Pandora Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 No trains today due to suspension of stock, I heard that a unit in service lost components of the braking system, the lost parts were found during a track examination. drivers are stood down on depots, stock will be checked and signed back into service when safe. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
EddieB Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 Yes, it has been reported that a dropped brake caliper was found in a tunnel section. Without knowing which unit it fell off, all need to be examined before they can be considered safe. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete the Elaner Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 That's not good. The authorities will want to know why this happened & take measures to ensure it won't happen again. It could take a few weeks to get all units inspected & back into service. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pandora Posted January 11, 2018 Author Share Posted January 11, 2018 It was a long time ago, but a similar situation for the Networker 750V DC stock, a Networker dropped an air compressor while in service, many cancellations and even line closures while investigations conducted. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete the Elaner Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 & for the Central line in 2003/2004? There was also a similar temporary mass withdrawal of 321/4's around 10 years ago for an incident too, but I can't remember exactly what that was for. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jim.snowdon Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 No trains today due to suspension of stock, I heard that a unit in service lost components of the braking system, the lost parts were found during a track examination. drivers are stood down on depots, stock will be checked and signed back into service when safe. According to the TfL website at 15:05 today, the only part of the Overground without a service is the Gospel Oak - Barking section, closed for NR electrification works. Jim Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jim.snowdon Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 Having now caught up with the BBC News report, there are elements about this that I suspect simply would not have happened in pre-TfL days, if only because TfL effectively contract out the engineering and maintenance, with the result that there is no-one that will take a balanced risk assessment of the situation. Instead everyone tries to play it safe by stopping the job instead, without thinking of the safety effects of dumping all of the Overground's passenger load onto the parallel operators. Remembering back to two occasions in the 1980s, involving different LU rolling stocks, where a traction motor dropped due to a bracket fracture and led to a derailment, I don't recall the whole fleet as being stopped there and then. Certainly, the whole fleet was checked PDQ (over about two days, I think) and as many units as practicable were pulled from service, inspected and released back to service. Part of the process is identifying as quickly as practicable the cause of the failure, so that engineering judgment can be applied to the scale of the risk, ie is the defect the start of a sudden epidemic, likely to occur again in a short/long time, or probably a one-off. A useful touchstone, taught me by my peers at the time was that "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times - you have a problem". Simply stopping everything at the first instance of a failure is not a way to run a railway. Now let's see if they reported it to the RAIB. Jim 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold The Stationmaster Posted January 11, 2018 RMweb Gold Share Posted January 11, 2018 Having now caught up with the BBC News report, there are elements about this that I suspect simply would not have happened in pre-TfL days, if only because TfL effectively contract out the engineering and maintenance, with the result that there is no-one that will take a balanced risk assessment of the situation. Instead everyone tries to play it safe by stopping the job instead, without thinking of the safety effects of dumping all of the Overground's passenger load onto the parallel operators. Remembering back to two occasions in the 1980s, involving different LU rolling stocks, where a traction motor dropped due to a bracket fracture and led to a derailment, I don't recall the whole fleet as being stopped there and then. Certainly, the whole fleet was checked PDQ (over about two days, I think) and as many units as practicable were pulled from service, inspected and released back to service. Part of the process is identifying as quickly as practicable the cause of the failure, so that engineering judgment can be applied to the scale of the risk, ie is the defect the start of a sudden epidemic, likely to occur again in a short/long time, or probably a one-off. A useful touchstone, taught me by my peers at the time was that "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times - you have a problem". Simply stopping everything at the first instance of a failure is not a way to run a railway. Now let's see if they reported it to the RAIB. Jim The problem of course is that man in the wig takes a rather different view - as several railwaymen have found out to their embarrassment if not actual cost. When asked question along the lines 'were you aware of this problem Mr So & so?' and you reply 'yes' the man in the dog will immediately come back with 'So what did you do about it?' and if you then say something along the lines of 'I applied sensible judgement based on my experience' you will be pilloried for not applying precisely what the book says or engineering procedures say and don't forget they will have been written nowadays as much to protect the employer from being sued as they will have been written to apply engineering common sense. This sort of thing started with the Southall and Old Oak Common collisions I know one very experienced railway man who was set upon in court by members of the legal trade, and then the judge, for not having applied the letter of the Rule Book in the precise order printed in the Rule Book when it came to protecting the site. He was an experienced man whose judgement and course of action I would both respect and support (and my actions would have been little different from his) yet he was seriously taken to task. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arun Sharma Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 (edited) Jim Snowdon said at post 7, "A useful touchstone, taught me by my peers at the time was that "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times - you have a problem". Going back to my misspent youth, the saying, "Once is happenstance, twice is co-incidence and thrice is enemy action" comes from the main villain in either "Moonraker" or "Goldfinger" - the books by Ian Fleming rather than the films of course. I don't have either of the novels immediately to hand but I suspect it was said by Auric Goldfinger. Edited January 11, 2018 by ted675 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
TJ52 Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 Quite right, Goldfinger. Terry Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jim.snowdon Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 In that case, thank you Goldfinger. Jim Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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