Severe Delays

I haven't been posting much lately. Partly because I've been busy with the Bloomsbury Pro Choice Alliance (whose glorious adventures can be found here) and partly because I've been placed in the Pigeon Stalkees Witness Protection Programme.




I live in fear for my very life.

I was amused to read the following on a colleague's facebook wall. It seems we're all in the business of vigorously denying any involvement:

Friend of Colleague: Severe delays this morning - what did you do wrong lol

Colleague: Was there? Nothing to do with me!

And there I thought it was just me who was routinely accused. ;)

I am not disabled. Generally I'm in good health. But when I wake up in the morning I can’t walk.

Since my late teens I’ve had arthritis. It is in many of my joints and this is a chronic condition. This will not go away or get better. Mostly I’m ok. Stiff in the mornings or after I’ve been sitting still for a while but otherwise not too bad. The first thing I do in the morning is most certainly NOT rush to get some coffee to wake up. I can’t grip well for a while so it’s best for me to not be handling containers of hot liquid. Not that I can rush anyway. I am not able to walk smoothly or properly co-ordinate my limbs for a while. It takes a bit of time until I can walk this off. Once I get my joints used to moving again they gradually get with the programme and return to normal. By the time I’m ready to leave for work you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with me.

It's not always like that though. This is a condition which comes and goes. Right now it’s bad. When I wake up I can’t stand. I’m lucky that it rarely hits all joints at once so I can push myself up to my feet and then use furniture to propel myself by supporting my weight on my arms rather than my legs. One of my heels is really painful lately so I can’t put that foot flat on the floor. This, coupled with the stiffness and loss of co-ordination means my balance isn’t good. More than once I’ve managed to get to my feet only to tip over and land straight back in bed again. And then I’m tempted to just stay there because I also experience a lot of fatigue when the arthritis is bad.

One day this is not going to ease off and let me function normally. My medical needs will slowly increase as things get worse. Over time my joints are going to be gradually damaged and at some point they are going to stop me from doing things. Because my arthritis is in the majority of my joints I don’t know exactly what this will be. I might lose useful functioning in a wrist or I might have longterm problems manipulating my legs well enough to walk. I might not stiffen up but could experience chronic, neverending pain. At some point I will probably not be fit enough to drive a train and if things get really bad then I may be unable to work at all. It’s not inevitable but these things are realistic possibilities for my future. And there’s quite a lot of future to have this happen in. This is not an old codger writing. I’m in my thirties.

It’s possible in the future I will require some help to have a normal life. I might need someone to go to the supermarket for me because I can’t walk that far. I might need to use a taxi instead of public transport because I can’t reliably grip the grab rails on a crowded bus. I might need help with basic housework because I can’t grip or lift easily. Yet all this costs money. People don’t clean your house or go to the shops out of the goodness of their hearts. Taxi drivers don’t live on fresh air. And if my future does turn out like this then I’m going to have to whistle for it because the current government wants to take away things like Disability Living Allowance and Incapacity Benefit and either reduce the numbers of people who can receive them or make them impossibly hard to get.

And then there’s basic medical care. I look at what Lansley and Cameron want to do to our health service with the NHS Reform bill (or more properly the Health & Social Care bill) and I fear for the future. The proposals are focused on losing a centralised system of care and farming it out to private practitioners. Private practitioners who don’t have to provide any kind of care they don’t want to. Currently healthcare can be something of a postcode lottery. That’s going to get much worse. The NHS Bill is not about reform. It’s about slash and burn and creaming off profits for private business. If the bill passes then the NHS as we know it will be dismantled and our future access to medical care will be very different. It will be costly, bureaucratic and reduce the quality of patient care with NHS patients being in direct competition for treatment with private patients.

Opposition to the Bill is not being tolerated. David Cameron’s recent emergency healthcare summit at Downing St was a farce. Only those medical bodies who tolerate it were invited.You can see Ben Goldacre's excellent analysis of who was and who wasn't invited here. And a doctor who openly opposes the changes is being threatened with disciplinary action for doing so. The mere act of adding his name to a letter condemning the proposed Bill has been said to be a breach of the NHS code of conduct. Other critics are being similarly silenced.

