Bad news for tomorrow morning:
Disruption to Great Western Railway services between Reading and London Paddington expected until 10:00 on Monday 27 November
Urgent repairs to the track between Reading and London Paddington means some lines will be blocked. As a result of this, trains may be cancelled or delayed.
Disruption is expected until 10:00 on Monday 27 November.
Customer Advice:
A Track Circuit Failure means some lines between Reading and London Paddington will be blocked on Monday 27 November.
Ticket acceptance is in place with the following train operators:
Chiltern Railways from Oxford to London Marylebone.
London Underground from London Marylebone and London Waterloo to London Paddington.
South Western Railway from Reading to London Waterloo.
Also, this photo. That presumably given the opportunity might be capable of causing a track circuit failure.
Mark
https://twitter.com/littl_eengine/status/1728793727118807397The
GWML▸ no longer uses track circuits on plain line, track circuits have been replaced with axel counters.
The argument / risk assessment is the removal of rail joints such as
IBJ▸ (insulated block joints) in
CWR▸ reduces greatly the likelihood of rail fractures that track circuits might have detected; reliance on regular runs of the NMT ('new' measurement train, sometimes referred to as the flying banana) and other track recording trains.
There is a lot of real-time data processing and the information is sent direct to the track maintenance engineer (
TME▸ ) team for the section, they will then prioritise the teams to respond. The defects are coded which dictate the priority of access the TME responds to and
NR» Route Control has to provide.
The response maybe an requesting the signaller to slow trains by signals until an
ESR▸ (emergency speed restriction) can be setup, until a team and equipment can be deployed.
Access to track by teams is now greatly reduced by the "Trackworker Safety Scheme" this has removed the use of "lookouts" certainly at full line speed, line blocks are now required to access and even in most places walk across open lines, this process was imposed on NR by the
ORR» due to the number of fatalities of track workers and number of reported near misses by train drivers