Golden age of railways?
Fog has played its annual puckish part in upsetting the carefully planned timetables of British Railways.
It seems odd that trains, which do not even need to be steered, may be worse affected by fog than road vehicles. Each slight dislocation of the railway timetable seems to spread like some infectious disease. The lateness of one train holds up others behind it, and the effect quickly escalates. Soon the dislocation has become a lusty disruption.
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Passenger complaints are only a symptom of this 鈥� the true cost to the community is much larger. More than a million working hours may be lost in a single day as a result of the railways鈥� inability to run trains to their timetables in a fog. Yet British Railways continues to use a method of controlling trains in fog that could hardly have been called advanced even in Victorian days.
When a fog is forecast, or when signalmen report to the traffic controllers at headquarters that it is foggy, the standard fog service is put into operation. This involves cancelling some trains to decrease traffic density. At the same time 鈥渇ogmen鈥� are called out to take up position at warning signals. Each is provided with detonators to fix on the line to give aural warning to the engine driver, a pair of flags, a lamp, and a coke brazier to keep them warm.
It is little wonder that the service is unable to maintain a steady flow of traffic over heavily used suburban rail lines. This is a ludicrous state of affairs. Automatic train control to alert drivers to the position of approaching signals already exists 鈥� is it not time to use it?
In these days of automatic pilots for aeroplanes and automatic helmsmen for ships, why is it still necessary to rely on the eye of an engine driver to pick out the shadowy form of a flickering wick in a signal lamp?
From The New 杏吧原创, 17 January 1957