HS2 under review

[pete_mcfarlane]

But some editors were "poor" at determining viewers' and listeners' level of expertise and sometimes pitted lobbyists against "top scientists" as if their views had "equal weight".

 

The BBC said it did "not believe in erasing wider viewpoints"....the typical sanctimonious and pathetic response from an organization that sees itself as infallible. 

 

 

That's not just an issue with the BBC - it permeates most of the media. It's why the views of (to take a random example) crackpot anti-vaccination campaigners are given air time because they give 'balance' by countering the views of Scientists backed by vast amounts of evidence and research.

 

Basically it allows pressure groups to get air time and column space by making lots of noise, no matter how small the group actually is.

[Kris]

Compensation amounts have been announced here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26952238 I'm a little surprised that they don't reach further out from the line than stated.

[Sheffield]

How far it has fallen. Britain can not build a power station without French help, and now it needs Japanese help to build a railway.

[lmsforever]

Due to the poor quality education offered in this country for the last fifty years we do not have the pool of engineers designers plus banks who do not support enterprise even though they claim to.Engineers and construction of OHL line equipment has gone to India and because of government inactivity for twenty years the people who could build power stations have died retired and not replaced plus the tree huggers have gained ground over proper engineering to provide power.Tonight our local news announced that part of Didcot power station is to be sold for housing if sense had prevailed it would still be producing electricity powered by coal,this country of ours has gone totally loopy(PASS THE CANDLES!!!!!)  

[GoingUnderground]

Due to the poor quality education offered in this country for the last fifty years we do not have the pool of engineers designers plus banks who do not support enterprise even though they claim to.Engineers and construction of OHL line equipment has gone to India and because of government inactivity for twenty years the people who could build power stations have died retired and not replaced plus the tree huggers have gained ground over proper engineering to provide power.Tonight our local news announced that part of Didcot power station is to be sold for housing if sense had prevailed it would still be producing electricity powered by coal,this country of ours has gone totally loopy(PASS THE CANDLES!!!!!)  

Sorry but I disagree about the cause being poor education.

 

I put it down to the low status given by people and governments to engineers, designers, technicians, and people who actually make things allied to the get rich quick mentality of the 70s and 80s, and the "I want to be rich and famous without actually doing anything to earn it" attitude of the 90s and 00s.

 

It wasn't helped by the importance given by successive governments to service industries to cover the loss of good, well skilled engineering and manufacturing jobs caused by the attitude of both governments and companies that it doesn't matter where it's made as long as its cheap. This has resulted in so many skilled jobs being exported out of the UK leaving us both underskilled and the skilled people under or even un-employed, not undereducated.

 

Another nail in the coffin has been the low status/value/worth given by many people to items made in the UK compared to the same items made overseas or with the name of an overseas company on it. Remember the "I'm backing Britain" campaigns to promote british made goods as opposed to british badged goods? It always makes me laugh to see people driving around in foreign made cars waving the Union Jack for the England Footy Team.

 

So I do agree that this country has gone totally loopy.

[jjb1970]

A big problem is that if the industry isn't there it is difficult to get experience. So we have a lot of well educated technical people that struggle to get the sort of experience to consolidate what they learn at college or university. And there is something of a culture that many people want to step out of a class room into a managerial job without the bothersome intermediate step of learning the industry and building up their core knowledge and experience, something for which I don't really blame youngsters as it is a societal attitude now and reinforced by many educationalists, at least in my experience.

[pete_mcfarlane]

I'd imagine that the Japanese are being involved because they have lots of experience of building High Speed Lines, and paying them a few million pounds in consultancy fees will hopefully save the UK money in the long term. Nothing to do with the country going to the dogs, just sound business sense. 

