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Hitachi trains grounded


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10 hours ago, Ian Hargrave said:

but apparently our UK climate gives ideal corrosive conditions coupled with salt sustained de icing processes in winter.

 

Which any car owner from the 50s to the 80s could have told them... Why is it that we seem to have re-learn stuff, don't designers look at history any more?!  ;)

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2 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Maybe its just me....

 

.....but I feel that most of the report is totally superfluous.

No it's not just you, it's a sign of the times. Endless reams of standardised paperwork and process that may very well improve safety but if you did the analysis the cost of producing them compared to the marginally improved safety benefit may not be ALARP.

 

An example: a colleague compared two schemes requiring the installation of lineside signals/stopping boards. Shortening the process to make a point, traditionally the scheme would have been drawn up, installation drawings produced and a signal sighting/siting committee convened that would inspect the location and report. As he put it, when on the ground you might very well find that an electrification mast got in the way of the optimum sighting and you might be better off locating the signal two feet to the left. Drawings and installation amended, job checked and signed off, job done.

 

On Crossrail every stopping board/signal has its own risk assessment and design review file, compiled at great expense by contractors. For an ATP fitted railway operated mostly under ATO, you really ought to ask whether a generic assessment might have been sufficient.

 

In my opinion, in recent years we have gone backwards a little. Late BR/early privatisation was a good period in which risk based analysis based on sound engineering judgement replaced slavish compliance with standards that were designed to prevent the reoccurrence of accidents that had happened before. The same thing happened with rules for operation. BR migrated its engineering standards to be goal setting rather than prescriptive, supported by Codes of Practice that showed you how the goals might be achieved. Now we work to a set of Euronorms, which for the most part are an excellent set of integrated standards, compliance with which is checked in a predetermined and limited manner. There is no scope for an assessing engineer to require more detailed analysis. I am quite sure that Interfleet's engineers will have done a competent job of assessing the Hitachi trains against the mandated standards.

 

Would BR have got it better? I suspect that the stress corrosion cracking might not have been foreseen, but I think DM&EE would have seen the damper bracket loadings from acceptance tests and perhaps identified that fatigue would be an issue. (Incidentally, as I read the ORR report I think it states that fatigue only occurs above a certain load. This is true for ferrous materials but not usually for aluminium).

 

Anyway railway safety assessments continue to give me some extra pocket money on top of my pension, so I'll continue to ride the gravy train for longer.

 

Rant over.

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2 hours ago, Hobby said:

Why is it that we seem to have re-learn stuff  ;)

 

After an entire career spent careering from one approach to the other one, every time some new fresh arrogant boss came along, I suspect this is just a natural human tendency. The other one being to dismiss the opinion of anyone pointing out that you are making a mistake!

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2 hours ago, Hobby said:

don't designers look at history any more?!

I suspect not.

 

The days of railway workshops designing and building railway vehicles to operate in the railway environment are significantly - but not entirely - a thing of the past.  Train builders are now multi-national businesses who often design and build other things as well and who may or may not have access to the specific requirements of any given rail route.  

 

Dawlish is not alone.  The Largs line in Scotland suffers in every westerly gale and has been electrified at 25kVac for quite some time.  That doesn't stop a decent storm bringing the trains to a halt as waves crash over the sea wall and through the overheads at Saltcoats.  

 

It has been said before and I shall say it again that there should have been no need to re-invent this particular wheel.  But political and commercial decisions and short-sighted policies of a generation or two ago resulted in rail-skilled engineers leaving the industry either voluntarily or otherwise.  Their accumulated knowledge and experience has been lost in many cases.  With one of the results being that trains are now built which cannot cope with the conditions they meet on a frequent basis.  Some have been modified with partial success; others remain incapable of performing the task they were designed, purchased and built for in anything but ideal conditions.  

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The navy learned the lesson from the Falklands, when the aluminium superstructure on the type 21s started cracking, so far there have been no more ships with aluminium superstructures. The continual hogging and sagging caused by the South Atlantic waves was an unforseen problem.

 

 

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I meant to add that fatigue being listed as a cause doesn't necessarily mean 'too big' a load but, as Siberian Snooper mentioned above, a load that cycles between + and - regularly enough over a period of time causing flexing etc., however slight.

