On the GEML, it is 45/60 mins, then options are looked at for evacuation, IF any are available of course, Normally if trains are going to have to be held, they try and keep trains in a station, which is why they maybe stopped miles away from any incident, those that jump ship, just make it worse for everyone else on trains that were not affected in the first place, and diverts staff from the failure in hand to those roaming the track, which of course is more important ! Thus those on the failure end up waiting even longer !
That’s why it’s mandated that a specific risk assessment is carried out whenever a train is trapped. Factors assessed include whether a train is at a platform or not; whether the air conditioning is working; whether toilets are available, whether refreshments are available, how long the train has already been standing and how long it is expected to remain standing; whether or not there are particularly vulnerable passengers aboard; time of day; location of nearest access point; wether or not doors and windows could be opened to ventilate the train; whether or not additional staff are available to assist with passengers on board a trapped train; whether another train could be brought alongside or onto one end etc.. etc.. etc.. As per my post above passenger evacuation starts when the risk assessment indicates it is in their best interest to do so. It’s an iterative process which is supposed to start within 15 minutes of a trapped train being identified and carries on at regular intervals until the train is moved or the evacuation commences. I’ve personally made the decision to start three controlled evacuations so far this year and have carried out risk assessments dozens of times. But yes, “here we go”, the monolithic unthinking railway and it’s faceless staff couldn’t care less about customers.
Thanks for those two posts. As we’re not in the middle of an impassioned debate about the rights and wrongs of how a specific incident was handled, it may be possible to discuss some of the issues more generally.
Personally, I try to avoid generalisations about an unthinking railway and faceless staff, and ones in the other direction as well, though in these discussions the views expressed tend to become increasingly dogmatic and likely to produce such generalisations.
When a train is halted for a long time, there is likely to be a wide range of perceptions about the situation and what could and should be done – and how soon.
Highlandspring’s account of what factors are included in the risk assessment is very interesting. There is a large number of them, and perhaps some have a greater weighting than others. If I were a passenger on board, my biggest interest would be “When is this situation going to be resolved and either the train will start moving again or we get rescued in some way?”. I wouldn’t be thinking much about factors like the nearest access point and whether additional staff are available. Those factors obviously are higher up the priority considerations of somebody thinking about evacuation or rescue.
I can see that the risk assessment may produce different conclusions if the train is at or very near a platform, or has stopped on a 50 foot high viaduct several miles from a station. But the conditions
inside the train will be the same.
Suppose that the weather is very hot, the train is quite full, it doesn’t have opening windows, the air conditioning isn’t working or is likely to pack up, and the risk assessment concludes that no doors should be opened to ventilate the train. It seems to me that there’s a high probability that passengers will take things into their own hands. The news that a risk assessment has concluded that it is not yet “in their best interest” to evacuate probably won’t carry much weight. They’ll make their own risk assessment, force open some doors and possibly get out.
If the risk assessment is repeated at intervals parts of it will become quicker to do each time round, but other parts may change. Perhaps, after a couple of hours or more, the on-board situation and other factors will lead to the conclusion that the train should be evacuated, and/or another train should be loaded with supplies and sent to the scene. How long will it then take to arrange that? It might take another two hours before the other train gets there. As a passenger, I would probably feel that the rescue arrangements should have been put in hand very early in the proceedings, even before the risk assessment said they were necessary, because by the time they actually start benefitting the passengers, the on-board conditions will have gone well past the point that triggered the rescue move.
As
swills said, passengers who decide for themselves to leave the train (“jump ship” as he put it, or “get out of an intolerable situation” as they might say) may increase the scale and extent of the delay, and that really does point to the importance of keeping people fully informed, in a way that gives them confidence that positive steps are being taken to resolve the situation. The line “then options are looked at for evacuation, IF any are available of course” is worrying: if there are no such options, then presumably a rescue train must be sent. Again, if the weather is very hot, and the train is crowded, that ought to be arranged very quickly, and passengers be very well kept up-to-date with what is being done.
It is perhaps the linear nature of the response that passengers in a trapped train are most likely to regard as inadequate, and lead them to take their own actions. “We’ll examine the situation and decide what’s appropriate, and later we’ll examine it again, and if we then decide to do something different, that’s when we’ll start to make the arrangements, and meanwhile passengers should put up with it in every respect.” The actual circumstances that the passengers are in may cause them to diverge from that approach.
