From: rf@cl.cam.ac.uk (Robin Fairbairns)
Subject: Re: Small Gods Annotations
Followup-To: uk.transport,rec.railroad
Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 10:45:08 GMT

In article <1993Jan26.144244.10642@bradford.ac.uk>, P.A.Foulkes@bradford.ac.uk (Pete Foulkes) writes:
|> In article <728033204snx@warren.demon.co.uk> leveret@warren.demon.co.uk writes:
|> >>[...]
|> >And I have *never*, *ever* heard of your "wrong kind of leaves" story.
|> >Please suppy a reference for it.
|> 
|> My recollection is that it wasn't the "wrong kind of leaves" it
|> was just "leaves on the track". 

Indeed so.

|> Of course you don't expect a shock fall of leaves on the track
|> in Autumn.  :-)

It's this terrible tendency BR have not to R&D with the portion of our
money they're not allowed to spend on R&D.

BR commission new, highly-efficient, trains for London commuter lines.
One of the wonderful new efficiencies is that the braking is disc-
based rather than the old clamp-on-a-steel-shoe style.  Now, if BR had
only spent enough money, and ordered their trains in enough time, they
would have realised that an unnoticed side-effect of steel shoes is
that they scrape soggy leaves off wheels.  They could then, perhaps,
have come up with a design change that they could have paid (with our
money again) to have installed on the production run of these units.

In article <728033204snx@warren.demon.co.uk>, leveret@warren.demon.co.uk (Nick Leverton) writes:

|> Wasn't it (recalls scratchy and rather inaccurate memory) when they introduced
|> a new train that was so light (you know, one of them bus-bodies on a rail
|> chassis) that it didn't have the traction to climb some of the grades over the
|> Pennines when heavy falls of leaves made the tracks all slippery. I think
|> that's the incident I was thinking of. Definately happened. For a while they
|> were talking about putting huge lead weights or something into them so that
|> they'd have the traction....

The serious issue about the ultra-light weight cross-country trains is
nothing to do with leaves.  Because they are so light, they have a
tendency only intermittently to operate track circuits that detect the
presence of trains on a portion of track.  Now, since railways are
hung about with _so_ much safety legislation, the lack of this
information (which in days of yore used to be supplied by the people
sitting in signal boxes at every significant junction) means serious
impact on the running of the railway.

BR's reprehensible attitude to R&D again, I'm afraid.  If only they'ld
spent more money, they'ld have anticipated the problem before they
installed the current generation of track circuits, and made them
behave more reliably in today's conditions.

Seriously, BR do have problems about the way they run their network.
They also have serious public relations problems arising from how easy
it is for the media and people at large to poke fun at them (note: the
operation of the railways was a standing joke _before_ nationalisation -
look at back copies of Punch, for example).

Followups (belatedly) directed to avoid uk.misc
--
Robin (Keep Radio 3 != Classic FM) Fairbairns       rf@cl.cam.ac.uk
U of Cambridge Computer Lab, Pembroke St, Cambridge  CB2 3QG, UK