I suppose this could mean the forces experienced by the yaw dampers under repeated acceleration/braking or even bogie rotations left & right.

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1 hour ago, Siberian Snooper said:

The navy learned the lesson from the Falklands, when the aluminium superstructure on the type 21s started cracking, so far there have been no more ships with aluminium superstructures. The continual hogging and sagging caused by the South Atlantic waves was an unforseen problem.

 

 

Aluminium is a great material, it just doesn’t like flexing…….they found out the hard way with the Type 21

 

Now a lot are CRFP…..also better for radar rejection.

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6 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Aluminium is a great material, it just doesn’t like flexing…….they found out the hard way with the Type 21

 

 

Very true - the flexing will have been made worse because of the hull frames being as small as possible too, I fancy, in order to keep weight down. The South Atlantic seas tend to be bigger than general North Atlantic ones, so more loads were on the hulls.

 

They looked peculiar with the "fix", a very large doubler plate, fastened to the outside of the hulls.

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Just now, MarkC said:

Very true - the flexing will have been made worse because of the hull frames being as small as possible too, I fancy, in order to keep weight down. The South Atlantic seas tend to be bigger than general North Atlantic ones, so more loads were on the hulls.

 

They looked peculiar with the "fix", a very large doubler plate, fastened to the outside of the hulls.

I went round the frigate Garage at Devonport in 1982 and two of the type 21's were in for that modification.

 

Jamie

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On 12/09/2021 at 10:49, Gwiwer said:

Dawlish is not alone.  The Largs line in Scotland suffers in every westerly gale and has been electrified at 25kVac for quite some time.  That doesn't stop a decent storm bringing the trains to a halt as waves crash over the sea wall and through the overheads at Saltcoats. 

 

Some irony in the name there!

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On 12/09/2021 at 08:38, Hobby said:

 

Which any car owner from the 50s to the 80s could have told them... Why is it that we seem to have re-learn stuff, don't designers look at history any more?!  ;)

No, designers look at contract specifications. If the specification is, from their experience, inadequate, they advise management accordingly that there is either scope for a later contract variation or that the risks of failure post-delivery are too high to warrant the commercial risk. Variations post contract are highly prized commercially, as the contractor has virtually free rein on what he can charge, as the customer is now bound by a contract to buy their product.

What they certainly do not do is discretely correct the shortcomings in the contract specification - that costs money and transfers commercial risk onto the contractor. It's something that many ex-BR staff failed to grasp when they went into the consultancy business, to their commercial detriment.

 

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On 12/09/2021 at 18:30, keefer said:

I meant to add that fatigue being listed as a cause doesn't necessarily mean 'too big' a load but, as Siberian Snooper mentioned above, a load that cycles between + and - regularly enough over a period of time causing flexing etc., however slight.

I suppose this could mean the forces experienced by the yaw dampers under repeated acceleration/braking or even bogie rotations left & right.

Yaw dampers, whose purpose is to prevent the bogie going into sustained oscillation in the yaw axis, aka hunting or instability, at high speeds are prime candidates for creating fatigue failures, either in their mounting brackets or in the body structure from whence they are supported. It's been a common problem for decades, back to (I think) the 158 stock. The real question, and the one on which the money hangs, is whether Hitachi designed correctly to an inadequate specification, or the specification is correct and Hitachi's design inadequate. It will emerge eventually, but not until the inquiries have ceased and the lawyers decided their courses of action.

 

 

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" lawyers decided their courses of action." 

Your forgot "and made their pile".

This has been a problem in construction for decades. In the public sector it has been worse because of the virtual rule that one had to take the lowest tender.

The advice I heard at least 40 years ago was to throw away the lowest tender because the bidder was expecting to make its profit on variations and the highest one because they didn't want the job anyway. I think the lesson is slowly being learned there and that one can now take quality into account.

I am not necessarily suggesting that they did automatically go for the lowest tender in this case. But . . .

"If the specification is, from their experience, inadequate, they advise management accordingly that there is either scope for a later contract variation or that the risks of failure post-delivery are too high to warrant the commercial risk. "

But if the pressure is to accept the lowest tender such reservations may well be ignored.

