On 6 Jan, 12:31, John B wrote:

(snips lots of worthwhile stuff)

Anyway... while junctions make life more complicated, they also
provide diversions and alternative routes. Whereas when you've got a
railway that's fundamentally two tracks with trains separated by only
a couple of minutes, any disruption is going to have instant and rapid
knock-ons - and the only way you can deal with that is to add
extremely expensive redundancy (in this case, adding signalling and
track work at Arnos so that it can be used as a full-capacity terminus
mirroring Cockfosters, or turning one of the stations north of Arnos
into an alternative reversing point - in either case, these will only
be useful for the few hours a month when access to Cockfosters has
completely failed).


One thing that never seems to get a lot of focus in such situations is
the failed train - what failed, why, and can better maintenance
prevent it or rather more realistically lessen the frequency of such a
failure occurring. It seems to be taken as a given, on both LU and the
mainline railway, that trains fail - of course some will, but I'm not
so sure this should be taken as a given as much as it seems to be.

Connected to this - will the new 09TS for the Vic line and the new S
stock have some fancy but useful self-diagnostic systems on board, for
example? Maybe such things aren't that helpful but depot based systems
are - and in this context I mean system not just as in a computer but
a whole process. TBH I don't very little about the railway rolling
stock maintenance regimes that are in use and I'm sure that they have
advanced significantly over recent years (or at least I would hope
they have!) but I suspect more can be done.