'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology

I know which company you mean, and I think the RAIB investigation found serious problems with the driver training and the management's approach to safety. One suspects they would also have broken the glass on the MCB if the attitude from above was "we'll give you hell if you're not at the destination on time, but we won't look too closely at how you do it". WCRC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Railways) got banned from the network as a result until Network Rail was satisfied that the management took safety a bit more seriously.

The driver being prosecuted and sentenced in court may also deter future drivers from doing that again, especially if someone can show they're being pressured from above to do anything unsafe again, someone much higger up will be very, very upset with them.

Meanwhile in Germany, there was a head-on between two trains with modern safety systems on the train because the _signaller_ was playing games on his phone - I'm not sure if it was actually candy crush - and pressed the "just ignore this red and go at normal speed on to the single line" signal button without following any procedures like checking whether there's a possibility that there's already a train there.

Yeah, the steam operators raised hell over having to follow the central locking for doors and sealing of windows passengers could stick their head out of.

Wasn’t even prospective, preventative action. There was pretty rash series of decapitations/fatalities in the past decade of people who think sticking their head out of a moving train is risk free that lead to this ruling being made mandatory.

They kicked off claiming it would ruin the ambience, but really it cost a very pretty penny.

They’d do anything to save a few quid; it’s amazing how they used to get cheap oil lube and coal from Russia, and since the war they’ve miraculously been managing to procure the same rates from new companies that have appeared overnight/moved production to sanction-less countries just over the border like Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan etc.

> On a typical "modern" (ie late 20th century) train like the mainline EMUs I would normally catch when I was a commuter decades ago, the equivalent "cut out" is a glass sealed MCB in the cab, a driver who wants to get rid of this safety feature has to destroy a tell-tale glass seal and company regulations will make them write up why it was necessary then replace it - and of course the automation records each occurrence because why wouldn't it. The paperwork is a faff, so is getting a new unique numbered seal, so drivers actually choose the non-risky option when it's available.

Fun fact: in Germany, the now-infamous company Die-Lei GmbH lost their license to run trains after a few accidents where a side finding was that their trains kept running with PZB (a magloop system halting a train when running a red light) disabled, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers and weeks worth of operating time. It never was a contributing factor in any of their incident, but the persistence of these findings was enough for the railway safety authority to yank their license for good.

YouTuber and former loco driver Alwin Meschede has a (German) video series where he narrates the investigation reports and the final license yank order, while drinking a gulp of wine for each violation [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heigen1vnHA

> like a distracted Karen playing Candy Crush as her SUV rolls through a busy intersection.

FYI this comes across a bit misogynistic! I'd word this differently

It's actually kind of consequent to privatisation.

See, the privatisation says that there need to be lots of companies (otherwise we can't have a "free market" right?) but there's an inconvenient natural monopoly maintaining like, the actual railway track and so on - so, that natural monopoly was made into a separate company. At first the Tories kept pretending it would be profitable, but of course it's national infrastructure, how much does the USA get in direct revenue from its interstates? Nothing of course, they're a cost - you pay for them from public funds because they're a public good, duh. So in practice this is always in effect government owned and costs money even if sometimes it was notionally a "private company" that the government lends money to and never receives repayment.

Anyway, the numerous small private train operating companies (TOCs) would get an OK to use these monopoly lines along certain agreed parameters. So e.g. maybe your firm wants to run Plymouth to (London) Waterloo, once an hour from 0600 to 2300, somebody else needs the Southampton to Winchester stretch twice an hour from 0800 to 2200, they timetable all this so there's no conflict - if everybody runs to time. As a result there has to be a mechanism to handle all this arbitrary scheduling among any number of operators, even though most routes, most of the time have a single incumbent and nobody else. An enormous waste just because of ideology.

Three notionally profitable (though in fact never actually profitable) businesses can exist in this environment beyond the traditional TOCs which operate a regular scheduled train service ordinary people will use.

One is little private tours, like we'll buy one service a week from Waterloo to Winchester on a Sunday afternoon in the summer, we'll sell Famous Steam Tree beer on that train and charge £80 (no beer included) for all customers, plus £50 if you want an ordinary train home afterwards. If we can secure a genuine refurbished steam train we'll use that.

Another is private trains, closer to what you see in a Western movie sometimes. Jim and Sarah are very wealthy, they want to get married in a nice castle that's out in the sticks, for $$$ we'll sort out the authorisation so then their guests all just show up at the railway station in a city somewhere with like an airport and so on, they board the train, maybe it's a nice old steam train, maybe not, and we go direct, non-stop to the closest stop to the castle where the wedding will happen. This is crazy expensive, like, private jet expensive, but it is possible because of the "Open access" requirement where businesses can pay to use the railway lines.

The third, and one you're most likely to have glimpsed, are tiny rogue operators. Buy (well, lease) a couple of trains, get yourself routed for back and forth and offer novel routes. This would genuinely have been harder to arrange in the British Rail era, you'd need BR to decide it was worth having this weird new route. But the reason BR wouldn't have gone for this was that it was usually one person's weird dream journey and few actual customers wanted this new route, so it was unprofitable. For example a company operated from Wrexham and Marylebone, running a few trains per day, and I believe never breaking even in their 3-5 years of existence.

They care because if steam trains can’t adopt the signalling technology required by the modern UK railways they won’t be allowed to run at all.

I've driven under ETCS in a simulator before and i was surprised you need to interact with the screen at all during operation. ETCS doesn't have "attention" buttons you have to press like with the german PZB.

I know. At least use brass-plated plastic or whatever for the case.

I can’t believe there’s nothing more they could have done to make this more aesthetically pleasing within the £9m budget, for which we appear to have got a robust PC case and an admittedly complicated sounding power supply.

I’m a dynamics/kinematics engineer who gets consulted by steam locomotive companies often, and they’re very much worth doing financially speaking.

They certainly wouldn’t be your only venture, more “you have a lot of money and love trains” but seats on these things can run for £2k a head and they run basically every day from Spring through to end of Summer.

This is the 90 minute documentary about the development of this particular locomotive.

https://youtu.be/c-CbY2d3O1c

That's a lot more than I thought: I was aware of Tornado, but not that there had been quite a few more new build steam locos.

> Maybe that has some the extra safety systems on it though.

That would be rare, usually the very first carriage has to have all the security systems.

"Also couldn’t they just retrofit a battery somewhere instead of a new steam generator?"

Kindly hand in your tail coat, stovepipe hat and brass head-up-display monocle on your way out, sir!

> What am I missing?

People don't work for free. Industrial-grade items are expensive.

You can't just seal some components. You have to seal those components then conduct rigorous and extensive testing of those components to make sure they're actually sealed. Then you have to document the process.

An alternator on a steam locomotive isn't a little thing you can hold in your hands and get from an auto parts store for next to nothing.

Here is one of the two new "alternators" installed on 60163 Tornado: https://www.a1steam.com/tornado/news/tornado-details/doublin...

I'm a hardware guy. The number 1 thing software guys don't get about hardware is that everything you do costs a shit-ton of money. You can't just download a hardware IDE, register a hardware domain, and vibe code your way to a hardware startup.

Well, you can, but the technical term for that is "kickstarter scam".

Conversion 2 will be less expensive than 1, conversion 3 will be less expensive than 2, and by the time they get to the 500th conversion it'll be practically cheap.

I had the same thought. I'm guessing rigorous and expensive safety certification, a custom designed steam driven turbo and alternator and stripping back and rebuilding the engine carriage? The fact it's got batteries and an alternator and a turbo suggests some stringent requirements.

I guess the locomotive and carriages were in need of renovation?