[Mike Storey]

Japanese help - this is a natural part of Japan doing business, where companies help each other out, due to the almost unique way in which many companies there have cross-holdings in shares in each other, largely supported by the domestic banking arrangements and business "brotherhood". This will be about Hitachi trying to win the contract for the new trains. Nothing sinister. The Germans do this a lot too. The French may equally well offer such assistance if Alstom are in with a chance for the high speed train fleet. In any event, it is almost certain that any such contract will require a large element of UK input if offered to a non-EU country, as has happened with the creation of Hitachi's UK factory. BR's international consultancy (Transmark) used the same sort of approach to flog BREL's HST to Australia and Canada.

 

Domestic engineering skills - there are still plenty of skilled UK engineers around from HS1, but the sheer scale of UK rail enhancements planned over the next 10-15 years, unprecedented since the 19th century, as far as I can tell (even the Modernisation Plan of the 1950's did not attempt to do so many things across the UK at one time) suggests that the number of qualified experts domestically produced will not be enough to get it all done in the timescales required, despite the huge number of new rail industry apprenticeships already in place and planned. The HS2 project, being largely self contained, is a sensible one to look to obtain non-UK assistance, but the Japanese, unlike the French for example, will have no experience of interfacing an HS line with a classic network, as they simply do not do that in Japan (largely because the gauges are different)!

[The Great Bear]

hs2 of course already leverages foreign experience in its design, just not as obvious as the Japanese input - for instance the civils design of C223 Country North is by Capita Symonds Ineco JV - Ineco being Spanish. Nice people and knew their stuff on high speed rail, a lot of good work for instance optimising the track layout in the delta junction-Leeds spur jnc on outside of Birmingham. The rails systems consultant, Parsons Brinkerhoff also utilised German sub-consultant/partner IIRC and I think Atkins had tie up with Systra (French).

[Mike Storey]

hs2 of course already leverages foreign experience in its design, just not as obvious as the Japanese input - for instance the civils design of C223 Country North is by Capita Symonds Ineco JV - Ineco being Spanish. Nice people and knew their stuff on high speed rail, a lot of good work for instance optimising the track layout in the delta junction-Leeds spur jnc on outside of Birmingham. The rails systems consultant, Parsons Brinkerhoff also utilised German sub-consultant/partner IIRC and I think Atkins had tie up with Systra (French).

 

Absolutely, although the core of these companies in the UK market is still the original British staff who stayed after the inevitable mergers and takeovers. I remember Parsons used to have to refer all their contractual designs A and B to a German office, despite there being no-one there competent to assess such designs against UK standards! Hey-ho. As rail investment winds down in much of Europe, apart from a seemingly never-ending procurement of new traction, these firms will increasingly seek a part of the UK pie, where rail investment is still ramping up. A good, buyer's market in theory, but time will tell.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Sorry but I disagree about the cause being poor education.

 

I put it down to the low status given by people and governments to engineers, designers, technicians, and people who actually make things allied to the get rich quick mentality of the 70s and 80s, and the "I want to be rich and famous without actually doing anything to earn it" attitude of the 90s and 00s.

 

It wasn't helped by the importance given by successive governments to service industries to cover the loss of good, well skilled engineering and manufacturing jobs caused by the attitude of both governments and companies that it doesn't matter where it's made as long as its cheap. This has resulted in so many skilled jobs being exported out of the UK leaving us both underskilled and the skilled people under or even un-employed, not undereducated.

 

Another nail in the coffin has been the low status/value/worth given by many people to items made in the UK compared to the same items made overseas or with the name of an overseas company on it. Remember the "I'm backing Britain" campaigns to promote british made goods as opposed to british badged goods? It always makes me laugh to see people driving around in foreign made cars waving the Union Jack for the England Footy Team.

 

So I do agree that this country has gone totally loopy.

 

Nigel Farage drives a Volvo. Swedish built by a company owned by the Chinese. Not my idea of UK independence.

[roythebus]

But Nigel seems to drink British real ale...

[The Stationmaster]

Nigel Farage drives a Volvo. Swedish built by a company owned by the Chinese. Not my idea of UK independence.

I don't know about the current situation but at one time Volvos had a higher British manufactured content than many so called 'British' cars - a chap i knew back in the 1980s had a company which supplied many of their castings.

