It seems that the meeja just cannot let go of the long debunked wrong kind of snow cockwaffle. That no one ever said “wrong kind of snow” makes no difference, every time there is a rail related story, they dust it off and trot it out with wearisome regularity. So, again, here it is – only this time, it’s warm weather.
Now it appears there is a new threat to the smooth running of trains across the country – the sun.
The latest report by Office of Rail Regulation, covering April to July, showed delays went up during the hottest days of the summer because of the “impact of warm weather”.
There is nothing new about warm weather affecting the infrastructure. It has been going on for as long as there have been railway lines. What are rails made of? Steel. And what happens to steel when the temperature rises? It expands. The railway is designed to allow for a certain amount of expansion. However, beyond that allowance, there is a danger of the rails buckling. And sometimes they do. I’ve had to inspect rails in high temperatures and yes, they buckle, sometimes badly. It’s basic physics.
According to the ORR a rise in temperature means that some equipment – including cabling, signalling systems and electrical items overheated.
Network Rail, which maintains the country’s track infrastructure, admitted life gets difficult when the temperature rises above 86F (30C).
In the UK, 30o is not usual. The infrastructure will cope with the normal operating conditions, just not the extremes, which aren’t that usual – or they wouldn’t be extremes.
Overhead power lines can sag and rails buckle, meaning that speed restrictions have to be imposed to prevent a train coming off the track.
As I said, basic physics and the response is a reasonable one.
A passenger watchdog voiced exasperation at the latest excuses from Network Rail.
So what would they like? Massive relaying of track and OHL to different standards? Where will that money come from? Perhaps they would like trains to run at line speed over buckled rails? That would work well.
“Long-suffering passengers will wonder why the railways seem unable to cope with sun and heat in summer, in the same way wind, rain and cold weather seems to surprise them every year.” said Jo de Bank, spokesman for London TravelWatch.
The only thing that surprises me is that despite this being GCSE level physics that we face every day of our lives, people still have the capacity to be surprised when it happens.
Louise Ellman, chairman of the Transport Select Committee, added: “It seems as if there is an excuse for all seasons.”
And there is always a buffoon who fails to understand basic physics…
In a separate study the ORR said that Network Rail was 34 to 40 per cent less efficient than its major European counterparts when it came to maintaining and renewing track infrastructure.
Now this is an issue. The railway is very quiet at the moment and small businesses that rely on contracts from Network Rail and its main contractors are feeling the pinch. A number will go out of business and expertise will be lost in the process. On the one hand, there is a danger of lack of investment leading to deterioration of the infrastructure that in some cases is operating at its maximum capacity and on the other, a need to save money.
“There is nothing new about warm weather affecting the infrastructure. It has been going on for as long as there have been railway lines. What are rails made of? Steel. And what happens to steel when the temperature rises? It expands.”
Last year, at the height of summer, I remember wondering why my c2c train was suddenly crawling at a snail’s pace, when the driver announced they had an emergency speed rrestriction in place due to buckling of the line…
Once, on a train going across/under the Pennines, the guard apologised for our slow speed and said it was ‘due to the wrong kind of rain’. He may have been joking. Or not. But it made me laugh.
Best overheard conversation between a member of station staff and an extremely foul-mouthed passenger complaining about a severely delayed train: ‘Would you like me to put you on my back and carry you there?’ My, didn’t the passenger turn a strange colour!
Now, you know that physics is deemed a very hard subject at GCSE level which is why most children are discouraged from taking it. Only the brightest are allowed to take GCSE physics so, unsurprisingly, huge numbers of children are woefully ignorant about such basic things as expansion and contraction of metals, let alone states of matter and the like. TV sets work by magic.
How’s the biking in France?
One hopes the original designers did know their physics, and they must have made decisions about costs, materials, support distances, expansion etc. It was surely those decisions which effectively defined the temperature range under which the system could operate.
While it’s obviously wasteful to overengineer it nevertheless seems to be a depressingly common failing in this country that we invariably build to the absolute minimum standard and we fail to to account for the stresses and less common weather that will undoubtably arise. As a result we end up with infrastucture that fails as soon as an ‘extreme’ event happens.
Chris, yes, of course these factors are engineered in. In the early days, structures were massively over engineered. I’m not a track specialist but I am aware that there are upper and lower limits for track tolerance. While it seems that it crops up regularly, the amount of times that the track heats to the point where buckling is a problem is relatively rare in the UK.
Many of the weather problems are nothing to do with engineering tolerances. Leaves, for example will always be a problem as the crushed mulch creates an insulating layer, preventing the track circuit system from detecting the train thereby causing signals to clear that should be at danger. The other problem with it is highly slippery. Axle counters overcome the first problem and are being installed on the system. Various sanding systems and an equivalent of ABS are fitted to trains to reduce the problem. The other thing that Network Rail does is vegetation cutting.
Snow is always a problem – no matter what type. Engineering has limited effect on frozen points and moisture getting into electrical systems as well as damage to OLE.
Weather is a problem, no matter how much engineers try to minimise the effects.
LR,
Whilst the basic physics is indeed undeniable, the question that remains is “how do this differently elsewhere?”
Most of continental Europe has wider extremes of temperature, being both hotter in summer and colder in winter, yet – we are led to believe – the Germans and French manage to keep their trains running. How do they do this? They have, after all, to cope with exactly the same basic physics….
