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0 pointsbombcar2y ago0 comments

When you have a situation like this you run a worst case scenario and put in effect immediately.

Whether that is telling passengers that busses will be there in two hours or whatever, you work it out.

If something like this happens in a winter storm, it can become deadly.

0 comments

> When you have a situation like this you run a worst case scenario and put in effect immediately.

Almost all of the time it's not a worst case scenario though. Most of the time it's just that someone has dropped their phone on the track and trains have been asked to stop so that it can be retrieved.

Worst case scenario management is expensive and dangerous (e.g. walking on tracks) because the net risk or net cost is beneficial in the face of a bad situation. It is a good thing that we don't jump straight to these sorts of solutions as it would be in general more dangerous and our services would cost even more.

Now, is 3 hours too long? Yeah probably. But these sorts of issues happen maybe once a year per line, it's hard to know when you're in one.

pdonis2y ago

> Almost all of the time it's not a worst case scenario though.

While this is true, this would seem to be one of those cases where the people in charge should have known it was a worst case scenario fairly early on. In which case they should have activated the worst case scenario fallback plan much earlier.

In other words, it's not a matter of treating every scenario as worst case, but of quickly spotting the ones that are so fallback plans can be activated much sooner to avoid stranding people for hours.

> It's hard to know when you're in one.

The passengers and the driver of that train obviously didn't know--but somebody knew fairly early on that this wasn't going to be a quick fix, and that somebody should be responsible for communicating that knowledge to all the affected trains and telling their drivers to evacuate because this isn't going to be fixed any time soon. The big question I would be asking is why that wasn't done and why it isn't standard operating procedure in cases like this.

addicted2y ago

I’d imagine when you’re minutes away from losing auxiliary power without any idea when main power will return that’s an easy trigger for worst case actions.

Here it seems people were waiting 45 mins to an hour after that happened.

midasuni2y ago

What winter storms in london would make a powerless train deadly in a few hours?

vkou2y ago

If we approached life with a worst-case scenario mindset, I wouldn't leave my house without first putting on full body armor with steel plate inserts, and a bomb-squad helmet.

Most of the time, it's not going to be a 3-hour stop, and anyone trying to walk the tracks is likely to create a safety problem for themselves and other trains.

At the time of the stop, if nobody knows how bad the outage is likely to be, there is no point in time when making the call to have the passengers all walk out is the right thing to do.

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