On Wed, 8 Mar 2023 at 17:39, Tony Galloway arg@...> wrote:
> Wasn’t that long ago there was no 2-way radio, digital or otherwise, and
> trains ran just fine.
>
> Now everything stops without it - what a joke.
>
> Must be that wonderful ever onwards “march of progress” that makes
> everything work so much better.
>
> Someone (a group of managers more like it) has written the operation of
the train radio system into the SMS and made it a 'vital' system so if that
system is not operational, they are not meeting all requirements for 'safe
operation'.
Never mind the railways ran for 100 years without radios and fancy digital
trunked comms systems.
Seems the concept of a driver looking out the front window and observing
the status of the signal lamps beside the track is no longer considered
'safe'.
There was no suggestion that interlockings had failed, or the actual train
control systems were down, what they lost was the network-wide GSM-R-based
train radio system. They couldn't talk between operations control and
trains in the field.
I observed the Cronulla branch being operated as a shuttle during the
outage, showing some initiative on the part of Sutherland station master to
take local control of the Cronulla branch. I've seen reports that Blacktown
did the same for the Richmond branch.
I just hope the relevant staff now don't get reprimanded for 'unsafe
operations' for showing some initiative to keep things running. Not all
station staff are safe working qualified anymore - I do wonder how they
will formally withdraw the qualifications from SMs that still hold safe
working qualifications, preventing any further local control initiative
taking on their part again.
They did a software update of the train radio controllers on the weekend. I
suspect that update wasn't tested under a full load of a busy system - or
tested long enough - the new software having a 'slow leak', so that it only
works for a few days - then falls over.
Vital systems should have redundant controllers with the software of each
written by different teams so that the two don't have the same bugs. But
that's expensive - doing all your R&D twice.