[Mike Storey]

Er, where is this thread going? By Jingo, statehood and nationalism were 19th century inventions, (created to replace the concepts of inter-married principalities) about which no-one much bothered previously. The British Empire was founded on trade, not statehood, and goods were made where it was most profitable to do so...... in case we all choose to forget, much of our Victorian railway system was built by imported labour (predominantly Irish) although many were of course also British, and one of "our" greatest engineers was, with his parents, a French refugee and had been classically educated. Almost all "our" great engineers were self-taught, and did not rely on some mythical national curriculum. Indeed, they were highly derided by much of the establishment at the time, much as many say technocrats and engineers are derided today (not borne out by current data incidentally, counting applications for engineering and science graduate courses). The great majority of our early electrification plant was German or Swiss, and almost all wood for sleepers was imported from Australia. There is nothing new in multi-national railway building. The idea that something must be made in Britain to be of value to the British economy started with the slave/cotton/goods triangle, and was further enhanced at the start of the First World War, prior to which the majority of our imports came from Germany! Switzerland produces next to nothing physically, but is still one of the most prosperous countries (although changes to banking secrecy may influence that somewhat). France protected its industries for decades, but is now entirely uncompetitive, despite having some of the largest companies in the world, who choose increasingly to make their products abroad (Many Renault models for example, are now made in Turkey, and Alstom makes most of its stuff anywhere but France. Germany is the last bastion of high-cost, domestically centred heavy industry, which is largely privately, or consortium-owned. But they cannot compete on price (which is why VAG took over Skoda) and they have an even more pronounced ageing, working population problem than the UK or China. The UK has focused on high value engineering where it is still world-leading - turbines, aero-engines and wings, bio-tech, agro-tech and pharmaceutical. You see JCB's and Land Rovers all over the world now, even France! Other non-EU countries' companies have decided the UK is also now a good place to produce medium value products with high engineering products, cars or parts for cars in particular (Toyota, Honda, Tata, Ford and indeed, for the EU, BMW and VAG). Our computer science industry is one of the fastest growing globally.

 

There is little doubt that the Little Englanders surrounding the publicly acceptable face of Mr Farage, would destroy much of that quite quickly, by pretending that the UK could pick and choose what it did and with whom, when the world really does not work that way anymore. It is wishful thinking of the most grandiose and frankly, disingenuous kind. Many will fall for it, instead of urging the (necessary) reform of the EU which can only be done from the inside. Mr Farage was a gambler by profession (a futures and commodity trader in the City) so he won't mind having a punt at our expense.

 

So, if it takes a multiple of countries to assist in creating 21st C rail infrastructure in the UK, what's new? The real value will come when each stage of the infrastructure is finished. Building the thing is purely a transition. The greatest value from a heavy engineering product, is not in its production, but in its life-long maintenance and repair, which in rail terms, provides 95% domestic, skilled or semi-skilled jobs, as well as through extra operational jobs created by the extra passenger and freight services run as a result, not to mention the wider economic and social benefits to the UK.

[The Stationmaster]

I think part of the reaction stems from the fact that our country once had - not all that long ago in practice - an effective home based supply industry for just about everything the railway needed plus an excellent pool of trained and experienced infrastructure engineers within BR that privytisation dissipated and dispersed.  True the UK loco and rolling stock industry had little choice but to get involved with mergers because, in effect, it had taken itself out of world markets and the advantages of scale and continuing production lines but the infrastructure engineering side still had a pretty good base and that could be enhanced by the use of consultancy etc staff.

 

Outside suppliers in that line did of course lose out in some respects - particularly in the case of signal engineering where not only did the domestic market begin to dry up but also the import of some frankly peculiar stuff from offshore suppliers such as Ansaldo in the name of 'sharpening competition' didn't help either (and in the end probably cost far more than it saved - witness the Ebilock debacle or indeed trying to get type approval for the Ansaldo signal heads where some site trials seemed to reveal no change from the previous one).

 

However we are where we are and with much of our own expertise thrown to the winds or not developed in the first place we have but little choice to buy in experience from both outside the rail industry and also from beyond our shores.  As ever UK political short-termism has a lot to answer for.

