Iskra
Established Member
There might not be hundreds of buses sat around doing nothing ready to go on a Friday afternoon.
Loads of people complaining about this on the trains I’m on, but there is no magic wand for these situations.
-
Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
Weather related disruption Leeds/York/Doncaster (27/07)
- Thread starter cuccir
- Start date
- Status
Loads of people complaining about this on the trains I’m on, but there is no magic wand for these situations.
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
AverageTD
Member
Where to? I guess services to Doncaster and York would be their priorities
noddingdonkey
Member
- Joined
- 2 Nov 2012
- Messages
- 774
Metro have said that regular buses are being diverted away from the front of Leeds station to make way for RRBs
bramling
Veteran Member
Being realistic there simply aren’t large fleets of buses or coaches sitting around complete with drivers, ready to spring into action. Sure there’s no school work at this time of year, however this is balanced by more annual leave.
No easy answer - it’s a case of unrealistic expectations.
FrankleyJunction
Member
- Joined
- 18 Mar 2008
- Messages
- 8
The York Rail Operations Centre (ROC) - the big new building next to platform 11 - has workstations that cover not only York itself but the ECML north and south, the Leeds line, Leeds station and fringes with other signal boxes on all routes out of Leeds and all of the Aire Valley lines to north of Skipton. This requires a whole load of repeating kit and safeguards to 'prove' within the signalling that points, signals and track circuits are working as expected. If the link between the detection on these items and the ROC goes down, then everything is designed to fail safe - signals to red and level crossings down for road users. It follows that if you want to manually and exceptionally override the signalling safeguards to allow a train to detrain in a platform, there are a very comprehensive set of procedures to go through to ensure that there are no conflicting movements authourised and every movement of a passenger train over facing points is made guaranteeing that these points are locked so they can't inadvertantly move under the wheels of a train, even potentially if some damaged signal component from the lighting strike allowed a stray current to the point motor. So each point has to be manually cranked to the desired position and then 'scotched and clipped' - i.e. mechnical devices applied to the point blades to physically guarantee no movement. This might be a pain and will take some time, but please don't have a go at the poor staff on the ground charged with these responsibilities. By their nature, these incidents are all unique and staff need the time and thinking space to operate safely without being hassled to hit a certain time deadline. Otherwise, to compound the already bad problems, you then have the potential for a derailment as well. This actually occurred on the District Line at Ealing Broadway not too long ago - derailment due to full route not being secured for an exceptional movement in a signalling outage.
The advice not to travel should be heeded - by now this incident will have created a national knock on in terms of late running and rolling stock out of position. By far the biggest challenge will be in deployment of train crew, who will all by now be stuck in the wrong places running out of duty hours. So it will not recover for the rest of today and any trains that do start running have the potential to be short formed. So don't travel today - which is the advice that has already been given. Even if it all came back now, many signalling areas run in Auto Route Setting - ARS - mode. For this to work, each train has to be correctly described with a headcode in the system. In times of high disruption, ARS will have to be switched off while the service recovers, which will put more work on the human signallers normally overseeing it and this in itself will cause further disruption.
In terms of the ROC going forward, it will be interesting to see how Network Rail provides greater resilience, disaster recovery and remote mirroring/duplication of critical systems.
The advice not to travel should be heeded - by now this incident will have created a national knock on in terms of late running and rolling stock out of position. By far the biggest challenge will be in deployment of train crew, who will all by now be stuck in the wrong places running out of duty hours. So it will not recover for the rest of today and any trains that do start running have the potential to be short formed. So don't travel today - which is the advice that has already been given. Even if it all came back now, many signalling areas run in Auto Route Setting - ARS - mode. For this to work, each train has to be correctly described with a headcode in the system. In times of high disruption, ARS will have to be switched off while the service recovers, which will put more work on the human signallers normally overseeing it and this in itself will cause further disruption.
In terms of the ROC going forward, it will be interesting to see how Network Rail provides greater resilience, disaster recovery and remote mirroring/duplication of critical systems.
Iskra
Established Member
Exactly, ticket acceptance is in place on other routes and there are some buses in place so the TOC’s are doing what they can. Yes, it’s cosy and slower but at least you can move in the right direction and claim a full refund. Or travel tomorrow.
kje7812
Member
Fingers crossed it's all sort for tomorrow, I'm going Edinburgh to London.
chrisdmadd
Member
Thankfully I’m off today as an operational member of staff on the ground I know it will be truly horrible working today.
However it is a bit pathetic that we can’t cope with bad weather on this network.
Look over Germany at any given time in the summer and you will be very likely to see a severe lightening storm.
If a building gets hit with lightening it can cope with it due to lightening conductors. Now if we are going forward and putting all of out regional signalling in one place, surely we have to make that place safe and secure!
I’m sure this won’t have just been a simple lightening strike on the ROC but if it is, this would be very embarrassing.
However it is a bit pathetic that we can’t cope with bad weather on this network.
Look over Germany at any given time in the summer and you will be very likely to see a severe lightening storm.
