Are incidents involving OLE just as common abroad as they are in the UK?

[Lost property]

Moderator note : split from

GWML / Elizabeth line disruption due to OLE down near Paddington

Sat just west of Paddington right now with no overhead power according to the driver!

www.railforums.co.uk

Leaving aside the evacuation aspect, I'm curious as to why, as mentioned frequently on here, the UK seems prone to OHLE failings .

How does this compare to other operators in other nations ?....and why please.

 

[Benjwri]

How does this compare to other operators in other nations ?....and why please.

They happen abroad too, we just don't hear about them that much. Just back in September Munich Station lost all power to its OHLE and was cut off for nearly an entire day. This section of the GWML is very prone to them as it is held up by headspans, in other words wires, so one line being taken down tends to take them all down. I have heard from some reliable people though that there are already plans very much in the works to replace the wire headspans with metal bars.

 

[Spartacus]

Leaving aside the evacuation aspect, I'm curious as to why, as mentioned frequently on here, the UK seems prone to OHLE failings .

How does this compare to other operators in other nations ?....and why please.

While it may seem prone, that's simply because failures elsewhere don't make the news here, hardly anyone would be interested in hearing about the overheads being brought outside, say, Lisbon, just as they won't here about the failures here there. I think a cable theft took things out for over three hours over a wide area of Germany last year, and that's just to get things moving again, without factoring the delays that would inevitably have continued for the remainder of the day.

DB in Germany having to replace half a million sleepers, at a cost of hundreds of millions of Euros, due to a manufacturing error that caused the deaths of 5 people in a rail crash last year wasn't news here, never mind overheads being pulled down making people late.

 

[YorkshireBear]

I've been caught up in two total dewirements and route closures in Germany. As others say we just don't hear a out the .

 

[CarrotPie]

Moderator note : split from

GWML / Elizabeth line disruption due to OLE down near Paddington

Sat just west of Paddington right now with no overhead power according to the driver!

www.railforums.co.uk

Leaving aside the evacuation aspect, I'm curious as to why, as mentioned frequently on here, the UK seems prone to OHLE failings .

How does this compare to other operators in other nations ?....and why please.

Various OLE issues happen here in Finland, generally half a dozen a year, mostly in the same area of the country. Simple solution: split the service in two and bus pax over the affected area. Not very newsworthy over here though; the last time a train stranding made the news was a several hour wait for a bus after hitting a deer in the middle of nowhere!

 

[yorksrob]

Yes, it's just a thing with OLE.

Bring on the third rail !

 

[philg999]

Happens a few times a year in the Netherlands. Usually after high winds but also sometimes caused by pantographs.

 

[Beebman]

It happens in Japan - as an example here's an English language article from about a year ago (Dec 19th 2022) about a 4.5-hour suspension of Shinkansen services due to a broken wire:

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20221219-78374/

Tokaido Shinkansen line back in service after major disruption​

The Tokaido Shinkansen line resumed regular operation from the first train Monday, after it was suspended for about four hours due to a power outage on Sunday afternoon.

The outage occurred at around 1 p.m. Sunday in a section between Toyohashi and Nagoya stations. According to Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai), 74 Shinkansen trains were suspended on both inbound and outbound lines. A total of 114 trains were delayed for up to 4½ hours, affecting about 110,000 passengers.

JR Tokai turned train cars into hotels at Tokyo, Nagoya and Shin-Osaka stations for passengers who could not make it to their destinations because of the disrupted timetables. About 950 passengers spent the night in the “train hotels.”

The power outage is believed to have been caused by a break in the line suspending the trolley wires that supply power to trains in Anjo, Aichi Prefecture. No abnormality was found during an inspection in April. The company is investigating the cause of the wire breakage.

I follow Japanese news quite closely and from time to time there's reports of train passengers being stranded due to power outages (although when it happens it seems to be mainly due to power supply issues at substations).

 

[D6130]

Last May there was widespread disruption in Central Italy after a class E401 electric loco on a Southbound InterCity brought down the wires on the 'Direttissima' high speed line just North of Settebagni, in the Northern outskirts of Rome. Several high speed trains of various categories were trapped behind it as far back as Orte and subsequent services were diverted via the classic line from Chiusi, causing hours of delays. By coincidence, @yorkie , @ Mag_seven, @Watershed and I were at Chiusi for a couple of hours that afternoon and we enjoyed photographing and videoing the entertainment....with the station full of stationary Frecciarossa, Frecciargento, InterCity and Italo trains at one stage.