[Mike Storey]

I think part of the reaction stems from the fact that our country once had - not all that long ago in practice - an effective home based supply industry for just about everything the railway needed plus an excellent pool of trained and experienced infrastructure engineers within BR that privytisation dissipated and dispersed.  True the UK loco and rolling stock industry had little choice but to get involved with mergers because, in effect, it had taken itself out of world markets and the advantages of scale and continuing production lines but the infrastructure engineering side still had a pretty good base and that could be enhanced by the use of consultancy etc staff.

 

Outside suppliers in that line did of course lose out in some respects - particularly in the case of signal engineering where not only did the domestic market begin to dry up but also the import of some frankly peculiar stuff from offshore suppliers such as Ansaldo in the name of 'sharpening competition' didn't help either (and in the end probably cost far more than it saved - witness the Ebilock debacle or indeed trying to get type approval for the Ansaldo signal heads where some site trials seemed to reveal no change from the previous one).

 

However we are where we are and with much of our own expertise thrown to the winds or not developed in the first place we have but little choice to buy in experience from both outside the rail industry and also from beyond our shores.  As ever UK political short-termism has a lot to answer for.

 

I agree, as ever, with most of what you say Mike, but the blame cannot be laid just at short-termism and political strategy. We faced increasingly, once Plessey and others gave up, a monopoly supplier situation (basically GEC Westinghouse) in the signalling field, under BR, which was causing costs to escalate exponentially and innovation to wither. The approaches to Ansaldo, Siemens, ML and one or two whose names escape me, was a brave attempt to go large. The well-documented problems that this introduced at the time do not negate the fact that cheaper signalling solutions have ultimately emerged. The GEC two-computers-out-of-three IECC has proven to be a robust conventional design, as it is proving with unforeseen exports, but the way forward with CCS and moving block, needed a grand kick up the backside. This was not a privatisation issue - Railtrack, for whom I subsequently worked, were not unique in outsourcing engineering nous, and BR had already long gone down that route. Signalling design capability was already largely confined to engineering spec not detailed design and construct, but RT failed to understand that you needed to retain people who understood what the contractors were offering and what they actually delivered, rather than relying on yet other third parties to give an opinion. Network Rail have largely restored that capability, and HS2 already have it on board (their engineering director was NR's engineering innovation director, bloody good bloke but not so great at piss-ups).....

Edited April 16, 2014 by Mike Storey

[The Stationmaster]

Of course there were also the the fourth parties who were checking up on the third parties under the ISA process.  Hence at one of the Ansaldo trials, due to the continuing debate over the compliance of their aspect colours with the BR spec.  So at the trial were not only the former BR engineer who was the expert on signal aspect colours (by then employed by a firm whose business was mainly road traffic signals), but also a bunch of consultants who were managing the test process, plus another consultant who was as an ISA (Independent Safetu Assessor) there to ensure that those consultants were managing it correctly and there their procedures were taking everything into account that they should have been especially any issues which came to light during the test.

 

In many resects that was a consequence of the dissipation of signalling design and innovation which resulted from the various sell-offs that came with privatisation.  There were still innovative engineers in BR S&T almost to the end and more than a few of them had external experience as they had worked in the private sector (both in the UK and abroad) as well as BR.  The (signal engineering) company I worked for after I left 'the big railway' in 2000 had people experienced in various aspects of detailed design ranging from mechanical locking through relay interlockings right up to SSI work  - in fact they wrote and published the SSI overview guide, and they were still producing innovative stuff in the private sector often for Railtrack schemes;  they ended up being taken back into NR as a design office where they are to this day.

 

That office involved folk who i had known for sometime back in BR days and both they and other innovative engineers had existed within BR but it seems at time to have been the system which stifled them rather than anything else.  For example advance junction indicator ideas to meet practical needs were emerging from Reading based people in the early 1990s as part of the work a team of us were involved with developing various proposals for the Reading area and the principles for advance indicator for Airport Junction at Hayes also emerged from that office.  But at the same time some of these ideas were being stifled from above - yet not much over a decade later I was involved in SPAD Risk Assessments using almost exactly the same principles for various works associated with CTRL signalling design.

