Solar storm railway operation disruption

[Southernman46]

On 17/12/2023 at 20:49, david.hill64 said:

Not sure about the big railway as my recent experience is with metros and Taiwan HSR. These have diverse redundant comms routes with the option for local control if, for example, the route is completely severed in the middle.

On the DLR there is a complete Control Centre on hot standby ...................... sometimes we actually manage to get it to work 😬

[Oldddudders]

8 minutes ago, Southernman46 said:

It was the failure of "cadweld" copper to aluminium joint in one of the traction feeds from South Bermondsey substation that just happened to directly under the signalling trough route - it was a small but V.hot fire fed by 750v and about 5mW of power until the cable eventually burnt through ..................... although I was destined work in SR Electrification, I was that morning (a Wednesday ISTR ?) in the Divisional Control Office at Beckenham on weeks' appreciation - certainly appreciated that day how people managed to control a degraded railway - something that would I suspect fall somewhat short these days ...................

Golly! I was Divisional On-Call and left home (Strood) rather hurriedly for the site about 22.30 on the night of the fire. There were some heroes that night (no, not me!) including two Area Inspectors who commandeered a light engine and clipped up every pair of facing points from Elmstead Woods to South Bermondsey, in, I think, the Up Fast, enabling some form of train-running to take place the next day.

 

As a personal aside, Deb and I were due to move house days later, and my extended absence did not help the packing  process!  

[KeithMacdonald]

3 hours ago, Vistisen said:

Monitoring systems that send so many alerts that at the end of each day I just delete the 500+ emails.

 

Oh that's a good one, carpet-bombing people's inbox. I did have inbox rules that moved the usual suspects to sub-folders I could ignore. But some Office 365 upgrade has broken all that, I now have to run the rules manually.

 

3 hours ago, Vistisen said:

Write only documentation

 

I like the choice of phrase, another good one. Here, we are chastised if production processes are not documented. So I write docs, and then (being a good house-trained thing), let my colleagues know that such-and-such is now documeneted, and please can they review it, and provide any feedback and suggestions? ... crickets, tumbleweed, sound of silence...

 

3 hours ago, Vistisen said:

Teams chats that after a while contain loads of very useful information, that is not indexed, catorigised, and then deleted by someone as the chat is 'not in use anymore'

 

Haha - a new twist. Last time I counted we have 30+ different Teams Chat channels, for different groups and projects. Everyone of which throws up alerts we are expected to respond to immediately. Which is fine (in its own way). But roll on a few weeks or months, when that issue surfaces again, you only have a vague memory that there was some chat, somewhere, sometime ... but which channel was it on? F**k knows, can't find it ...

 

3 hours ago, Vistisen said:

people who send very long complicated passwords as screenshots that can not be copy/pasted

 

And the same with screengrab images of blocks of text we are supposed to read, use, and forward.  Aha!  I've actually found a way round that. Microsoft Power Toys includes some free OCR software that does a good-enough job of converting images back to text on the clipboard. Recommended.

 

[The Stationmaster]

18 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

It was the failure of "cadweld" copper to aluminium joint in one of the traction feeds from South Bermondsey substation that just happened to directly under the signalling trough route - it was a small but V.hot fire fed by 750v and about 5mW of power until the cable eventually burnt through ..................... although I was destined work in SR Electrification, I was that morning (a Wednesday ISTR ?) in the Divisional Control Office at Beckenham on weeks' appreciation - certainly appreciated that day how people managed to control a degraded railway - something that would I suspect fall somewhat short these days ...................

A cat managed a similar job at Waterloo in the mid 1990s - it decided to settle down in the wrong place in, I think, a feeder building.

[Reorte]

18 hours ago, KeithMacdonald said:

I like the choice of phrase, another good one. Here, we are chastised if production processes are not documented. So I write docs, and then (being a good house-trained thing), let my colleagues know that such-and-such is now documeneted, and please can they review it, and provide any feedback and suggestions? ... crickets, tumbleweed, sound of silence...

I know the feeling, but I've also been on the other end of things, trying to find documentation that I need that's never been done.

 

Documentation is like the box of bits you keep in case they'll come in useful some day. The vast majority never will but there's no way of knowing in advance which, so you're stuck with having to create and keep (in a manner that means it's capable of being found again) the lot.

[Southernman46]

18 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

A cat managed a similar job at Waterloo in the mid 1990s - it decided to settle down in the wrong place in, I think, a feeder building.

Yes indeed - at Waterloo Substation, a kitten no less got through one of track feeder cable exits and into a DC circuit breaker which then attempted to trip but despite have some monster pull-off springs failed to dislodge or splat said kitty enough to let the mechanism operate fully so it arced and arced and arced without clearing the fault melting itself and two others either side with a large portion of the DC busbar effectively leaving half of Waterloo without traction current or any easy means of getting it back either ............................ 

Edited May 16 by Southernman46

[ess1uk]

There are more solar storms due in the next 2 weeks 

 

[mezzoman253]

I'd say likely, not due, as there are several different factors that need to align before we're affected . The flare needs to have an associated CME, it needs to be Earth directed, the interplanetary magnetic field needs to be South pointing, and it needs to occur when it's dark where you are. There was an reasonable aurora yesterday, early evening here, but it was daylight, so we didn't see it.

 

The Beeb has an article today about possible storms and there effects.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c163j8551ygo

 

This site is worth monitoring if you are interested in the sun.  https://www.solarham.com/

 

 

 

 

[Pannier Tank]

2 hours ago, mezzoman253 said:

I'd say likely, not due, as there are several different factors that need to align before we're affected .

 

Certainly noticed the LF / HF Amateur Bands have been affected recently.

[mezzoman253]

I only go down as far as 10M, but it has been affected. In summer I'm usually on 6M to 23cms.

 

Some of us benefit from the storms, others lose out.

 

73 Rob

[Pannier Tank]

31 minutes ago, mezzoman253 said:

I only go down as far as 10M, but it has been affected. In summer I'm usually on 6M to 23cms.

 

Some of us benefit from the storms, others lose out.

 

73 Rob

 

Hopefully catch you on 6 Metres at some stage. Only got a V2000 Vertical Antenna so not expecting too much, although it is known as the 'magic' Band! 73 David G4NVB

[AY Mod]

3 hours ago, mezzoman253 said:

it needs to occur when it's dark where you are.

 

Only to see it; last Friday was very high levels all day so equipment could have been affected at any time.

[mezzoman253]

2 hours ago, Pannier Tank said:

 

Hopefully catch you on 6 Metres at some stage. Only got a V2000 Vertical Antenna so not expecting too much, although it is known as the 'magic' Band! 73 David G4NVB

Hi David,

 

Well 6M is the magic band, so should be possible. I see you are in Bletchley, so that should work on tropo'. I've a 4+4 dual bander for 6/4M. Just been open to SP/OK/YU/S5 on 4M.

 

73 Rob G8HGN

 

[Pannier Tank]

36 minutes ago, mezzoman253 said:

Hi David,

 

Well 6M is the magic band, so should be possible. I see you are in Bletchley, so that should work on tropo'. I've a 4+4 dual bander for 6/4M. Just been open to SP/OK/YU/S5 on 4M.

 

73 Rob G8HGN

 

 

I look forward to working you Rob.

 

To bring the thread back on track, here's a BBC Article on the Northern Lights / Solar Activity.