At the time of writing this the e-petition calling on the government to drop the health bill has over 156,000 signatures. It has already surpassed the 100,000 target at which the government claimed parliament would consider debating the issue. But every signature counts. Every single signatory is a person who lives in this country and who at some time or another will have need of healthcare. If you live in the UK then you will need healthcare too. Please sign it.

I’m a traindriver. I earn a lot and thusly pay a lot in taxes. And I’ve always been proud to pay tax in a country where we use that money to help those less fortunate. Not any longer because my taxes will be used to pay for needless cable cars across the Thames and sporting jamborees. They'll pay for operations in one private clinic and partly pay for recovery in another instead of comprehensive, centralised, patient-focused care. I’d far rather my taxes were used to support those less able than myself and to provide universal, centralised healthcare that is free at the point of delivery. Just like I’ve always been promised.

I am Spartacus.

You are Spartacus too.

By the time you read this I will be gone. I’m sorry but I just can’t take it anymore. I’ve left you and gone back to my mum.

Things used to be so good between us. Things were warm and easy-going. Our lives were filled with flowers and birdsong. Now there is nothing but a frozen desert and a howling wind.

I’m not sure when things first cooled between us. I’m sure we were happy together until recently. I know I left you briefly at Christmas but that was only for a couple of days. I didn’t mean it to be a long term thing. But since I got back there has been a noticeable chill in our relationship. Where did that come from? How did this frostiness come about? I just can’t understand it.

So I have gone back to my mum’s where I got a lovely and (most importantly) warm Scottish welcome. How can my life be warmer here than with you? That makes no sense at all.

I’m not sure if I’m going to return to you. I’d certainly like to come back to you but that all depends on how you behave. I can’t stand this icy relationship we’ve been having and I want that to change. If you are willing to work at this then I’ll come back. Until then I’ll stay away.

It’s not me, it’s you.

Looking forward to the heat of our relationship to be restored,
Severe Delays

The more alert among you may have noticed that the rain has been rather fluffy and white lately. And given that this is the south of England this has naturally caused all sorts of chaos.

Much of the line now looks like this. The rails are dry, the current supply is pretty steady and we don't really have any problems. It wasn't always this way.



This is how the rails looked before the trains ran on them:



Not a huge amount of snow but certainly enough to start covering the running rails. That's not really enough to stop our trains running and we had trains out overnight to keep the rails cleared. We certainly struggled during the evening as the snowstorm made driving trains around difficult. But our biggest problem was transporting staff by road.

Taxis sent to take the late crews from sidings back to the depot didn't turn up for hours as the drivers struggled in the snow. This meant the late turn traindrivers didn't finish work until many hours after their shifts should have ended. Shifts are worked out carefully so that minimum times offshift are observed and the whole debacle meant that the late turn drivers had to come in later than usual the following day. LUL operate with a rolling shift system and this left us with a bit of a gap in drivers starting work.

Another difficulty was in people getting to work the next day. Most people in the south don't experience snow very often and are woefully inexperienced at driving cars in it. People took it slow and ultra-careful and quite a number from more remote areas weren't able to get in on time. And there was also the issue of this:




Yep, snow on the rails again. Although this is LUL track, the Train Operating Companies which use Network Rail track had exactly the same problems we had. Which meant that if our staff were travelling to work by train they had to wait patiently for the other TOCs to get their service up and running.

The stations had their own problems with snowy platforms. LUL's current method is to have as few staff in a station as they can possibly manage. Often there will be only one person on duty. That person has to do all their usual duties regarding opening up, dealing with customer queries, ticket machines and information management and also to pick up a shovel and start clearing snow to make the platforms safe. It's a big job for one person.

Of course, being the helpful person that I am, I spent a frantic ten minutes at the terminus "helping" to clear the snow.




What? It's piled up out of the way isn't it? ;-)

So I was rattling along last night happy as Larry when something went wrong with my train. Oh dear.

I've mentioned before that when we are in train-ing we often hear the phrase "that wasn't supposed to happen" as trains break in inexplicable ways. Last night I gazed in puzzlement at the defect and then muttered the immortal phrase to myself. I won't bore you with the details of the defect but will just say that it was an odd one that logic dictates should not occur.