 

So I think it is perhaps slightly misleading to say that some of the design and development nous was missing from BR as my direct experience with some of the engineers involved suggested to me that it was more likely discouraged rather than encouraged and Reading wasn't unique in that respect as a design office.

Edited April 17, 2014 by The Stationmaster

[Edwin_m]

I agree, as ever, with most of what you say Mike, but the blame cannot be laid just at short-termism and political strategy. We faced increasingly, once Plessey and others gave up, a monopoly supplier situation (basically GEC Westinghouse) in the signalling field, under BR, which was causing costs to escalate exponentially and innovation to wither. The approaches to Ansaldo, Siemens, ML and one or two whose names escape me, was a brave attempt to go large. The well-documented problems that this introduced at the time do not negate the fact that cheaper signalling solutions have ultimately emerged. The GEC two-computers-out-of-three IECC has proven to be a robust conventional design, as it is proving with unforeseen exports, but the way forward with CCS and moving block, needed a grand kick up the backside. This was not a privatisation issue - Railtrack, for whom I subsequently worked, were not unique in outsourcing engineering nous, and BR had already long gone down that route. Signalling design capability was already largely confined to engineering spec not detailed design and construct, but RT failed to understand that you needed to retain people who understood what the contractors were offering and what they actually delivered, rather than relying on yet other third parties to give an opinion. Network Rail have largely restored that capability, and HS2 already have it on board (their engineering director was NR's engineering innovation director, bloody good bloke but not so great at piss-ups).....

Just for clarification, GEC and Westinghouse were separate companies so it was a duopoly not a monopoly.  And I'm not sure what is meant by the "GEC two-computers-out-of-3 IECC".  SSI was and is a two-out-of-three system developed by BR Research and licensed to GEC and Westinghouse.  IECC was a BR Research product combining VDU-based signaling workstations with automatic route setting.  GEC and Westinghouse didn't have any stake in the IECC technology, though they did implement it on behalf of BR.  The successors to both ultimately developed competing products. 

[pete_mcfarlane]

Just out of interest, what's meant by 'two computers out of three'? Is it some kind of high availability system?

[Oakydoke]

Just out of interest, what's meant by 'two computers out of three'? Is it some kind of high availability system?

It must be something like "two out of three cats prefer Pedigree Chum...."

 

......or was that Dog's?

[cunningduck]

Just out of interest, what's meant by 'two computers out of three'? Is it some kind of high availability system?

Three separate computers monitor pieces of information, it only takes 2 of the computers to detect the level being too high/low to trip the system, but only one 1 computer detecting it won't trip the system.

 

It means the system isn't prone to a single point of failure causing a trip.

[Edwin_m]

The main processors of the SSI system are triplicated for both safety and availability. As stated, two out of the three computers have to agree for any action to be carried out, and if the third computer disagrees it is terminated with some prejudice by blowing its fuse (or some such).  If this happens the interlocking keeps running with the other two processors, but if they then disagree before the third one is replaced, then the whole system shuts down. 

 

Dual-processor systems can be duplicated either for safety (the whole thing shuts down if the two disagree) or for reliability (the system decides which one has failed and carries on with the other one). 

[Mike Storey]

Of course there were also the the fourth parties who were checking up on the third parties under the ISA process.  Hence at one of the Ansaldo trials, due to the continuing debate over the compliance of their aspect colours with the BR spec.  So at the trial were not only the former BR engineer who was the expert on signal aspect colours (by then employed by a firm whose business was mainly road traffic signals), but also a bunch of consultants who were managing the test process, plus another consultant who was as an ISA (Independent Safetu Assessor) there to ensure that those consultants were managing it correctly and there their procedures were taking everything into account that they should have been especially any issues which came to light during the test.