Jonathan

 

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It's been a few years since my day job was writing requirement specifications for outsourced electronic equipment, then vetting the received proposals, but I always used to include one impossible requirement in the specification, so I could weed out the obvious BS merchants with little effort.

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15 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

" lawyers decided their courses of action." 

Your forgot "and made their pile".

This has been a problem in construction for decades. In the public sector it has been worse because of the virtual rule that one had to take the lowest tender.

The advice I heard at least 40 years ago was to throw away the lowest tender because the bidder was expecting to make its profit on variations and the highest one because they didn't want the job anyway. I think the lesson is slowly being learned there and that one can now take quality into account.

I am not necessarily suggesting that they did automatically go for the lowest tender in this case. But . . .

"If the specification is, from their experience, inadequate, they advise management accordingly that there is either scope for a later contract variation or that the risks of failure post-delivery are too high to warrant the commercial risk. "

But if the pressure is to accept the lowest tender such reservations may well be ignored.

Jonathan

 

It's not good to take a clip from someone else's comment (mine) and use it out of context as if it were referring to someone else. I was referring to how the tenderer approaches the situation, not the client. Unless the specification is outlandish, the tenderer will put in a compliant bid, knowing that there is scope (if not necessity) for post-contract variations. That knowledge will be kept up their collective sleeves until after the contract has been won.

 

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I'm sorry. I didn't mean to misrepresent you. 

I think my comment about lawyers, although slightly tongue in cheek (I have known some very trustworthy lawyers) applies to lawyers on both sides.

The problem is that the whole tendering process is essentially adversarial by design. The client wants the best product (usually) at the cheapest price and the tenderer wants to make the maximum profit. Those two aims are not often compatible, and as a result a slight error on either part can be very expensive.

But I read the second part I quoted as applying to the client, and re-reading it I still see it as reading that way. I suspect that others may have done the same. It is only a very principled tenderer which points out errors in the tender documents to the client, I fear. As I made clear, that is too often how the tenderer hopes to make its profit.

Jonathan

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1 hour ago, jim.snowdon said:

It's not good to take a clip from someone else's comment (mine) and use it out of context as if it were referring to someone else. I was referring to how the tenderer approaches the situation, not the client. Unless the specification is outlandish, the tenderer will put in a compliant bid, knowing that there is scope (if not necessity) for post-contract variations. That knowledge will be kept up their collective sleeves until after the contract has been won.

 

 

Exactly, and when all's said and done, IF (big if) the specification is incorrect it doesn't mean to say that the supplier would know any better anyway, and it isn't their job to know the specification is wrong either in some cases. The customer should know what they want/need when they have teams of prior writing tenders.

 

If I went and smashed my car wheel on a pot hole then who's fault is it? Mine, the council's or the car? I think we'd all agree the car is least to blame unless I had bought it on the condition it could manage such things.

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13 minutes ago, Afroal05 said:

Apologies for the rather long information dump and any industry jargon, I thought an update might be of interest as to what repercussions there still are.

 

A most useful update, thankyou. I am glad that ways and means have been found to run services close to pre-Covid levels. 

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It looks like GWR are still having to make other short notice changes; For example, on the 16th August the 0514 Worcester SH-Paddington was a 9-car set, 802108; Yesterday it was a 3-car 165 running to Reading only, which appears to be a variation for this week. 

 

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On 14/09/2021 at 18:05, spamcan61 said:

It's been a few years since my day job was writing requirement specifications for outsourced electronic equipment, then vetting the received proposals, but I always used to include one impossible requirement in the specification, so I could weed out the obvious BS merchants with little effort.

That's sort of the inverse of the well-known 'Van Halen rider', whereby the band specified M&M's in the dressing room with a particular colour removed. The justification was that the band had a particularly complex technical set-up, and if the promoter hadn't read the contract/ couldn't be bothered about the M&Ms, they probably weren't observing the more important/expensive/potentially life threatening requirements either.

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1 hour ago, caradoc said:

It looks like GWR are still having to make other short notice changes; For example, on the 16th August the 0514 Worcester SH-Paddington was a 9-car set, 802108; Yesterday it was a 3-car 165 running to Reading only, which appears to be a variation for this week. 

 

With that specific one, the plan is 80X MO through to Paddington, 16X MSX to Reading. So that is "baked" into the plan.

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