"D A Stocks" wrote in message
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In article ,
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So is it the intention of these deliberate derailers, or catch points
as those of us not in the press know them, to cause the train to
smash into an overhead wire support with such force that it bends in
two? What would be the result if the driver, who was presumably in
the cab at the time, or passengers had been killed or seriously
injured as a result?
Is this another feature of the signalling design that gave us the
Ladbroke
Grove crash? Looks like stupidity piled on stupidity.
How many other London Terminal approaches have derailers to handle SPADs?
I asked a similar question a year or two back in relation to a set of
catch points that regularly cause chaos at Brighton station - the last
time was 15 April 2015. There are a number of circumstances where trap
points will be provided, especially on the exits from yards or depots (or
other lines) where shunting takes place. A falling gradient to the main
line might be another candidate for trap points because TPWS won't help if
a train is running away due to brake failure.
I wonder about the sanity of siting catch points so they derail a train into
an OHLE mast. Derail the train into anything else - preferably broadside-on
into a platform edge so the friction slows the train down fairly gently. Let
it even foul the line that it is joining, as long as the train isn't
derailed into the path of an adjacent line. But hitting an OHLE mast, with
the loss of power to all electric trains, seems stupid.
Why did the derailment cause *all* departures to be cancelled? Why couldn't
diesels continue to use any tracks that weren't fouled by the derailed
train, with only HEX having to be cancelled? Did the derailment happen at a
place where all the tracks were fouled by either the train or by the fallen
wires?
Do TOCs have disaster plans for turning trains at a nearby station that has
transport links? Ealing Broadway would have been good because it has Central
and District line links. And what about Reading? Were westbound trains
running from there for people who used the Waterloo-Ascot-Reading line?
I presume all other TOCs accepted tickets for journeys from Paddington over
any reasonable route to Ealing/Reading.