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Ambulance Trains

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Peter Kelford

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Could trains (and quite possibly just-retired HSTs) be used to transport passengers from place to place like in France, or, seeing as the trains have already been retired, parked on station platforms with extra capacity for use as a relief hospital? Railway stations are typically in city centres with some amount of easy infrastructure accessing them, so it is logical.
 
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JonathanH

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Could trains (and quite possibly just-retired HSTs) be used to transport passengers from place to place like in France, or, seeing as the trains have already been retired, parked on station platforms with extra capacity for use as a relief hospital? Railway stations are typically in city centres with some amount of easy infrastructure accessing them, so it is logical.

Not needed at this stage. We are not looking to move ill people around the country on the scale you envisage.
 

E100

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The inner enthusiast says yes...

...but the reality is that field hospitals in conference centres / large halls where space, power & water supplies are less at a premium are a much better solution. Particularly so as seats need removing first to use HST's. It's potentially useful to transfer patients if there's a big regional disparity, though again likely to be a better use of resources to just use an ambulance.
 

edwin_m

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I guess France has more hospital beds relative to population than the UK, so when only one part of the country was hit hard they could move people to hospitals in other regions with capacity available, but we had to start creating more hospitals instead.
 

hwl

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I guess France has more hospital beds relative to population than the UK, so when only one part of the country was hit hard they could move people to hospitals in other regions with capacity available, but we had to start creating more hospitals instead.
France has roughly the same population as the UK but around double the land mass with far smaller city populations outside Paris.
Hence much bigger distances to cover been population centres than the UK.
 

Peter Kelford

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I guess France has more hospital beds relative to population than the UK, so when only one part of the country was hit hard they could move people to hospitals in other regions with capacity available, but we had to start creating more hospitals instead.
That said, there are now plans to reopen the Val-de-Grace Military Hospital in central Paris that was closed a few years back as surplus to requirements.
 

edwin_m

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That said, there are now plans to reopen the Val-de-Grace Military Hospital in central Paris that was closed a few years back as surplus to requirements.
Presumably converting a couple of trains to access existing hospitals with spare capacity is quicker than re-activating a mothballed hospital. If the infection spreads to become equally prevalent across all regions then all existing hospitals are likely to be roughly equally under pressure so there would be little point in shuttling people between them. However the trains could then have a role in bringing people to Val-de-Grace, which I see is close to Austerlitz and Montparnasse and therefore conveniently accessible by TGV from much of the country.
 

Peter Kelford

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Presumably converting a couple of trains to access existing hospitals with spare capacity is quicker than re-activating a mothballed hospital. If the infection spreads to become equally prevalent across all regions then all existing hospitals are likely to be roughly equally under pressure so there would be little point in shuttling people between them. However the trains could then have a role in bringing people to Val-de-Grace, which I see is close to Austerlitz and Montparnasse and therefore conveniently accessible by TGV from much of the country.
The TGVs transport people in a stable condition but needing ICUs from Alsace and Paris to Aquitaine and Brittany. On the other hand, VDG is likely to be providing pure bed capacity for medium symptom individuals in Paris as these people can't be transported en masse to elsewhere.
 
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