Eurostar woes

[Andy Burns]

And if it's "too cold" on both sides of the tunnel for either London or Paris/Brussels trains to enter?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Yes - but that's rather different from your idea of having enough of them to do all trains.

Far as I know it's still losing money. That can't go on for ever.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Brilliant idea. Until you get the 'wrong' snow on the UK side of the channel...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Indeed. All this for what hopefully was a one off event. Very badly handled - but making the system more complicated is likely to stress that poor incident coping even more. What needs to be answered is why, if they already possessed shunter locos capable of pulling out the stuck trains, it took so long to do even the first one. It's not like they were derailed.

[js.b1]

Firstly w.r.t. reset it can come down to authority if multiple systems involved perhaps requiring maintenance engineers, and secondly the failure may have been more involved. I still suspect the melt ended up where it shouldn't, filters clogged by snow then melted.

The problem is achieving sufficient snow ingress prevention outside the tunnel, whilst ensuring sufficient cooling inside the tunnel. I suspect the other services lost indicate the melt ended up "where it shouldn't", the power control systems probably require direct cooling and the system may not have been designed for a deluge of suddenly melted snow.

Several failures - insufficient shields against snow ingress being the initiator.

[Pete Verdon]

Passenger trains aren't made up of independent carriages any more (at least, South West Trains ones aren't, and I assume the same applies to Eurostar). Yes, they articulate to go round corners, but the set of four or so coaches is one vehicle that can't be split and joined willy nilly. Hence SWT services are always 4, 8 or 12 coaches, they can't just tag one or two on the end for extra space, and 16 coaches would be too big to fit between points, track circuits, etc.

This according to SWT customer relations folks; some spotter's probably going to prove it's all rubbish now :-)

Pete

[Pete Verdon]

Um, isn't this exactly what it does? It says "Aileron Mistrim", meaning "I'm having to pull down too hard on this aileron - something's wrong". Then, since it's in an error condition, it disconnects to let the pilot sort it out (possibly this is the not-so-clever part). At which point the pilot not having instantly understood the problem is not ready to apply the same force himself.

The way this all plays out together could be better, but to say "they're all idiots - why didn't they have any warnings?" is not correct.

Pete

[Roger Mills]

Then you reverse the process. It's only when you get the wrong type of snow on *both* sides of the channel simultaneously that you've got a *real* problem.

In the case under discussion, it was only one one side - but Eurostar just seemed to go into panic mode rather than applying lateral thinking.

[Rod]

While I agree the general points, you will find many SWT trains that are five car units - hence, 5 or 10 cars long. (Not sure if 15 is possible or not.) Indeed, it appears some SWT units may be 2 or 3 cars.

[Owain]

Euro*tunnel* which announced a =8040m (=A335.6m) net profit =96 only the second in its history =96 for last year, said it was paying =807.6m to shareholders. (Guardian, 4 March 2009)

Euro*star* seem rather coy about their financial results - neither their website nor google produce much info.

However apparently from Jan 2010 Eurostar's monopoly ends and other train operators will be able to run through the tunnel.

Owain

[Peter Twydell]

We're all of us wrong. The true cause can only be found if you understand the basic principles of flight:

will explain all that lift/drag stuff.

The Mary Shafer referred to was a Lead Engineer on the NASA SR-71 team, so she knows what she's talking about.

[dennis]

Then they have set the limits incorrectly or they should have issued a warning well before they decided to give up and dump the problem on the pilot.

I didn't say they were idiots, I said never trust them.

[S Viemeister]

Is she still posting somewhere? She's disappeared from the newsgroup I used to see her on.

[geoff]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

But that was not the case, was it ?

Nor was there a nest of Zombies in the tunnel

There is little point in constructing hypothetical situations

[geoff]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

Where did I say that ?

I was talking about maintaining some sort of service rather than none

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Or providing solutions for them.

[Peter Twydell]

She posts very occasionally on rec.aviation.military. I think she has a blog somewhere that's to do with sewing or knitting or some such. Sorry to be vague, but it wasn't of interest to me!

[js.b1]

Bet there were after 15hrs...

...eyes wide... staggering around...

...desperate to take a bite out of...

[S Viemeister]

Found it - thank you.