Historically steam locomotives have a bad record with actual use of safety systems. IIRC accident investigators found that one locomotive retrofitted with the current minimum allowable safety equipment (TPWS) was routinely being operated in a "cut out" mode intended only for service use but in passenger service. In this mode no actual safety is achieved, the locomotive can (and does) for example pass danger signals without action - which is why accident investigators were looking at it, it had been involved in an accident which should have been impossible because it simply sailed through red lights like a distracted driver playing Candy Crush as their SUV rolls through a busy intersection.

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.

On the steam loco, that "cut out" is operated by cutting a cable tie. The cable ties aren't unique of course, and so investigators found countless broken ties littering the dirty cab of the steam locomotive, because you just cut the tie, do what you want and before signing off try to remember to fit a new cable tie. No actual safety delivered.

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.

I don't understand why there's a button for that. In the UK the trains would be "Cautioned through" this section. "Caution" here being a term of art for an instruction for drivers to operate a train by hand at a speed where they can reasonably brake the train short of any obstacle - this can mean very, very, slowly if you're on a sharply curved or foggy section.

I understand the UK is weird because of route knowledge [a German train driver can expect to just operate a train to anywhere in Germany, a British train driver needs to be intimately familiar with any track section to be used for their journey, as a result the signals in the UK don't need to tell you e.g. "Go 50" but instead "The signal after next is red" because the driver knows "that's the signal in New Town, it's uphill from here, so I can do about 50"] But it seems like caution would be possible everywhere.

A lot of people wondered at the time why that button exists - I think the answer is something like "it is only pressed by competent and trained professionals after they have followed a number of protocols to make absolutely sure there is nothing on the single line" (at this point I can hear safety and human factors experts crying out in pain). Maybe that protocol involves scratching your head and wondering if you can remember recently signalling or accepting a train in the other direction!

There was a time when, whatever buttons or levers you had, nothing goes on the single line until someone has found the token. You wonder whether a digital "TOKEN OUT" light would be possible on the signallers panel.

Driving at caution is great when you're looking out for a possible broken rail, tree on the line, or a huge maintenance trolley left behind by an incompetent overnight repair team (this happened not too far back), or when you're expecting a train ahead stopped or going in the same direction.

In the German case, you have a train going from A to B correctly going at linespeed under greens, so even if you signal the train from B to A into the section at caution, you're going to have a bad day. Perhaps lower impact velocity/energy, but I still wouldn't fancy the probability of survival under those circumstances.

Switzerland does caution if you're instructed to pass a red light, I think Austria does too?

Route knowledge exists in Germany, it's called "Streckenkunde" and under normal circumstances drivers in germany can't just drive anywhere. I think it's a fairly common thing in europe, Switzerland and Austria also require aquisition of route knowledge.

Ooh, I did not know that.

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.

The "slam door" carriages survived way past their sell by date. I travelled on them in the 1990s. The only advantage is quick de-boarding .. because you can open the door while the train is still moving. Everything else about them is spectacularly dangerous 1800s levels of safety.

I'm confused about what exactly constitutes "slam door", because wikipedia says they were last in operation 2005, but there were definitely still the type of "open the window to open manually" type used on the Reading / Paddington line well after that. Is the difference that they had central-locking?

IIRC it largely depended on the age of the carriage. Some newer slam-door carriages had the door sensor and remotely operable lock, but most of the stock did not and was of an age already that they were due for replacement so retro-fitting wasn't cost-effective. That subset which did have the mechanisms in place may not have been counted in what was decommissioned in 2005 & prior. I'm pretty sure I used slam doors later than 2005 too.

Which specific Lithuanian companies are you suggesting are supplying Russian oil and coal? I call bullshit. Anyone found doing that in Lithuania would get lynched.

As for calling them “sanction-less”, you clearly have no clue what you are talking about. Spouting nonsense based on a rudimentary understanding of the geography and little else.

Sorry, but sticking your head out the window is one of the greatest perks of going on a heritage train. That really IS about the ambiance.

It turns out UK society wasn't OK with "Sometimes people get decapitated" as the price of this perk, and it also wasn't happy with "Increase the clearance for structure gauge" because that would solve the decapitations but is eye-wateringly expensive in many places or would mean demolishing things society also wanted, like bridges, castles, or other buildings which are too close.

what about "make one car skinnier than normal so that folks can open windows on it without risking their necks"?

> 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

Each sex can have their own stereotypes if you wish: The male drunk driver rushing through the same intersection is probably even more common than the unfortunatelly common screen distracted Karen.

