Piccadilly train on the District line tracks

Equally of interest was that when the original failure occurred at Hanger Lane Junction just after 08.00, the Piccadilly Line train that was stalled at the junction home signal was sent to Ealing Broadway - unusual (i.e. not a daily occurrance), but not unusual (done to clear the area of trains during failures), if you get my drift!

One of the football special in the 80s...

Likewise the District occasionally sends big trains to Northfields......

I think the main purpose was to keep the doors shut all the way to prevent rival supporters getting on the same train and causing trouble.

It also avoids having several hundred fans from the West Country or Wales getting off at Paddington and clogging up Zone One, when they could be all on one train. Sensible idea really, no-one from that way ever plays Arsenal regularly though.

From practical experience (ie, running the occasional out of service train in traffic hours), the easiest thing to do is simply run a shade slower than usual. For most platforms you are also required to slow to 5mph passing the station starter so although you don't have the full delay of actually stopping and taking on passengers, you do at least have a bit of a slow-down built in.

Usually, trains that are not supposed to stop at stations (engineering trains or empty trains going to maintenance ) avoid to enter a station as long as the starter is red. This way, they are not abliged to stop along the platform, within reach of waiting customers (or in the case of supporters of the other team!)

I remember reading a comment that stopping trains stopped in stations, while non-stop trains stopped between them.

Would you not expect the drivers to know and remember these as part of route knowledge? Especially if a rule saying they should be stopping outside platforms exists?

But the rule book instructs us to do exactly that:

For whistlekiller:

www.flickr.com/photos/niknkim/3716926359/

The one of the football special at Ealing I still can't find. Someone might have posted it on here before though?

I read somewhere that the United Airlines train once made it to Ealing Broadway

Indeed I was told that story by Tubeprune some years ago - I'm pretty sure it was during his time on the Picc and I *think* he can probably name names - though of course he's far too discrete to do so (and - no - it wasn't he!).

A few do, but they aren't great in number.
I think this is one of the down sides of the outsourcing of engineering. The proper liaison between Operators and Engineers isn't there and the engineers are frequently viewed by the operators as being unnecessarily obstructive.

Unfortunately, the advice of the engineers is open to being ignored by the operators and has been since the start of PPP as it's "their" (i.e. LU's) railway now and the engineers who design it are viewed as being just another contractor.

It doesn't help that the people who are now involved in writing the rule books and other operational publications lack the experience of their predecessors so they don't always understand why something has been done the way it has. Also in these days of focusing on customer service it may appear better to the passenger to sit outside a station rather than in one with the doors closed.

Personally, I would have thought that it would be better to draw into the platform at somewhere like Turnham Green and allow passengers to have the option of transferring onto a (potentially unaffected) District Line service, but hey, what do I know?

_{(Other than about the risk of a train berthing away from a protected berth and the associated SPAD trap it creates, of course...)}