviced at all that all the money thrown at, for example, the deployment of ETCS, is the wisest choice...

 

[RT4038]

Just some food for thought : rail is already the safest day to day mode of transportation. Therefore, any money spent to make it even safer is in fact going to be counter productive :
- either those expenses will drive the price of train transportation up, and will therefore send people back to less safe modes of transportation where they have 10 or 100 more chances to get killed;
- or the price will not go up but then it would have been way more efficient to spend this money to lower the price or enhance the service, as this would have attracted to rail more customers and thus reduce the death toll in other modes of transportation.
I'm not against technical progress, but not conviced at all that all the money thrown at, for example, the deployment of ETCS, is the wisest choice...

Rail was the safest day to day mode of transportation in 1950 also, so are you suggesting that spending money on rail safety since then has been counter productive? I don't think so.
Whilst undoubtedly there are some who travel by car because they consider the train too expensive, I would suggest that there are many more to whom the level of fares or service (within reason) would not make one iota of difference - car is more convenient or better conditions of travel or just plain the only way of making the journey, at the desired time.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Rail was the safest day to day mode of transportation in 1950 also, so are you suggesting that spending money on rail safety since then has been counter productive? I don't think so.

I think we are reaching a point of "diminishing returns" with regard to rail safety since the early to mid 2000s, and we might actually well save more lives if we stop additional spending but instead spend it on road safety measures or on keeping fares down and capacity up to attract people out of cars.

TPWS, for example, was a massive safety coup (being quite similar in concept to the highly successful Indusi PZB system in Germany but quite a bit cheaper), but gains from ERTMS are much, much lower. I supported and continue to support the former, but unless we are going for ATO and "guard-only operation" a la DLR I consider the latter a waste of money other than for HS2 where it might as well be in place from the start with a view to moving to ATO/"GOO".

 

[43096]

I think we are reaching a point of "diminishing returns" with regard to rail safety since the early to mid 2000s, and we might actually well save more lives if we stop additional spending but instead spend it on road safety measures or on keeping fares down and capacity up to attract people out of cars.

TPWS, for example, was a massive safety coup (being quite similar in concept to the highly successful Indusi PZB system in Germany but quite a bit cheaper), but gains from ERTMS are much, much lower. I supported and continue to support the former, but unless we are going for ATO and "guard-only operation" a la DLR I consider the latter a waste of money other than for HS2 where it might as well be in place from the start with a view to moving to ATO/"GOO".

The classic "increasingly endless means being devoted to increasingly meaningless ends" scenario.

When was the last passenger fatality as a result of a UK railway accident that could only be prevented by ATP/ETCS (rather than AWS/TPWS)?

The benefit of ETCS - in theory at least - is that it is meant to reduce the cost of re-signalling by use of a standardised system that is available from multiple manufacturers, so there is competition to keep costs down. That it comes with enhanced train protection can only be good - provided it meets the cost objective.

 

[Re 4/4]

When I was a child in Switzerland, and no-one thought twice about me being able to travel on trains on my own, most carriages had folding doors with a handle you had to rotate to open them. Opening them a bit before the train stopped in a station was usual; I once had the stupid idea of trying to see if it would open the doors somewhere on the open line and much to my surprise it worked! I quickly closed them again and never did that again.

Another Swiss speciality is in front of some tunnels or worksites with limited gauge clearance, they mount a set of brooms on a post to whack anyone who didn't read the bit about not sticking your head out of an open window.

They taught us about level crossings at school though, and I always took that very seriously.

 

[Gostav]

When I was a child in Switzerland, and no-one thought twice about me being able to travel on trains on my own, most carriages had folding doors with a handle you had to rotate to open them. Opening them a bit before the train stopped in a station was usual; I once had the stupid idea of trying to see if it would open the doors somewhere on the open line and much to my surprise it worked! I quickly closed them again and never did that again.

Another Swiss speciality is in front of some tunnels or worksites with limited gauge clearance, they mount a set of brooms on a post to whack anyone who didn't read the bit about not sticking your head out of an open window.

They taught us about level crossings at school though, and I always took that very seriously.

Old folding door, l think it is similar to this old news

But this old news in 2018 also shows modern automatic door will also failed or not fully closed.

 

[Oscar]

Oh, I know. They've changed things around a bit now with such oddities as smartphone app based dispatch, but SBB's curiously unsafe dispatch procedure always stood out (with its assumption that once the whistle goes nobody will do anything stupid even inadvertently). Many would think Switzerland would be H&S obsessive, but it's anything but. It's so much of an outlier that it took me many weeks of travel to work it out.