 

[stuu]

It's really not a big enough story to make international news, but it happens everywhere. For example, use the search engine of your choice to search "paris défaut d'alimentation électrique" and you will see very regular news stories. SNCF had problems which closed Gare du Nord and Montparnasse on the same day in June, with dozens of trains halted

 

[Richard Scott]

Remember huge delays in Germany a few years back due to extremely hot weather causing issues with overhead wires. Also had a delay in Switzerland due to overhead wire issues.

 

[zwk500]

I remember reading of several incidents in the Netherlands during my year there, thankfully I didn't get caught up in any of them.

Yes, it's just a thing with OLE.

Bring on the third rail !

Yes, because the third rail's never come off the pots, or iced over, or the shoes are never removed... Every system has failures of one kind or another.

 

[Three-Nine]

There was an incident a few years back on, IIRC, the Yamanote line in Tokyo where a pole holding up OLE wires fell over due to corrison caused by salt water having been blown in by a typhoon (at least, that was what was reported in Japanese English-language media at the time).

 

[DanielB]

Happens a few times a year in the Netherlands. Usually after high winds but also sometimes caused by pantographs.

High winds and falling trees will happen anywhere obviously. But defective pantographs or OHLE is more common AFAIK.
And sometimes also incorrect repairs, which was concluded after investigation of this incident with lot of media coverage.

 

[rg177]

Various OLE issues happen here in Finland, generally half a dozen a year, mostly in the same area of the country. Simple solution: split the service in two and bus pax over the affected area. Not very newsworthy over here though; the last time a train stranding made the news was a several hour wait for a bus after hitting a deer in the middle of nowhere!

I remember having an OLE failure when using a suburban service around Helsinki last year. I'd managed to find info online that a fix would take approx. 60 minutes, but there was zero information from the driver or elsewhere on the train. Most people simply shrugged, got off and tried to find buses after about 15 minutes of waiting.

Meanwhile, I waited the 60 minutes, and sure enough, we got moving!

 

[Graham H]

Had a 50min delay in the back end of nowhere in Belgium due to supply issues last time I use Eurostar. I think its a British thing that the press bash the rail network as it seems most networks suffer delays regularly but go unreported in most countries.

 

[zwk500]

Had a 50min delay in the back end of nowhere in Belgium due to supply issues last time I use Eurostar. I think its a British thing that the press bash the rail network as it seems most networks suffer delays regularly but go unreported in most countries.

There were plenty of choice words in Dutch presses when a major fault brought Amsterdam Central to stand just after a major pop concert, stranding thousands of teens in Amsterdam overnight. Equally there have been plenty of articles bashing the German railways. NS and DB also had their fair of strikes and just general unreliability (we've had a thread on German railways) that their respective press did not appear to hold back on.
However both of these are caveated that I was very much not fully integrated into mainstream press when spending 1 year in Maastricht, and my algorithm for google/facebook may have been artificially inflating the apparent presence of railway-bashing based on my previous browsing history for UK rail news.

 

[coppercapped]

In 2005 or 2006 there was a very heavy snowfall in and around Munich when I was working there. It started snowing heavily on the Friday lunchtime and continued without pause until sometime in the night from Saturday to Sunday. I thought I would take some photographs of trains in the snow and on walked on the Sunday in bright sunshine to my local S-Bahn station through half a meter or more of snow. As it is a requirement on all householders to keep their patch of the pavement cleared walking was not too difficult - but the cleared way was a channel between metre and a half high heaps of snow.

But there were no trains...! The snow had brought trees down on the overhead on the country reaches of the S-Bahn out to the Ammersee and Starnbergersee lakes and the overhead had collapsed under the weight of snow somewhere on the mainlines. Incidently the DB uses headspans generally and not gantries, although some of these do exist.

 

[CarrotPie]

Following a nationwide public transport strike yesterday, the morning peak into Helsinki got off to a cracking start as the morning's first Pendolino brought down wires half an hour north of the capital. An almost 20 km-long section, including around 4km of quad-track, was reduced to one line only, with services having to be flighted through the area. The screenshot below shows the extent of the disruption, which wasn't fixed until about 11am.