New, but maybe not better. Northerns new trains

[kevsmiththai]

New, not necessarily better. Pacers V Civities

 

So the embattled Northern Rail franchise passes back into government control  on March 1st after a catalogue of delayed, cancelled and overcrowded trains finally proved too much. Arriva will be stripped of the franchise early after chaos following the introduction of the new timetables.

 

Now Northern covers a huge area of the North of England and its trains call at 528 stations, 476 of which Northern control. In 2016 it handled 97million  passenger services

 

The group was given 500 million at the award of the contract to purchase 101 new trains split between diesel multiple units, the 'Class195,' and electric multiple units using the same bodyshell and running gear, the 'Class 331s'. This was supposed to allow the withdrawal of the venerable but much derided Class 142,143 and 144  Pacers.

 

A 142 and 144 at Skipton

 

These had been introduced as a stop gap measure from 1985 onwards and were basically Leyland bus body components on a modified long wheelbase wagon chassis powered by a Cummins engine. Rough riding and prone to horrendous flange squeal on tight curves nobody anticipated they would still be holding down important traffic flows in 2019! The driver for their introduction was to eliminate the hundreds of first generation Diesel railcars that were still vacuum braked and well past their sell by date in the 1980's

 

 A clas108 introduced in 1958 leaves Worksop for Sheffield

 

Now I basically quite like the Pacers so long as I don't have to ride one but the poor commuters who had to endure daily trips on them into Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle etc were desperate to se them go so the introduction of the new CAF built stock was eagerly awaited

 

The rather rarer class 143 on a middlesboroufgh train at Seaburn

 

 

I photographed my first 195 in May last year on a driver training trip out of Barrow and my first 331in September on my way to Fleetwood model railway exhibition that's how new they are.

 

A Class 195 at Lancaster heading form Barrow in Furness from Manchester Airport

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kevsmiththai]

You can see the common bodyshell in this view of a 331 EMU at Kirkham and Wesham

 

 

Now they are packed full of electronics as all modern trains now are and on my first ride on a 195 things did not go well. I was heading to a conference in Manchester and as usual caught the Manchester Airport train at Dalton which is now a 195 turn. Quite pleasant inside with USB charging points and information screens but rather upright firm seating. Quiet as well, compared to the 156s and 158s that were the norm.

 

Things first went awry as we slowed for Ulverston station where the display screen advised passengers to exit to the left. Ulverston is an island platform and on the left is a four foot drop onto the ballast!

 

Worse was to come as we headed into Manchester where before we had reached Salford Crescent the screen said the next stop was the Airport. This caused the other passengers to get a bit nervous as the three main Manchester city stops Deansgate, Oxford road and Piccadilly had dropped off the screen. I put there mind at rest on that one.

 

The other day a report landed on my desk on reliability figures and failure rates. Guess what? the much derided four wheeled Pacers were showing one failure every 7884 miles, the Civities 2877 miles. The main issue is that the 'analogue' Pacers just keep going when they have minor faults where the new trains, stuffed full of computers stop themselves every time they think they are showing a fault and ask the driver to do a reboot! We had the same issue at work where the 'Analogue' Hunslet shunters, if the engines were worn, would tell you the oil pressure was low on tickover by the oil warning light flickering. Loco 4, kitted out with a full electronic driver display unit, sees the warning and shuts the engine down.

 

New, not better?

Kev

[Socimi]

1 hour ago, kevsmiththai said:

The other day a report landed on my desk on reliability figures and failure rates. Guess what? the much derided four wheeled Pacers were showing one failure every 7884 miles, the Civities 2877 miles. The main issue is that the 'analogue' Pacers just keep going when they have minor faults where the new trains, stuffed full of computers stop themselves every time they think they are showing a fault and ask the driver to do a reboot! We had the same issue at work where the 'Analogue' Hunslet shunters, if the engines were worn, would tell you the oil pressure was low on tickover by the oil warning light flickering. Loco 4, kitted out with a full electronic driver display unit, sees the warning and shuts the engine down.

 

Railway equipment can easily be compared to military one: they are both among the few where the "simplicity = reliability" rule is always true.

In railway practice, one should design anything with Murphy's law firmly in mind: the more stuff it can go wrong, will go wrong.

 

Trains built between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s (with a few exceptions) are those in that sweet spot between mechanical reliability and sophisticated electronic control, and often are more reliable than post-2010s ones, while being still perfectly adequate for the services they're running.

Not to mention that in railway practice, a computer fault is always harder to fix than an electrical or a mechanical fault, especially en-route.

 

 

 

[Sheffie]

Computers just don’t know anything. They can detect issues quickly and reliably, but they cannot understand or judge. Now, in some cases it might be appropriate to allow a driver or engineer to choose to ignore or override a warning/failure/error condition... but I’m prepared to bet that the number of software engineers who are also railways engineers is essentially zero. In other words, there’s still no deep understanding and therefore there’s no basis for making a judgment call as to which events—or combinations of events—may be safe enough to ask, and wait, for a human response. The people who write the software are always going to make it “fail safe” as far as they can. 

 

(This is is me speaking as a senior software engineer rather than a train enthusiast. )

 

Until we get to a significant improvement in software design, allowing systems to be trained or configured by subject matter experts, I’m afraid that anything as complicated and dangerous as a train is going to be either perfect or broken—binary states with no grey area in between.