As there was no safety issue I continued to rattle along while I tried to figure out a workaround to the problem. This was more of an intellectual challenge to pass the time than a real, pressing need as we had so few customers it was easy enough to explain what they should do (nothing) while the issue was happening. I tried a few things which didn't work and as I reached the terminus I added another minor defect to my list of woes. I fiddled around and fixed the second issue though this meant leaving rather late in the other direction. And as I pootled along I tried something else and lo, it was fixed! Or rather it wasn't. For as soon as I once more reversed and started driving in the original direction the problem reappeared.

Never one to be bothered by the idea of making a complete idiot of myself, I called the Voices. Although they haven't all been drivers with experience of fixing defects they do always hear about what goes wrong with the trains and can sometimes offer some good suggestions. In this case I didn't need advice but did need permission to do something rather drastic to the train - I wanted to kill it.

Some defects are best solved by doing what I call the Windows Option. Turn it all off and then turn it back on again. Trains are similar to PCs in that it can take a few minutes for the systems to be restored fully so killing the thing is not something we are encouraged to do. But as I had some time to spare at the terminus the Voice agreed and told me to keep him updated on whether it worked. So I duly committed foul murder and set about restoring my train to life. During which I just let customers (all three of them) board through the cab since I was too busy to mess around with doors. Heading off in the other direction I realised I still had the defect and called up the Voices to tell them.

I got a different Voice this time who asked me to give him the entire history of the defect. He hadn't any other ideas but did check the train ID and realised this was a problem we'd had last week. The train had been returned to the depot to be fixed and either was ignored or had somehow become defective again. And while the problem was fairly minor on a wet Wednesday evening where there were only three customers who I could warn, it would cause plenty of confusion and delays on a Thursday morning rush hour. So the Voice did the sensible thing and asked me to take it out of service, dump it in the yard to be fixed and bring a better train back out.

This would be all well and good if it were not for the manager waiting for me on the platform to ask me details about the problem train. This is common when a driver decides to take a train out of service due to a defect. In this situation I'd have thought that if the Voice already knew what the issue was then they could fill in the forms but I humoured him and provided the general story before heading home. Today, I was asked to write a report on the train. I'm now really puzzled by the reaction to this because I only took the train out of service because the Voice told me to. As I was given no time to actually write the report I declined and this gives me a bit of time to come up with a fun scheme. I just have to decide whether to Nuremberg on this or to write something very, very silly. Ideas are most welcome. *weg*

Is this not the most ironic thing you have ever seen in your entire life? It is a number of tiny lamps fashioned into the shape of a Victorian lamp and hung on a functioning-albeit-currently-switched-off lamp.

TREMBLE at the potency of the irony!

Do we all remember how earlier this year I wrote about this guy?



Well he's back with a vengeance and it seems he's no longer so circumpsect. Lurking on a windowledge in the dead of night is clearly for amateurs. He's now spying on me in broad daylight! This leaves me wondering what it is that I do that is so fascinating to pigeons.

A couple of shots I grabbed while waiting for something interesting to happen this morning.

Ah Autumn. What a wonderful season. Unless you're a traindriver. Or a passenger. Or a trains manager or Signaller. Or in any way associated with or reliant on the railways. Then it's sheer hell.

We are on our leaf fall timetable at present. For us that means we run the trains a few minutes early and will do so from early October until around December. Leaf fall is a bit of a problem on railways and every year we have to work around it in a variety of ways. Re-jigging the timetable is one and there are some practical things we can do in terms of maintenance of the rails and our land but the autumnal onslaught is something we struggle with every year. Basically it's because leaves are bastards.

Leaves. Green things on sticks. Big sticks and ones with root systems but that's what it boils down to. The problem is that they don't stay there. Come the autumn they get flung off and blow about a bit. A fair quantity find their way onto railway tracks and at that point it's a slippery slope to doom.