 

In many resects that was a consequence of the dissipation of signalling design and innovation which resulted from the various sell-offs that came with privatisation.  There were still innovative engineers in BR S&T almost to the end and more than a few of them had external experience as they had worked in the private sector (both in the UK and abroad) as well as BR.  The (signal engineering) company I worked for after I left 'the big railway' in 2000 had people experienced in various aspects of detailed design ranging from mechanical locking through relay interlockings right up to SSI work  - in fact they wrote and published the SSI overview guide, and they were still producing innovative stuff in the private sector often for Railtrack schemes;  they ended up being taken back into NR as a design office where they are to this day.

 

That office involved folk who i had known for sometime back in BR days and both they and other innovative engineers had existed within BR but it seems at time to have been the system which stifled them rather than anything else.  For example advance junction indicator ideas to meet practical needs were emerging from Reading based people in the early 1990s as part of the work a team of us were involved with developing various proposals for the Reading area and the principles for advance indicator for Airport Junction at Hayes also emerged from that office.  But at the same time some of these ideas were being stifled from above - yet not much over a decade later I was involved in SPAD Risk Assessments using almost exactly the same principles for various works associated with CTRL signalling design.

 

So I think it is perhaps slightly misleading to say that some of the design and development nous was missing from BR as my direct experience with some of the engineers involved suggested to me that it was more likely discouraged rather than encouraged and Reading wasn't unique in that respect as a design office.

 

There were clearly a number of innovative individuals within S&T, but as you say, and as Edwin below graphically illustrates (I was paraphrasing for brevity in my post), the "system" under BR was culturally conservative in most engineering fields, bar possibly traction and some civils in later years. The progression of SSI and IECC was broadly the electronic development of absolute block, and I recall the criticisms of the time, where us operators wanted vastly expanded capability, such as BiDi for weekend engineering, and moving block or increased permissive or speed-based signalling to cater for the many different classes of train still operating, which we could see being tackled, to varying degrees of success, across the Channel, but were constantly told it could not be done 'ere. In trying to cut capital costs, without properly assessing the cost-benefits, British signalling became vastly over-complex and a nightmare to maintain and operate, not perhaps because of the engineering per se but because of the hellish constraints under which we had to deal with things when it went wrong, which was all too often. The same was true of OLE, with crazily long or large isolation sections - we had to isolate half of Kings Cross each time we wanted to paint one roof column. It is ironic that, these days when the "cost" of failure (whether delays, injury or death) is so dramatically higher, the level of innovation is accelerating. It does not explain the approach that BR and HMRI took for 50 years, unless one simply blames the Treasury for everything. Hopefully, HS2 and other major enhancements due over the next decades, will no longer suffer the boxed-in thinking of those times.

[The Stationmaster]

The big problem with BiDi and reversible signalling never seemed to be an engineering one (well not on the Western anyway) but one of cost and staff (mainly footplate) conservatism.  When the first reversible schemes were consulted in on the Region there was a major debate, led by Sectional Council B Staff Side (footplate staff) regarding the safety reliability of the equipment following a number of wrong side failures and alleged wrong side failures and a concession was won from (operations) management that the system would not be used for train regulation, plus a limit on maximum speed in the reverse direction.  Thus on the first stretch there was signalling installed which was far more capable than what it could actually be used for and this subsequently led to the Simplified reversible type of signalling appearing which in reality was stripped down to suit the agreed level of conservatism.

 

All something of a shame compared with the original vision for reversible signalling on the Region, and indeed subsequent (operational) managerial efforts to try to get a more advanced view of how it could be and should be used - and of course even some of the Simbids (Simplified Bi-Directional Signalling) was never commssioned or languished for many years before being commissioned.  But none of that was down to technical shortcomings or failures to deliver.

 

Incidentally in my experience of it as an operator/operations planner speed signalling doesn't necessarily deliver any increase in capacity although it can, in some respects, cater for greater speed differentials between different types of train using the same route.  The interesting problem on BR was, from a lot of what I saw, a lack of thought and consideration among operators in specifying headways to signal engineers and in some cases wanting signals for things which weren't compatible with the headways being specified.  Having frequently seen the other side of the coin with headways being applied via proper headway design charts the amount of flexibility which was there in reality was quite considerable as was the fact that in reality - and for a variety of reasons - achievable headways were normally better than the specified level although some of that is also down to management of driving technique.