I'm really not trying to say that OP is misogynistic here, just mentioning that it can come across that way because the "Karen" example is oddly specific and not relevant to the overall point. Yes it's a stereotype and you could pick a male one but that'd also be weird and potentially also come across as sexist.

Yeah, I rephrased.

> We had to test whether or not you can even use a touchscreen while you’re hurtling along at up to 75mph

Who cares? This is a fucking train! DO NOT use a touchscreen!! Have we not learned anything from modern cars??

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.

That doesn't address the question at all. Put some physical buttons on it.

> Put some physical buttons on it.

Which means developing and integrating new systems to support a tiny number of steam trains.

I hate touchscreens myself in vehicles. I hate them. But I'm just commenting on the fact that if the trains can't adopt a technology that already exists, they may have to suspend services.

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.

> Since the privatisation of the railways, steam trains have been free to roam the national network subject to there being “white space” in the ­timetables around service trains.

This is a nice quirk that I would definitely someone to have strategically forgotten about during the privatisation process.

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.

To see that touchscreen just bolted onto a literal steam engine, without adornment, steampunk enthusiasts must be dying inside.

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.

In some sense I'm more surprised that someone spend time and money on building a new steam locomotive, rather than the fact that you can fit ETCS on one.

Sure, fitting modern signaling equipment on a steam train isn't easy, but it also doesn't feel impossible. Building a brand new steam locomotive, again, sure you can probably do it, but it seems like a lot of expensive work, requiring skills that hasn't been employed in decades and it's probably not really worth doing, financially speaking.

Edit: Apparently it is not uncommon to build steam locomotives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotives_of_the_21st_...

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.

Caught a steam train that operates on the mainline in NSW, Australia last year.

https://www.picnictrain.com.au/

We had to stop & wait at various points on our return day trip for other passenger services to pass us. Had to wait for some freight services to clear a block at a few places too.

There was an auxiliary diesel unit not actively used apart from for power AFAIK (and additional emergency mobility should things go kaboom/excess wheel slip).

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

> 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.

Related: Union Pacific fitted 4014 with Positive Train Control, the US version of this tech https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/inside_track/big-boy-te...

They are/were also planning on adding it to 844 too.

The Green Signals (UK rail) podcast had an episode/segment on this:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T962HGvN_Q4

I’m unable to figure it out - is this just a screen that tells you what the status of the next signal is? Or does it control the train?

Also couldn’t they just retrofit a battery somewhere instead of a new steam generator? It also seems like they reinvented the wheel making it rugged. Seems like they’re spending too much money on this project, but it seems to be private money so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: presumably the rest of the train also has power? Is the power draw from this system so intense it needs a new generator? Or does it need the resilience maybe?

The complete system only controls the train insofar as it can apply the brakes (and probably cut the steam). What it can do depends on the lineside equipment. On newer routes it replaces the signals, keeps track of where the train is, where it has to stop and how fast it can go. It communicates with transponders mounted between the rails and depending on the route via GSM-R with a "Radio Block Center". It might communicate with older, uk-specific safety equipment. It contains a black box to monitor the driver and train. The screen is just a part (the so-called "Driver Machine Interface") of the whole system. And it needs to meet a high level of safety.

ETH is a lot more than something a simple battery could provide. 1 ETH 'unit' is 5kW of power at 750-1000V AC. A train will usually require much more than 1 unit.

HEP cars (aka 'generator cars') are a solution, but the UK never really had them, we had converted diesels called 'Ethels', which are functionally identical to the current practice of tagging a diesel locomotive at idle on the tail of the train, but all of those were scrapped.

* Ethel => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_25#Train_He...

"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!

How does this cost 9m£? I mean, sure, it was exploratory, but come on, how do you spend that kind of money on sealing some components, adding an alternator and some sensors? What am I missing?

> 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.

In my understanding it's a complete ETCS L2 system, so it needs a "Euroradio" for GSM-R, a bunch of redudant sensors for Odometry, a balise transmission module, an interface to the train to interact with the brakes and a central computer with a black box. And I assume everything needs to be certified to reach some level of correctness.

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.

There was a little more than gluing a touchscreen

> The cab was stripped back to bare metal because of the sheer number of new conduits, boxes and equipment and that was the only practical way to do it

And the system has to be homologated, which takes a lot of time to test in a unknown environment.

How very steam punk

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737353

Realistically I have no idea of the scope required for this project and I'm armchair-project-managing... but I feel like "put the ETCS in a different part of the train" would've been my first go-to. Give the driver a 2-way radio headset and have someone in the guard van operating the touchscreen.