The thing we hate about leaves is the sap. As discarded leaves naturally rot down they release tree sap. This stuff is incredibly slick and sticky and when you are running a vehicle with metal wheels balanced on metal rails then that's bad news. Every time the motors are applied the wheels have a tendency to spin uselessly for a bit before they can gain traction. Aside from the cumulative effect of many tiny delays caused by trains struggling to get started this causes damage to the wheels. This is bad enough but the issue is compounded because wheels which are damaged or flatted in one or more areas can in turn cause damage to the track. So not only do we have trains struggling to move and gradually accumulating bigger and bigger delays but we have both trains and tracks needing more than usual maintenance.

As ever, when there is a problem starting there is also a problem stopping. With slippery track it is incredibly simple to gently apply the brakes and have every wheel instantly lock up. The train then has the potential to slide along until friction eventually stops it. Naturally this will result in flatting of the wheels and again, that sort of damage is best avoided.

There are some solutions. We don't have a perfect solution but we have a few things going on to give us a fighting chance in the annual battle with nature. The first thing we do is cut short turnaround times at termini. In plain english that means the train will leave a few minutes early. This allows the train to run slightly slower but to still arrive at major interchanges around the same time. By running more slowly it obviously takes less time to bring the train to a halt in stations so that drivers don't need to brake so harshly. Another thing we do is change driving style. Braking starts much further out from a station and is much more gradual. Depending on the distance between stations I could start applying tiny amounts of brake from as far out as halfway whereas normally I'd not even think about it until I was a trainslength or so outside.

This slow, measured approach is crucial to keeping things moving. It adds a little extra to each journey time but on balance it cuts down delays. By keeping speeds down and braking gently and early trains are less likely to overshoot or slide straight through stations. It also reduces the likelihood of a driver being horrified as they slide straight towards a red signal. If you read my previous entry on failed signals you'll remember that when a signal is passed at danger (whether authorised or unauthorised) there is a procedure in place to maintain safety. And that this procedure takes quite a bit of time to complete. So accidentally flying through reds because the wheels are locked up is going to cause a huge delay (not to mention that the system instantly loses a driver as they are removed for interviews and investigation and if there is no spare around that means putting the train away too).

If you read that entry you'll also remember that if we are in any way not sure what's going on we have to default to the safest method of working. In the case of Signallers if they suddenly get a whole bunch of signals turning red for no apparent reason they have to assume it's because a train entered that area - even if there are no other indications of a vehicle being there. I mention this because the little leafy demons are responsible for delays in another way. The buildup of sap and decaying leaves can disrupt the signalling - essentially it short circuits the signals and these go to danger. The Signaller is then obliged to run the system with a failed signal and that takes lots of time to process.

One thing we try to do is to keep trees cut back on our land. Ideally they'll be no closer than a metre from the rails so that falling leaves will not go on the track. We have crews out for much of the year cutting back back large sections of foliage but it's a sisyphean task. With large amounts of LUL track being outdoors it's very difficult to strike a balance between maintaining wildlife habitat and keeping a working railway. And even though we cut back harshly, trees will have sprung up again within a few months. Even if we completely stripped our land of trees we'd still have leaves blowing in from other areas. So unless LUL can get a bylaw passed to institute treemageddon within the M25 boundary then we need to think up another means of dealing with leaf fall.

And we have one. Two, actually. One is to pressure wash the track. This is a tactic used by many companies which run on Network Rail track but with us being powered from the rails it's obviously not ideal to run a train through dumping water everywhere. So instead we lay something called Sandite. This is a mixture of sand which provides better traction and an enzyme which helps disperse leaf sap. Sandite comes from hoppers on a small train which pours it directly onto the running rails. It is not a perfect solution and needs replacing at least once per day but it makes a big difference in how easy it is to get trains running properly.

Various train operating companies also have systems on trains which are designed to stop the wheels spinning uselessly and locking up. It rather depends on the age of the train and who designed it as to whether this works well or not. Some are ok, some are a bit pants. But every little thing that is done to counteract leaf fall can give us a tiny advantage.

I think this is a war we are never going to win. Most of the time we are victorious in the yearly battles with hopefully only a few casualties in terms of sliding trains. But leaves are never going to leave and it's going to be at least another month before the Horror of Autumn is over. Just in time for the Horror of Winter with iced up power rails, frozen points and (you guessed it) sliding trains. It never rains but it pours.*


*If it rains we get slippery track and.... ;-)