And they experience the same problems. One of the great myths of our time is that they do not have the same delays as the UK system. They do, but they build in more recovery time into their timetables.
It’s not unusual, even so, to await a train at Montpellier and note that your train is retard. Indeed, on the occasions that I used the train to get down here, we were frequently late by anything up to twenty minutes.
I’ve got plenty of experience on Russian trains, having ridden them in the height of summer (35C) and depths of winter (-35C). The Russian trains rarely have a problem with extreme temperatures, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why: they leave about a six-inch gap between each rail, so that the ride is seriously rough and noisy. But, like everything else which is rough and noisy in Russia (and that is most things) you soon get used to it. I had a pretty good record of sleeping on the Russian trains, even though you felt as though you were going to get pitched onto the floor with every jolt.
So, there is a solution, but it involves discomfort.
Long welded rail is designed to minimise that discomfort. So, yeah, we could go back to the clicketty-clack of the old fish-plated system.
The other problem picked up in the original article is that of expenditure on the infrastructure. Old components fail more readily when put under pressure in extremes of temperature. Higher maintenance expenditure will reduce this. It’s a balancing act.
Most of the various environmental problems of railways are track engineering related. Manganese steel, which I understand is still the material used for most railway lines, has known behaviours under various conditions, yet the actual design of track has undergone few fundamental design changes since it was invented.
I think what I’m driving at here is the notion that steel rail track always has had a certain operational envelope. Like all modes of transport it has its limitations, and we should not expect it to survive all the conditions this planet can throw at it and remain untrammelled. Like you can’t reasonably expect to tow a Caravan along Cornish country roads using a Smart Car.
Simply put; rail has its limitations. Being a 19th century solution to 21st century transport issues is one of them.
In days of yore they did leave a gap for expansion in each joint between the bits of rail, leading to the distinctive clackety-clack of train wheels, still heard in many parts of the world.
Eventually, some mighty Einstein of the railway engineering world realised that the force generated by the rails expanding is independent of length. So as long as the rail is fixed down with enough elbow grease etc, we need not leave expansion gaps between single sections of rail. This led to the introduction of long welded rail sections as noted above.
This suggests to me that it is the usual incompetence in the design of the system that is the problem, although no doubt AGW and ‘unprecedented warming’ could probably get weaseled in by the guilty.
Longrider, Japan has slightly more extreme seasons than we do over here. Winters are generally colder, summers hotter and they have earthquakes as well as monsoon rains to contend with. Yet in Japan a delayed train is practically national news.
And their trains don’t cost that much to travel on – and they are all private lines – and the trains don’t go clickety-clack either. But the Japanese have a proper rail system – not like the load of politically deranged ex-nationalised shite we have been lumped with.
I don’t know a great deal about the Japanese system, but I presume they have greater expansion tolerances built in to allow for their range of temperatures.
It goes back to the comment I made in the original post about having to relay with those tolerances built in – the cost would be huge. The infrastructure owner has to make a cost benefit analysis. Given that they are under pressure to reduce their outgoings, I think we can see what the likely answer will be. A wholly private system would be able to make that decision free of any political influence.
The other thing to bear in mind is that a delay on the UK system pretty quickly causes knock on delays due to the high intensity of traffic. Again, don’t know about the Japanese system.
I recently ran a post on this and there is something to it. The hot days stop our rail service, as do rain and rush hour.
Hot days are only a problem once the temperature gets above 30oC. This is relatively rare in the UK. The causes of delay are various and sometimes they are weather related. Heavy rain can cause flooding, shorting out track circuits affecting the signalling system. The cure for this is to fit axle counters throughout the system. This is ongoing. It takes time and money.
As I’ve mentioned before, much of the infrastructure is running at full capacity during the rush hours. One idiot jumping in front of a train, for example, will cause hours of delays while the police stop everything to carry out their investigation. I’ve already mentioned leaf fall and snow. The other factor is the stock itself. Gradually the TOCs are replacing older stock – but, again, it takes time and money, which is why there is still a significant amount of older stock running about that is prone to failing.
Then there’s the little matter that a significant part of our infrastructure is over 150 years old using semaphore signalling. Even the later MAS signalling dates back to BR days and is life expired. The technicians will keep it going for as long as they can but new signalling systems take decades to design and install.
My point being; there is no one single factor that causes delays, they are various and will not be fixed without significant investment.
Are you sure about that wrong kind of snow comment not being true?
I have a very strong memory of watching the original interview on regional BBC and being somewhat taken aback when it was said. However when it was explained, something that most of the MSM ignored in their clamour to poke fun, it made sense. It was something to do with the light flakes getting under a cowling and into a protected part of the engine.
Yes. The snowfall wasn’t sufficient for the use of snowploughs. Terry Worrall explained that the powdery snow that fell then got swept into the motors of the trains causing damage to the traction motors – much the same as happened to Eurostar in January. “Wrong type of snow” was a media invention.
You mention axle counters and here we see where much of the perceived problem lies. For some reason we seem to be shockingly bad at installing these correctly in this country, they don’t have anything like the problems with them on the continent that we do here. The standards of design, installation and maintenance on our railways, not to mention safety gold plating and inflated costs are the real problem, not the weather.
I remember my grandad may he rest in peace, complaining about the problems they had when continuous welded rail was introduced. He was of the opinion that the engineers were idiots and didn’t understand that metal expands and contracts with temperature changes.
This was from a man who was born in 1914 and left education to work on the railways at the tender age of 14!