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phil-b259

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Everything posted by phil-b259

  1. No such thing - you try arguing that in court and you will be slapped down! There is no such thing as 'Common Sense' in legal terms and it CANNOT be used to justify ANY decisions for which are being investigated in a UK court. Indeed, and more generally -I wish more people on the forum would appreciate that the UK courts (who are the ultimate arbiter of everything) have made it very clear that there is no such thing as 'common sense'! Any persons trying to use that argument will be swiftly told it carries no weight and they had better come up with something better if they want to avoid being found guilty. (Note there are legally recognised concepts as "The Duck Test" - which although superficially looking like 'common sense' are in fact something else entirely and they are allowed by UK courts allowed precisely because they centre around the concept of evidence based reasoning and not assumptions).
  2. The point about glowing fireboxes is that if you leave the firebox doors wide open as the loco moves off you will very rapidly find it causes massive problems with the fire and thus the steam raising capability with the loco probably grinding to a halt not long after. When working the doors covering the fire are closed (or nearly closed) thus regulating the airflow and ensuring the fire burns in a way to produce the optimum amount of steam. Yes when stationary at a station (the place most folk will get to see the inside of the cab) then having the doors open is quite common but do NOT assume this is the situation when you are watching the loco move along.
  3. Thats a loophole in current ORR rules and has its roots in the fact that it wasn't though viable / possible to fit selective door opening to the legacy BR slam door fleet* such as the HSTs which would routinely stop at stations whose platforms were too short to accommodate a full set in places like Cornwall. Its unlikely such an exemption would be considered acceptable were CDL being invented as a concept today Given the retirement of the HST fleet we are now in a situation where the only trains which have slam doors and could be longer than the platforms are charter trains - and given the RAIBs investigation into a passenger on the Great Central Heritage Railway who suffered an injury when not alighting from a door which ended up adjacent to the platform ramp I suspect we will see regulations tightened up in this area - which could range from simply having enough Stewards that all non platformed doors can be monitored / bolted to something more technical... As to the comment " No one cares" - I think you will find the ORR DO CARE! - its just that at present operators of trains which are longer than the platforms at which they call are undertaking proper risk management activities. If such activities are done properly then it will obviously help prevent the ORR from feeling the need to take action in the short term, though as I said above, with slam doors being history as far as scheduled train services go it would be prudent for Charter operators to start thinking about the situation in the long term... *BR stock fitted with power worked doors were not given such a dispensation - if they didn't fit they couldn't call unless SDO was installed. In occasional cases where SDO wasn't fitted but the Guard could control a single set of doors directly then passengers could be let off / get on via said door, but this obviously wasn't suitable for stations with more than a few people boarding / alighting.
  4. I admit it was strong (and in hindsight shouldn't have included an insult) - but I won't let "I'm perfect and I don't care about anyone else" type thinking go unchallenged! If that wasn't the sentiment the OP wished to convey (and I accept it might not be) then can I politely suggest they think about how they phrased their post. The bottom line is there are many factual / statistical based routes people can go down if they wish to challenge CDL and which form the basis for sensible debate and which I have no problem with folk expressing. The most important point in any debate about safety is to put personal traits / actions / behaviours aside and consider the wider picture - and when it comes to slam doors the simple fact that outside of railway enthusiasts many ordinary folk haven't got much of a clue about how to use them safely / properly. Coming to the table saying 'I'm alright so why should we think of anyone else' is not the right approach...
  5. And how many station staff are there in the Scottish highlands....
  6. Have you ever considered that the child might be on the platform as the train runs in, the steward is elsewhere / distracted (or not present as the ORR repeatably discovered when they visited the Jacobite operation last year) or your garden gate bolt not been done up because the Steward forgot and someone flings the door open so they can be first off to get a pic of the loco... Stop being selfish and consider others - not everyone (or everyones children) is / are as perfect as you think yourself / yours to be...
  7. (1) A line has to be drawn somewhere and its perfectly logical to use the traditional 25mph limt formerly specified by the now defunct Light Railway Order legislation as the boundary (2) As those investigating road deaths have repeatedly shown over for decades the chances of surviving a big impact get dramatically less once you go over 30mph -hence all those "hit me at xxmph and there is an 80% chance I will live, hit me at YYmph and there is an 80% chance I will die.... (For the purposes of survival it doesn't matter if the case of that impact is a car hitting the person or the person falling out of a door and hitting a hard surface at 30mph...
  8. While other reviews may well have locos which work flawlessly and lack glue marks - their models are not going to magically come with a flywheel, a closer coupled loco + tender or lamps that are more to scale / less bright / easier to remove are they?
  9. CDL is a stand alone secondary lock fitted to the door - it does not prevent people from Turing the door handles and disengaging the primary lock. It can also be engaged with the door standing wide open…. That secondary locking function is not ‘controlling the doors’ as would be understood by those in the industry or the wider public because once the CDL is released the doors are not fully unlocked (passengers still need to operate the primary door lock themselves) nor does CDL cause the door to open by itself or shut and lock itself after use.
  10. Erm… the clue might be in the title “RESTAURANT MINIATURE BUFFET”! A RMB will potentially allow for a grater amount and variety of refreshments to be carried and on any form of charter train sales of refreshments is an important addition to the revenue the train generates.
  11. Given it took some time for the newly formed Southern Railway to settle on what we would now term its cooperate image then a 1923 Arthur would be without a name (that was a SR marketing department initiative) and in LSWR livery!