 

In the latter area it  is very interesting to compare French and British driving techniques and their impact on both real capacity utilisation and the frequency of SPADs - at which juncture cab signalling and train protection systems come into their own.  But the differences then also go back to years of British parsimony in the matter of infrastructure where we were so far behind/divorced from normal UIC practice, and the relevant UIC Fiches, as to leave many of our European mainland colleagues amazed that we could seemingly run so many trains over so small an amount of railway.  

 

Fortunately at least HS2 (terminal station capacity possibly aside?) seems to be getting an infrastructure which might match its proclaimed capacity - we can but hope that the difference between line capacity and terminal capacity design which is such a constraint on CTRL/HS1 will not be repeated on HS2.

[Mike Storey]

The big problem with BiDi and reversible signalling never seemed to be an engineering one (well not on the Western anyway) but one of cost and staff (mainly footplate) conservatism.  When the first reversible schemes were consulted in on the Region there was a major debate, led by Sectional Council B Staff Side (footplate staff) regarding the safety reliability of the equipment following a number of wrong side failures and alleged wrong side failures and a concession was won from (operations) management that the system would not be used for train regulation, plus a limit on maximum speed in the reverse direction.  Thus on the first stretch there was signalling installed which was far more capable than what it could actually be used for and this subsequently led to the Simplified reversible type of signalling appearing which in reality was stripped down to suit the agreed level of conservatism.

 

All something of a shame compared with the original vision for reversible signalling on the Region, and indeed subsequent (operational) managerial efforts to try to get a more advanced view of how it could be and should be used - and of course even some of the Simbids (Simplified Bi-Directional Signalling) was never commssioned or languished for many years before being commissioned.  But none of that was down to technical shortcomings or failures to deliver.

 

Incidentally in my experience of it as an operator/operations planner speed signalling doesn't necessarily deliver any increase in capacity although it can, in some respects, cater for greater speed differentials between different types of train using the same route.  The interesting problem on BR was, from a lot of what I saw, a lack of thought and consideration among operators in specifying headways to signal engineers and in some cases wanting signals for things which weren't compatible with the headways being specified.  Having frequently seen the other side of the coin with headways being applied via proper headway design charts the amount of flexibility which was there in reality was quite considerable as was the fact that in reality - and for a variety of reasons - achievable headways were normally better than the specified level although some of that is also down to management of driving technique.

 

In the latter area it  is very interesting to compare French and British driving techniques and their impact on both real capacity utilisation and the frequency of SPADs - at which juncture cab signalling and train protection systems come into their own.  But the differences then also go back to years of British parsimony in the matter of infrastructure where we were so far behind/divorced from normal UIC practice, and the relevant UIC Fiches, as to leave many of our European mainland colleagues amazed that we could seemingly run so many trains over so small an amount of railway.  

 

Fortunately at least HS2 (terminal station capacity possibly aside?) seems to be getting an infrastructure which might match its proclaimed capacity - we can but hope that the difference between line capacity and terminal capacity design which is such a constraint on CTRL/HS1 will not be repeated on HS2.

 

I completely agree that ASLEF were party to the resistance to innovation, but they were not alone! HMRI were very prone to maintain the status quo, and a weak and conservative (operationally) senior management at that time, and the wrong-side failures you mention did not help. On the Eastern, where I experienced most of these issues, we had SimBids along substantial sections, which we accepted we were not allowed to use for regulation, but which we also could not use for engineering work or when the OLE was down on one line. Crazy.

 

Headways calculations relied on M&EE definitions, which were usually way out of date. The entire ECML timetable, from the early 80's did not theoretically work according to them, but it proved to be one of the most reliable since the Deltics first came in.

 

Hopefully, as you say, things like this are better handled now.