It's 2024, surly some kind of device or setting can be added to all trains fitted with 3rd rail gear and pantographs that triggers the pantograph to drop as soon as the train detects a current from the 3rd rail?
It couldn’t be completely instant, though, as that would lead to an immediate cut of power to motors as soon as the collector shoes hit the juice rail in the overlap. There needs to be some additional system to actively prompt the pan to drop or rise at the point you need it to, and the on train systems to reconfigure.
Or even something that works by GPS and auto lowers the pantograph at certain locations?
How would a GPS system work in (say) the TL core? And would it be accurate enough? The alternative would likely be a balise based system.
After all, we were able to land humans on the surface of the moon over 50 years ago!
And the systems and technology used to do that had failures, too! In the end there’s always some compromise between budget and design spec.
Apco Belise exist. Have done for years.
Yes. Although there have been a few high profile examples of pans not being lowered when needed on GTR’s balise based system (admittedly usually in out of course situations where it has to be manually overridden), which shows no system is totally infallible.
At this location the powers that be have chosen to accept some additional risk by 1. Having an human error prone entirely manual system, and 2. electing to make the change on the move rather than when stationary.
(Should also say we don’t 100% know this particular incident was down to human error, albeit highly likely. It’s just possible he followed the procedure to the letter and the pan failed to drop, ADD malfunctioned etc.)
