On Feb 18, 1:50*pm, wrote:
On Feb 17, 8:23*pm, Paul Corfield wrote:

I would agree that signal failures are not acceptable but they can
happen for all sorts of reasons. To effect quick turnarounds you need to
roster in "stepping back" which is used at Brixton. However you can't
just magic drivers out of nowhere to make it happen at Warren St or

Why would you have to magic up a driver? The train already has one and
since he can't get to where he was going anyway why can't he just
drive it back in the other direction?


The driver can just walk to the other end and drive it back, but for
the normal service, there will be a driver already in position at the
rear who take take the train straight back out. It takes a driver
longer to walk from one end of the train to the other than the time
that the train would have to turn around at Warren Street whilst still
maintaining a reasonable frequency. At Warren Street, you would be
lucky to manage a train every 5 minutes without stepping back,
especially as the platform will be crowded.

Highbury when there is a major disruption. *I know you'll say that's a
typical useless LUL response but it's an honest one.

All it shows is that LUL have little in the way of fall back
procedures in place when things go pear shaped. A broken door or dodgy
signal should not end up with 5 trains worth of people stuck in a
tunnel for an hour. Broken signal? Fine , drive through it on caution
and let everyone detrain. Whats the problem? Broken door? Reverse
train back into platform , empty pax and take it away again. Sorted.
Why do these simple procedures take LUL hours and hours to sort out?
The odd occasion one can accept , but every single time theres some
failure on a line this sort of thing occurs. *I suspect it will take
someone dying in a stuck train and the relatives suing LUL for a small
fortune before someone pulls the corporate finger out however.


There seem to be plenty of fall back plans, the problem is that the
system has enough trouble coping with a 'normal' day due to the number
of passengers. For example, "Broken signal? Fine , drive through it on
caution and let everyone detrain." is a good plan, except that to
drive through a signal at caution may take three times (for example)
as long as a normal and so the line gets blocked up with a queue of
trains and what do you do with all the people that you've decided to
detrain? Reversing a train back into a platform assumes that the next
train isn't already coming into the station. All these procedures take
time to set up for the very good reason as they often involve doing
something out of the ordinary, there have been accidents after 'stop
and proceed' at a failed signal with trains running into the back of
one another.