@Steveg58 You're Australian so I assume you're not used to all railways being grade-separated? "Drive onto the tracks" isn't a thing you can allow to happen when trains routinely hit 300km/h or faster.
@Charlie Stross @Steveg58 I'm not sure whether it happens on the high-speed parts of the line (probably not) or close to the shared stations, but for some reason the Italian high-speed trains do manage to get stopped / slowed down because there are “unauthorized people on the tracks”
I'm not sure whether that's protesters, or a code word for “we had a team doing urgent maintenance on the track, but it wasn't really safe for them to be there, so officially they aren't”
@valhalla @Steveg58 We get this happening in the UK. It's usually (a) graffiti taggers/teens trespassing near stations, or (b) suicides. The latter are No Fun for anybody (especially if you're on a train that gets delayed 3 hours then cancelled after police and ambulance crews pick lumps of human flesh out of the undercarriage and determine the brakes have been damaged).
@Charlie Stross @Steveg58 in my commuter time I only got “flock of sheep committed suicide on the track” and it was definitely enough
(I think it was only half an hour or so delay until the police got sure that the lumps of flesh weren't human, and it happened 2 km from the end station, so we eventually got there, but the bad part were at the beginning, when we felt all of the bumps and crunching noises and saw the bloodied surviving sheep)
@valhalla @Steveg58 I once got home 8 hours late on a 3 hour ride because the intercity service I was in the front carriage of hit a suicide at full speed (around 110-125mph). Two hours for police/ambulance crew, two hours to be towed into the next major station and decanted onto another train (already full), then *that* ran into a downed overhead line 50km from the destination at 3am. Small town, no taxis: I got home by bus around dawn.
Almost none of our Railways are grade separated ... okay, there has been a move to do that with the suburban lines (Perth and Melbourne at least) but it is still the minority of routes. I'm more informed by videos of Americans getting their hire cars stuck by driving onto tram/train tracks in various European locations. Japan, on the other hand has been very rigorous with their shinkansen routes.
@Steveg58 Yeah, but Europe covers a lot of different nations—Swiss railways or French are not the same as Croatian or Romanian ones, for example, to put it mildly.
@Charlie Stross @Steveg58 and even in the same country, say Italy, high speed, high revenue lines aren't treated the same as regional lines, especially the ones with less traffic
(they are slowly grade-separating also the regional lines, starting with the ones with most traffic, but it's a *slow* process)
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Jack William Bell
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Is nothing sacred?
Oh. Yeah. I guess nothing really is. Is it?
Never mind…
ZZ Bottom
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Steveg58
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Steveg58 • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Charlie Stross • •@Charlie Stross @Steveg58 I'm not sure whether it happens on the high-speed parts of the line (probably not) or close to the shared stations, but for some reason the Italian high-speed trains do manage to get stopped / slowed down because there are “unauthorized people on the tracks”
I'm not sure whether that's protesters, or a code word for “we had a team doing urgent maintenance on the track, but it wasn't really safe for them to be there, so officially they aren't”
Steveg58 likes this.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Charlie Stross • •@Charlie Stross @Steveg58 in my commuter time I only got “flock of sheep committed suicide on the track” and it was definitely enough
(I think it was only half an hour or so delay until the police got sure that the lumps of flesh weren't human, and it happened 2 km from the end station, so we eventually got there, but the bad part were at the beginning, when we felt all of the bumps and crunching noises and saw the bloodied surviving sheep)
like this
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Charlie Stross
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •LisPi likes this.
Steveg58
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •I'm more informed by videos of Americans getting their hire cars stuck by driving onto tram/train tracks in various European locations.
Japan, on the other hand has been very rigorous with their shinkansen routes.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Steveg58 • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Charlie Stross • •@Charlie Stross @Steveg58 and even in the same country, say Italy, high speed, high revenue lines aren't treated the same as regional lines, especially the ones with less traffic
(they are slowly grade-separating also the regional lines, starting with the ones with most traffic, but it's a *slow* process)
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Ricardo B�nffy
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •