On Nov 23, 8:06*am, MIG wrote:
On good form today with reports of South Eastern services suspended
between Shepherds Bush and Milton Keynes.

If you will indulge me, I will rewind a bit back to the beginning. In
a building there is a Control room. On a Sunday night the Network Rail
duty manager and his team of train running controllers and
infrastructure controllers take duty alongside the TOC duty manager
and Controllers, which may include fleet staff, will include area
controllers (with different names across the industry) and will also
include a Customer Information controller/manager as well as CIS
operators and CCTV, but the latter staff may be located separately, it
depends on the TOC.

Once on duty the mundane jobs are done. It is a night shift so will
include balancing stock for the morning peak (TOC) , creating the
previous days log for distribution (TOC/NR) and monitoring of
possessions (NR, but TOCs obviously showing an interest). As it is
autumn there is the RHTT’s to monitor (again NR with TOC
watchfulness). Take a way’s may be delivered and certainly plenty of
tea and coffee will be consumed.

At an unspecified time (we will use 05.00) a call will come in to say
that there has been a failure of the signalling equipment has occurred
at Dingily Dell and the information flow will start through the
office. Obviously this could be a unit failure a line side fire, wires
down, Ice on the 3rd rail, possession over running – you get the
point. So, at the moment the extent of the problem will not be
immediately apparent so there will be deployment of resources, on call
management to site if need be or advised at least. So to get back to
the original topic a message will – if relevant at this time – be sent
to staff pagers (a bit old fashioned now) more likely staff
Blackberries will be emailed, stations receive faxes, or direct
massages on read only Tyrell(*) terminals, normal emails and there
are other methods of receiving. Public facing recipients will be the
TOC’s website, NRES and a number of designated recipients and as
Dingily Dell is a South East location the information will go to
London Traffic Link and a smattering of local radio stations.
Customers / passengers who have chosen to receive alerts may at this
stage also receive a text or email alert, but that really depends on
how much information is initially known at this stage.
Now once the extent of the problem unravels (sometimes it is obvious,
other times it needs time to assess) it may be necessary for a
telephone conference between site on staff and representatives from
the Control (at all levels) with senior management staff also if
required.

So we now learn that the Dingily Dell incident is now going to be a
bit of a biggie, with very restrictive signalling available. A train
plan is hatched. The Network Rail infrastructure controller is
allocating resources to go to site and fix the problem; the NR train
running controller is liaising with signallers and inputting schedules
or cancelling schedules and of course liaising with the TOCs
controllers. The TOC Controller is sorting out the train crews and in
turn liaising with the fleet controller (he/she may be in the Control
or the depot, it depends on which control you are in) as to what units
should stay tucked up in the depot and the most important link in the
chain is that the information controller / manager will now update the
information already sent out with a more informed update and details
of the service plan. All of the original recipients of the first
message will receive this information in the form of an “updated
“message. Individual trains will then be shown as cancelled, delayed
or altered and each of these alterations will also go to the same
recipients with clever stuff now being done with text alerts filtering
out the unwanted bits so that those who receive text alerts get the
right information. The CIS will now be updated. Live departure boards
will also be updated, either by the information input by the Customer
Information Controller / Manager on his Tyrell terminal or by input
into CIS. Some systems allow the CIS to be updated by Tyrell cutting
out a link in the chain and also illuminating any differences, such as
reasons being manually input differently.

Thus the man at Dingily Dell local radio receives an updated message
at 06.00 advising that TOC “A” (local trains) is affected by the
signalling problem, as well as a message from TOC “B” (Inter city) who
are located in a different control room but have sent out a very
similar message. TOC “C” only run a few trains so have been told to
stay away altogether please, so the junior reporter working at Dingily
Dell radio pulls off all of these messages and gives them to Tim, nice
but dim, who is on the breakfast show. Tim tells all of the morning
commuters the tale of woe.
Now if you move the dial over a bit (press a preset button etc) a
larger commercial radio station has a traffic report coming up. The
traffic news is being read by an independent organisation who has
received the same information from the different TOCs. Prior to
reading out the local news that affects the whole of London; the
reporter has just finished a slot on Birmingham’s commercial radio and
prior to that, Manchester. In between these broadcasts they are
getting updates from the highways agency and many other TOC’s and LUL.
They will be back in half an hour with another update.

So now you turn on the BBC news on the TV and after the local weather
the traffic will be read by the newsreader from a script prepared by
information gleaned from Traffic Link (mentioned earlier and quite
probably the same source for the commercial radio show). Turn over
again (in my opinion at your peril, but that is my opinion only) and
you will find the ITV version of breakfast news. They will advise you
of the same problems having got the information in the same way.

(*) Tyrell is a system used by MOST railway control offices to
disseminate information and is provided / hosted by Nexus Alpha (I
will leave the sci-fi buffs to work out the connection). It has been
mentioned a few times on here before and their website is at
http://www.nexusalpha.com/

I appreciate that the chain can become broken, but hope this helps
explain why it can be broken. I would not say that I spend all of my
spare time monitoring the airwaves and TV for inaccuracies, but when I
see them or hear them, if I can, I will go via the most direct route I
can to get things corrected. When not at work this can be via a radio
station direct or via email to other outlets including NRES (whose
staff is very good and very well informed).

I hope this is of some interest

Richard