Great Western Coffee Shop

From the Bristol Post (http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Packed-like-cattle-overcrowding-commuter-trains/story-26091246-detail/story.html):

From the pictures, I'm guessing the 2-car unit used was a 150/1. You could beat that, it could be a single 153 or 143.

That's not full! The photographer had room to aim his/her camera.

Try the Central Line eastbound from Bond Street at around, say, 17.00.

The Central line looks like that for a couple of hours each day, with trains running every 1/2 minutes! You can't open the windows either!

I have experienced this on a daily basis on both Tube and Train - the Tube is different as journeys tend to be much shorter and there is always another one along in a few minutes....irrespective of this I cannot help thinking that one day there will be a tragedy which is made much worse due to ridiculously overcrowded conditions like this - I don't buy FGW's blase attitude that it's not dangerous and its the customer's fault if they choose to get on........were there to be (God forbid) a fire or other need for urgent evacuation I dread to think what might happen in these conditions.

This would not be acceptable in any other form of transport on safety grounds, never mind comfort, I am at a loss to understand how it is tolerated on the railways.

I don't know, I've seen similar to the pictures in the OP on buses. Although there is an official maximum passenger count on buses, unlike trains, it is a large enough number that passengers almost don't have room to move when the bus is full.

.....as you state there is a maximum passenger count on buses, clearly displayed, and I have often seen drivers tell people "no more room", in contrast on trains it is a complete free for all.

While I have sympathy for your concerns, one has to recognise that rail operates in a very different framework to road, sea and air travel and the hazards and risks are different both in kind and incidence.

Road transport is not constrained to a pre-defined path and, as is well known, impacts can happen both between vehicles and with the surroundings. These incidents occur with sufficient frequency to make it sensible to ensure that the users are both seated and strapped in - so the law requires this in both cars and coaches and everybody gets a seat. Stage buses are a special case in that in general, and certainly within towns where most passengers are carried, the speeds are not sufficiently high to be life-threateningly dangerous in the event of a sudden stop. It is acceptable to have standing passengers who will mainly be present at peak times when, due to road congestion, speeds will tend to be lower anyway.

Sea journeys tend to be longer and because of the way ships are built more space is allowed for each passenger. Accelerations in any axis tend to be low - except of course in severe storms but then one has sufficient warning for the passengers to sit down. Seat belts are not necessary and standing shoulder to shoulder cannot happen.

Aircraft are subject to constraints on weight, the position of the centre of gravity and the number of emergency exits so the passenger load has to be controlled. Aircraft are also subject to turbulence which means that large vertical accelerations can be experienced; seat belts are essential. The result is, as with car and coach travel, that every passenger has a seat.

Rail operates in a way which ensures that accelerations are low - the maximum is about 10%g longitudinally. Because of the end load requirements (200 tons-force with no permanent distortion of the body structure) coach bodies are strong enough to cope with the maximum number of passengers than can be accommodated in the space. As a result there are no design constraints on the maximum number of passengers - it is not necessary to limit the number of passengers to the number of seats. Under normal operation
The design case that you mention, fire, may of course occur, but one has to consider where fire is likely to happen as well as its frequency. For a fire to take hold it needs a fuel, a temperature high enough to ignite it and a supply of oxygen. Railway vehicles are constructed of fire-proof or fire-resistant materials; within the passenger space fuels are hard to come by (this is one of the reasons modern seats are so board-like) and an ignition source is difficult to find. Fire in emus and dmus is mostly likely to occur under the floor where hot engines, exhausts and high currents are to be found - if the in-built fire suppression does not smother it then there will be several minutes before any fire burns through the floor. In any event an underbody fire will be local to an engine or a fuel tank meaning the entire coach will not be engulfed at once giving passengers time to leave the train.

In the case of an accident, of course, things may develop differently - but once an accident has happened the results are very much in the lap of the gods. However fires in railway vehicles are very rare (I can think of three in the last twenty years: an HST losing a fuel tank near Maidenhead, the Ladbroke Grove accident and a recent fire in junction box of a Class 459/9 which burnt through the floor). Tens of thousands of people are carried by rail to and from work each day in London, New York, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Madrid and Rome and the number of fires is vanishingly small.

Overcrowding in trains might be unpleasant and it certainly damages the perception rail travel - but of itself it is not dangerous. Restricting the number of people in a railway coach because of the slight chance that an accident or a fire might occur is to condemn some of these people to death because of the greater chance of accidents on the roads.

FYI, it's the ORR who you may wish to accuse of being blase and not any specific TOC.

http://orr.gov.uk/what-and-how-we-regulate/health-and-safety/guidance-and-research/passenger-safety/crowding-on-trains

I've seen a technical drawing of a class 158 showing it at it's maximum designed occupancy. Basically, it's designed to have every space filled with a passenger. Having seen it, I firmly believe it is not humanly possible to have too many passengers on a train. I suspect the same is true for other classes of train too.

Now this may not be good news for passenger comfort, but their safety isn't being compromised.

........and what effect does an enclosed area having "every space filled with a passenger" have on the ability to evacuate it swiftly in the event of an emergency, which surely should be one of the first considerations?

For those interested, I uncovered the paper linked below, after a little googling, which goes into some detail about rail vehicle capacity, mainly from a design point of view, but nonetheless relevant to this topic.

Hong Kong and some other Asian cities, use a crush loading design capacity of 8-10 standing persons per square metre...!!

http://www.railway-technical.com/Infopaper%202%20Railway%20Passenger%20Vehicle%20Capacity%20v3.pdf (http://www.railway-technical.com/Infopaper%202%20Railway%20Passenger%20Vehicle%20Capacity%20v3.pdf)

Just think: If you put a couple of hundred gallons of paraffin in each carriage, it'd be almost as unsafe as flying!

Similar scenes on the Devon Metro yesterday (and most rush hours) as everyone rushed off to Sandy park. Never seen so many people trying to get on the Pacers before on a saturday afternoon. Somewhat terrifying, has to be said!

What type of emergency in a train demands a swift evacuation? Anyway it's a six or eight foot drop to the ground, so should each door be fitted with steps or a Jacob's ladder?

The last think one wants is an uncontrolled evacuation - straight into the path of a train coming the other way or tripping over a live 3rd rail.