If a building gets hit with lightening it can cope with it due to lightening conductors. Now if we are going forward and putting all of out regional signalling in one place, surely we have to make that place safe and secure!
I’m sure this won’t have just been a simple lightening strike on the ROC but if it is, this would be very embarrassing.
Information is woefully lacking on both the Northern and National Rail sites. Both basically just refer to most services not being able to operate out of Leeds or York but, for example, make no reference to whether a limited form of some services are operating on unaffected sections of route. I also see from the posts above that a small number of services are now starting to operate. Again, no mention of these on the websites.
Well the weather records say otherwise. A couple of decades ago the Met Office (and other similar authoritive bodies) abroad warned that weather patterns might tend to be more extreme as an effect of the onset of global warning. I think it was following the 1987 and 1991 gales across the south. (Other gales were available but it was questions arising from those two that spawned the comments). Since then, there have been several extreme weather events that in part support their warnings.
Still, as some say, concern about climate change (and actually doing something about it is definitely 'knee jerk') so we should all sit and wait until they are proven right or not.
p.s. "moaning about how we no longer get decent summers or snow in winter in this country!" is a pastime of the uninformed so hardly connected with any fundamental changes in our climate.
chrisdmadd
Member
Looks like york signalling is down again.
All lines showing LBLK
All lines showing LBLK
Stampy
Member
It'll certainly be interesting when we're down to the 12 (is it?) ROC's that are planned...!!
EMC compliance including lightning protection is not rocket science but it does need competence to achieve. To fail to embody sufficient measures in a critical asset such as a ROC isn't far short of criminal. Given the rise in electrical storm activity as Climate change takes grip, somebody has to answer for such an omission.
nlogax
Established Member
Yep. I'll be doing London to Edinburgh, so fingers crossed indeed.
Id fully support funding on improved drainage and coastal defences such as Dawlish but is there an immediate necessity to spend many millions preparing for a heatwave that may not be repeated for another 20+ years, and isn’t the chance of being able to prevent damage from future electrical storms pretty limited anyway.
Last edited:
warriorofrovac
Member
- Joined
- 23 Feb 2006
- Messages
- 313
LNER currently have 42 Coaches working to get passengers moving at the following stations: Darlington, York, Doncaster, Wakefield, Newcastle, Leeds.
I do find the 'this doesn't happen in other countries' argument so tedious. Each country will have their own problems and challenges. None are perfect. - Shall we build infrastructure in this country to withstand typhoons? earthquakes? No..because the odds of it happened are remote. Same as today.
I do find the 'this doesn't happen in other countries' argument so tedious. Each country will have their own problems and challenges. None are perfect. - Shall we build infrastructure in this country to withstand typhoons? earthquakes? No..because the odds of it happened are remote. Same as today.
bramling
Veteran Member
Whilst I don’t necessarily disagree with the general theme, it’s noticeable that your post hinges around things which *might* happen.
So far we’ve seen a string of hot days, mainly in the south-east, perhaps bordering on touching records but nothing earth shattering. It’s also worth noting that this most recent “heatwave” has mainly affected the south-east. I’ve just come back from a 2-week holiday in Wales and the weather wasn’t really much to write home about for summer - rained on a couple of days, a couple of good sunny days only one of which I would describe as “hot”, and the rest cloudy ranging from cool to warm. Storms are hardly unusual in summer, especially as August comes.
No doubt at some point in the next year or two there will be periods of rainfall resulting in some rivers flooding, and the environment agency being blamed for not doing enough to protect people who have chosen to live in flood-prone areas.
As I say, I don’t really know enough to say whether climate change is or isn’t likely - even experts aren’t really sure let alone able to agree - however I certainly wouldn’t be wanting to spend large amounts of money based on the recent weather - during which generally the transport system seems to have coped well, perhaps excepting Eurotunnel’s air conditioning issues which I think we can both agree is not really an indicator of systemic unpreparedness in the industry! The industry coped pretty well with the snow in March too as I recall.
What’s the odds next year the jet stream will be further south and we’ll see a summer of Atlantic weather systems - especially outside the south-east?!
Last edited:
That rather depends on the design of the installation at York (and other ROC's). If it follows the Networkrail design of old then, yes, there is quite a lot that can be done to minimise future damage and for a relatively low cost (what is today's cost likely to be in terms of delay attribution?)
Spartacus
Established Member
- Joined
- 25 Aug 2009
- Messages
- 2,928
Someone else on here was talking about 3+hr delays travelling through Germany and an enforced overnight stay.
bengley
Established Member
- Joined
- 18 May 2008
- Messages
- 1,844
York ROC doesn't control Leeds Station, that's still under York IECC.
(to clarify, the areas affected by the signalling problems are all under the control of York IECC)
Some of the responses on this thread are laughable, just what planet do people live on. The railway is not immune from significant weather events, just like the aviation industry and road. I note several homes have been struck by lightning as well in Yorkshire
bengley
Established Member
- Joined
- 18 May 2008
- Messages
- 1,844
Nothing like a good bit of railway bashing!
Pretty sure when that happened in multiple instances recently it was also blamed on climate change
- Status