TBTC Testing

I wish I had your aspirations! But have a good birthday, delayed or not!

Drown thy fears in a good, strong cuppa! Fear not the measly Jubilee! Aspire to rejoice amidst the Great... District to South Harrow!! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

apparently this weekend is a full ATO trial of the entire line....is this to be believed?

ok - in my newly arrived RAIL today it talks about how they're hoping that the Stratford-Dollis Hill section will be using the new signalling in weekday service by the end of the year.

I'd be interested to hear how this weekend's testing goes

Does anyone know how the TBTC testing went?

Revenue TBTC has been cancelled this weekend.

The latest TBTC weekend trial started well but went down hill - I think 30+ trains were in operation on Saturday and trains were tested in ATO, though unfortunately I didn't get a chance to have a go on one!

sw206 This weekend would have been TBTC in revenue had last weekend gone better but the service wasn't good enough to risk it i don't think. The 'usual' timetable was in operation - WTT10, i think this led to some of the later problems on Saturday evening / night as they were keen to get as many trains out as possible, which resulted in major backing up, over running turns for some drivers which then led to drivers not being in place to pick up and so forth. On Sunday the service wound down about 2300 iirc as all the signals needed to be unbagged for Monday morning.

Having said that when it works it does seem to be a very good system. Seeing three trains each a cars length apart on the Northbound approach to West Hampstead certainly got some interested / puzzled looks from passengers on the Met trains running passed.

The trains are much faster too - the motors were restricted to 70% power but are now pretty much unrestricted.

Apologies if this is over-simplifying, but I suspect they were waiting for the signalling system to give them authority to proceed.

I suppose that's what the moving block signalling is for - allowing trains to safely be very close.

Fleets of Lorries if I've got the transmission based signalling systems crossed over, but I suspect that the trains were being held quite correctly at a safe distance apart at the end of the relative 'micro-block'.

In and of itself this is nothing new - some here will be aware of the old multi-home signalling system on the District, Piccadilly and Northern which would allow trains to close up on one another approaching a station.

Very nifty, and all done without the use of any computers - there were electromagnetic speed inductors that checked the speed of the approaching train against the block occupancy in front. Admittedly some would regard this as 'infrastructure heavy' but it does make me wonder if we have really progressed any further forward with the newer signalling systems!



Although this probably belongs on another forum altogether - it wasn't unknown for trains to be legitimately only the thickness of a signal post apart!

Potentially, but the main benefit must surely be taking defensiuve driving out of the equation? Its a shame that the self preservation culture requires a multi-million pound solution just to return us to something approximating the service 50 years ago.

TBTC will surely limit though the potential to speed? Putting a computer in charge might take away the ability of the driver to flex the rules if circumstances require. We've probably been on a Met thats been doing 70-80mph at times for example, no matter how much its officially frowned upon...

Although really off-topic to reply to this: I don't know where you got that impression from at all.

50 years ago London Transport still had a sense of civic pride, employed more customer-facing staff and most importantly for the general thrust of this discussion ran more trains at smaller headways without the use of semi-conductors [1].

The service wasn't run so close to the edge, otherwise the WTTs and the 'delay reports' which are occasionally alluded to in Traffic Circulars would tell a different story!

[1] OK, including Mullard M8136.

With these modern stocks I would imagine they are speed governed by software to 62mph anyway...

I heard that the 96 stock run in 'full performance' mode under TBTC as well. Does anyone know exactly what the difference is? Is it top speed increase or what? They are pretty quick off the mark in normal mode, so other than ATO 'efficiencies' what else changes?
I read somewhere the 95 stock on the Northern is only running at 60% power too - is this also going to have a performance increase when TBTC finally gets installed on the Northern too? I don't think the Jubilee track 'line speed' will increase, just perhaps the ability to get trains to a higher speed more quickly with the 'performance' increase.