London Banter - View Single Post

Tom Anderson · November 5th 07, 08:55 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, wrote:

"Richard J." wrote in message
news
No it's not. If you had a dead man's handle on the Vic and the driver
had a heart attack, the train would stop in the tunnel with nobody on
board able to radio for assistance or talk to the passengers. Without
a dead man's handle, the ATO would drive the train *safely* to the next
station where the driver and passengers could more easily and quickly
be attended to. Which would you prefer?

If a driver dies in the cab and releases the dead man's handle, the line
controller will at first try to contact him to see why he hasn't reset
and continued on his way (It does happen that hands occasionally just
slip off the controller.).

If that is unsuccessful the line controller will then link into the
train's PA and request that any LUL employee on board come forward and
see what's happened.

Failing that, IIRC, they might send somebody down to see what's wrong.

As in the train behind comes forward and does a push-out or sends over a
new driver or something. Is it possible to couple two trains in the tunnel
and have the relieving driver drive the double train from the front?

But the point is that this all takes a lot of time - with the current ATO
situation, the train would simply drive itself to the next station on its
own.

ISTM that the way forward might be for the control room to be able to
override the deadman remotely, i suppose via the ATO codes. They'd need
some way to be able to ascertain the condition of the driver - CCTV would
be nice but probably implausible (unless there's more bandwidth down there
than i knew about), the cab radio might be enough - to make sure they're
not overriding a legitimate stopping of the train, though.

tom

--
We start here and head south.