Roughly, it was:
- Guard blows whistle
- Guard operates box on platform, which gives RA to the driver after a time delay of a few seconds
- Guard returns to train, operates key to close other doors, has a quick look and closes his own door. The quality of this look varies, I on many occasions saw trains go out with doors open if someone had put their foot in at the wrong second, or the guard reboarding and not operating the close at all on one notable occasion (the doors close automatically on SBB stock on reaching 5km/h when the UIC door blocking kicks in). Notably the guard does not have any way, other than going into the saloon and pulling the emergency brake, of stopping the train at that point.
- Train departs, whether someone is stuck in the door or not

A guard was killed last year in Switzerland after being caught in a door which had not been closed before departure. On many trains, guards are now required to check all other doors are closed from the platform, then board, close their own doors and only then give the right away to the driver.

Safety concerns raised after conductor fatally trapped in train door - SWI swissinfo.ch

The head of the Swiss rail union has called for all carriages like the one involved in a fatal accident last weekend to be withdrawn.

www.swissinfo.ch

Tödlicher Tür-Unfall: SBB ändern Anweisungen an Zugbegleiter

Nach dem tödlichen Tür-Unfall Anfang August ändern die SBB die Weisungen an das Bahnpersonal. Die Untersuchung zum Unfallhergang dauert an.

www.nzz.ch

I imagine that the door locking about 5 km/h is automatic - drivers can press a button to enable automatic release of doors when the speed drops below 5 km/h (i.e. they do this before the train starts decelerating significantly to stop at a station), at least on the Zürich S-Bahn.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Old folding door, l think it is similar to this old news

But this old news in 2018 also shows modern automatic door will also failed or not fully closed.

Yeah, that's a standard UIC folding door.

Most UIC standard coaches have their doors controlled by the same mechanism (closing pressure, which can be resisted by putting your foot in it until it leaks away, and door blocking above 5km/h which just stops you opening it from inside) regardless of the door type.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I imagine that the door locking about 5 km/h is automatic - drivers can press a button to enable automatic release of doors when the speed drops below 5 km/h (i.e. they do this before the train starts decelerating significantly to stop at a station), at least on the Zürich S-Bahn.

The UIC standard is that you don't have to press anything to unlock it, it just unlocks itself on dropping below 5km/h. I don't know what mods have been made to various stock, though. A lot of EMUs in mainland Europe are as you describe - the driver can press a button at any speed to choose the side then on dropping below 5km/h the door is released. When the 471/871 pre-WW2 stock was still knocking about in Hamburg, drivers used to this feature meant it was common that they'd just hit the button at the start of the platform and you could pull the doors open (they were opened manually) well before the train had stopped.

 

[duesselmartin]

When I was a child in Switzerland, and no-one thought twice about me being able to travel on trains on my own, most carriages had folding doors with a handle you had to rotate to open them. Opening them a bit before the train stopped in a station was usual; I once had the stupid idea of trying to see if it would open the doors somewhere on the open line and much to my surprise it worked! I quickly closed them again and never did that again.

Another Swiss speciality is in front of some tunnels or worksites with limited gauge clearance, they mount a set of brooms on a post to whack anyone who didn't read the bit about not sticking your head out of an open window.

They taught us about level crossings at school though, and I always took that very seriously.

Always wondered what these brooms are for.

 

[30907]

A cheap and effective way of warning of temporarily reduced clearances. Seen at Basel SBB and on the RhB. Mostly for staff, as drop down windows are getting rare in CH.

 

[MarcVD]

Rail was the safest day to day mode of transportation in 1950 also, so are you suggesting that spending money on rail safety since then has been counter productive? I don't think so.

I think that in those times the main focus was in fact to increase capacity. The augmented security was just a by-product.

 

[MarcVD]

The UIC standard is that you don't have to press anything to unlock it, it just unlocks itself on dropping below 5km/h. I don't know what mods have been made to various stock, though. A lot of EMUs in mainland Europe are as you describe - the driver can press a button at any speed to choose the side then on dropping below 5km/h the door is released.

In Belgium the driver selects the right side and unlocks the door with a lever that he can manipulate only if the train is fully stopped. On hauled rakes the train guard takes care of this. There is no auto unlock below 5 km/h.

 

[ABB125]

There was an article by Roger Ford in Modern Railways fairly recently about level crossings, where a continental-style crossing was trialled somewhere in Yorkshire. They had to spend a "large sum of money" on bespoke, custom-designed metal grilles to comply with some EU legislation about preventing children's heads being trapped in the barrier mechanism if they should decide to stick their head in to have a look. As Mr Ford wrote, if this crossing had been installed hundreds (or it might have been thousands) of times across Europe, why wasn't this protective grille a standard part?

 

[Peter Kelford]

We probably interpret the same directive differently.

 

[ivzem]

Aren't directives decided on EU-wide, but legislated nationally(/subnationally) with considerable play anyway? It might just be the case that this is because of a EU directive implemented more strictly on the national level.

 

[swissrailpassion]

Aren't directives decided on EU-wide, but legislated nationally(/subnationally) with considerable play anyway? It might just be the case that this is because of a EU directive implemented more strictly on the national level.

In Switzerland they use a simple box to hide the mechanism, it's often made of wood. It looks tidy and is inexpensive.

 

[route101]

Only really noticed things getting lax in South Eastern Europe , particlarly outside the EU.