  12. Because if you run them as part of a passenger train and put them in front of the coaching stock (as might happen from smaller ports) then passengers might be a bit pissed off to have a cold train to travel in (even if the fish don't mind the cold). Well lagged steam heat pipes a will avoid this problem
  13. Given how popular Sams trains website is and the sort of feedback which get posted in the comments section is I fear there is a large segment of 'don't care about prototypical nonsense' train set types out there who will hoover them up regardless. The only thing which might stop them is the high price....
  14. Thats rubbish! Come on Hornby even you can't be as thick as to think lamps were left on between locos and their trains.... If Hornby can go to the trouble of having a plug in lamp for the smokebox door then there is no reason whey the same cannot be done for the tender...
  15. I meant 'you' in the general forum wide sense, not the personal. Its just there are a lot of people on this forum who find him objectionable in one way or another.....
  16. He did - BUT (1) he never went and gave either item a final score nor (2) entered into his own 'league table' Whatever else you might say about Sam his adoption of the system used by the Consumers Association / Which? for decades (only reviewing items / services they have purchased from providers the general public can buy from) does show integrity.
  17. And also the fact that Hornbys efforts: (1) Are done to a far lower standard with much more reliance on moulded on detail (2) Are very much a LBSCR Stoudley body design (2) Have rubbish interiors (3) Are fitted with Westinghouse air brake equipment and Stroudley emergency communication system (which means no external items visible) As such I have only purchased 4 of Hornbys efforts (all LBSCR versions) but have many times that number of the Hattons offering in a multitude of liveries....
  18. CDL does NOT ‘control’ the doors! All it does is prevent them from being unlocked - once they are unlocked then it’s down to the forces acting on them which governs how fast and with what force they open outwards. Plug or sliding doors will either retract into the train body or say very close to it and as such there is very little chance of them hitting a passenger standing on the platform as they open. Hinged doors swing out on a wide arc - plus have door furniture (latches /catches) which stick out and could cause injury. A person controlling when a swing door is opened and then the actual the rate of a swing can ensure that it is done in a safe manor - including stopping the door or deferring the opening until a passenger has moved out of the way. A door which uses gravity to swing out when released cannot do this! Finally you should take note that in places like France for decades they have had doors which require the user to manually open them - but which can be closed by power when commanded to by the train guard. This is by far a better way of doing things….
  19. Simply swapping one type of manually operated mechanical locking mechanism to another would, in railway terms probably considered in much the same way that swapping one type of point machine to another is dealt with - I.e. providing no changes are made to the controls then it can be done as a maintenance activity by maintenance staff and tested using maintenance testing procedures. By contrast re-inventing the whole door system and simply letting a door swing open under gravity and in an uncontrolled manor* would not be considered as replacing a manual mechanical lock with an ‘operationally equivalent’ system due to all the new elements which were not present on the old system and as such mean far more approvals / testing would be needed. Such a system would also probably cost far more than simply making a drag batch of manually operated mechanical locks…. * Given the dangers of an uncontrolled** hinged door hitting passengers on the platform as it opens and potentially causing injuries I doubt it’s a solution which would pass a proper risk assessment ** if it has to be moved by a person then that person can be said to have the ability to control and stop the opening process if needed.
  20. Any engineering firm capable of making them! Door locks are not jet engines and as such it’s perfectly possible to get a new batch made (particularly if you make use of ‘off the shelf’ solutions rather than seek exact replicas of BR locks)
  21. Vaculm braking is not unacceptable on safety grounds - it still fulfills all the legislative requirements as far as vehicles operating on the national rail network go. The ONLY reason Network Rail don’t like it is hardly anyone uses it - so if a vacuum braked train needs rescuing / dragging off the main line due to a failure then it’s going to take ages to sort out thus increasing the compensation payments which have to be paid out to other operators due to the infrastructure being unavailable (If the failed train is a charter then it’s even more expensive for Network Rail as the amount of charter operators pay is capped - what Network Rail have to pay out to everyone else is not! By contrast if the train is air braked then it will be say to source an air braked loco from a Freight company to get the failed train out of the way.
  22. If that were a realistic proposition the LSL, Belmont, Hastings diesels etc wouldn’t have / are spending lots of money on ‘Mk1’ (the law basically considers anything with a separate bodyshell and underframe to be a ‘Mk1’ regardless of whether it is actually a true Mk1 coach. Fitting of interior door handles and restring droplight openings is also hardly difficult - huge numbers of BR Mk1 based EMUs had just such a setup as a response to restricted clearances on some routes (e.g. East Grinstead line)
  23. In the absence of more drivers or more rolling stock - both of which require authorisation from the DfT in Whitehall (who are still peddling the notion that trains are running round empty) any changes that Southern do is always going to be a robbing Peter to pay Paul sort of thing.
  24. Plenty of coaches have operated with doors locked out of use to passengers - and at least one type of Mk1 (the RU) didn’t have any passenger doors at all! All the ORR will require is that before locking all the doors out of use is that someone has risk assessments the implications for emergency evacuations - but this should NOT be confused with a requirement that all doors must be available in an emergency! As I said earlier if the RMB is sandwiched between two CDL fitted carriages with end doors then the risks of locking the RMB doors out of use will be minimal and as such there will be no issues as far as the ORR are concerned with it carrying passengers.
  25. No - that would require an official exemption to be issued by the ORR for the RMB Please remember the use of Stewards was a mitigating measure for the absence of a CDL system.
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