Obstruction between White City & Marble Arch

According to London Tonight, a current rail shoe became detatched from an engineers train and this fouled the following passenger train.

Somewhere around Holland Park. I booked on around 14:30 just as the first trains were going through.

Do you mean today? If so, the service appears to be back to normal today (bar the planned engineering works)

I was impacted by this and it reminded me of a theory I've long had that London Underground is hopeless at reacting quickly to solve problems. Generally I'm happy with the level of service and actually think it's pretty good considering the immense pressures of money, staffing levels, and sheer passenger numbers. However when a problem occurs the whole system seems to go into paralysis. OK something fell off a train and was hit by another. Obviously the line has to be suspended while the problem is investigated. But once the problem has been identified and resolved just run an empty train along the track to check there's nothing else wrong and resume service. Should take a couple of hours, not eight.

I agree with what you're saying, but eight hours does seem a trifle long. I do also understand that the paperchase around these things is a lot more protracted than previously.

If it was known that the incident train had lost significant numbers of pickup shoes, then the decision to send a rescue train from the rear seems an odd one vs sending one wrong-road to the front of the train or walking the pax out (although I accept this method is intimately tied up with traction current issues and distance to the station, which hasn't been noted on this thread).

Of course this may not have been known, and it seems that a decision to remove passengers was taken more quickly in this incident than in others recently - the Independent article says passengers were in the tunnel for "nearly an hour" which contrasts very well with the "over 3 hours" for the Jubilee Line incident a few months back.

The failure of engineering locos to reach the incident site doesn't strike me as being a good thing either.

While I'm sure nobody doubts LU did the best they could do in the circumstances, we want to know whether that was the best that should be doable. Without knowing all the circumstances its not possible judge on anything more than appearances from the outside, and from that perspective 8 hours does seem excessive. Giving more information would help with this, but there are also risks with that - your average member of the public wouldn't understand what 20 pickup shoes falling off a train meant, nor what the effect of that would be, and all it takes is one journalist who is clueless or writing with an agenda (or both) to blow it out of all proportion. Particularly as the Chancery Lane derailment was caused by things falling off a Central Line train.

Whatever though, we really should not be reading quotes like "driver has said “i don’t know whats going on my bosses are not telling me” ".

Detraining passengers should be top priority and in a reasonable time and that means determining the severity of the issue and the time required to resolve it PDQ, otherwise detraining should commence ASAP. That means holding everything, getting the juice off the affected section(s) and getting staff there to assist.

Bringing up a second train was simply a dumb move if the cause of the original problem was known and dumber still if it wasn't.

Moving the train was not a priority until the passengers were detrained.

Getting the second train into position is neither here nor there, it shouldn't have happened and not doing so would have saved both time and unnecessary repairs to a train that was then made defective and no doubt extend the time required to make the necessary track repairs.

It is well known that dislodged traction pickup shoes can cause traction rail creep and pull traction rails off the pots.

As for repairs, yes they take time but engineering staff are well trained and very efficient in such circumstances. Track repairs as such are not usually that big a deal, invariably signalling is affected as track connections are often broken and it takes time to properly prove and repair signal circuits. Derailments are the biggest headache as quite often a carriage will gouge a section of cable run and it can then take quite some time to identify and repair many different circuits in several engineering disciplines.

I'll be very interested in reading the RAIB report, I'm sure there'll be some interesting recommendations and I would not be at all surprised if staffing and management are discussed at length.

I'm not going to defend LU or the actions of those who work on the Central line any further than I have done already. All I will say is I wasn't there on the day, and I know that when you are dealing with an incident in real time you don't have the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of time in which to pick apart all the details.

I'm merely a District line driver & the factual information I posted was taken from the Central line service manager's report.

As for the comments about the ERU (Emergency Response Unit) having blue light status; this has already been well documented on the forum and was subject to a lot of work post 7/7

ERU does now have some vehicles that are able to operate under blue light status, but they are branded as BTP (British Transport Police) vehicles and must driven by BTP officer when the blue lights are in use.

There is no doubt whatever that staffing is the key difference between efficiency and lack thereof when it matters such as in emergencies.
I suspect you'll find that the bean counters who did the risk assessments for running stations effectively, efficiently and safely never took into account the need to have proper numbers of staff on site to deal with each and every situation. Further I would suggest that some arbitrary times for major decision making such as evacuation of station, detraining, dealing with medical emergencies etc had been plucked from the air rather than calculated for worst case scenarios.
I would agree that it's very difficult for those on site to make effective decisions when the resources required to enact them are not available. But that is why there is a hierarchy of management in place who should be able to see the 'big picture' in an instant and bring resources to bear immediately that an incident is reported.
As for bringing resources to bear one cannot ignore the worst case scenario in which no trains are running on any line and the city streets above ground are jammed with traffic.
Section 12 stations are pretty close together so using Shank's Pony (travelling on foot for those who've never heard the phrase) to get staff from one station to an adjacent one to assist should perhaps be the maximum time allowed to make meaningful decisions about evacuation, closing station(s) and detraining passengers such that once such assistance arrives decisions can be enacted instantly.
Of course there are different priorities at different times of the day and in the rush hours but stations should be suitably staffed at those times and closing and evacuating stations should not be the big issue that it sometimes is.
The key to proper management of events is having the right people in the right places at the right times and having the correct backup resources available as a contingency in order to make effective and efficient decisions.
For years LU has held joint emergency exercises with the emergency services so if a station needs closing to deal with an incident there is no real reason why the police forces could not be called upon to do that especially as they have the resources and control of the capital's streets. The modern radio communications which enable proper liaison between LU and the emergency services should make such things easy.

I do not profess to have the answers but driving a bus through the gaps in what currently exists in terms of incident handling seems all too easy. There was a time when LT ran its own fire department but it was ineffective and that's why the Fire Brigade attend what are now called fires but which once were smoulderings. Invoking local police for crowd control at stations when required really should be considered, that of course means more training and map reading, there are LFB fireplans, there could also be crowd control plans available to Police. Something else that might help is emergency liaison plans containing all the necessary contact details for anything required in an emergency at a given site.

I'm sure that much of what I mention here has been mulled over by the powers that be at some point and that current practices, procedures and resources are based upon cost rather than priority. The bottom line is simply perhaps that there are too many managers and not enough front line staff and perhaps that imbalance should be addressed.

Yep but then NR is a much bigger train set with multiple operators so many more variables than LU has to deal with.

Yes, ERU will assist on NR if asked - they also attended Potters Bar.

It's not creepy. Not forgetting ERU do more than the "creepy stuff". I am surprised NR don't have an equivalent however after my 3 hours forced wait for evacuation maybe I am not. But interestingly the 3 hour wait never made it into the ES nor the local paper - although the travel "chaos" did. I wonder if a jubilee/ central/ met train being held for 3 hours with a total mornings peak service suspended due to one train with a loss of air. I wonder if ppl would be saying LU don't respond quick enough. Oh wait..... Lol

You could draw parallels. Reason we had to wait 3 hours was largely to allow a FCC / NR manager to make a decision. Local operational staff knew after an hour the severity of the incident. Lions led by donkeys.