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0 pointsjrockway3y ago0 comments

It sounds like it was a crew scheduling issue. So if you implement some manual replacement for the automated system, it's possible that train crews will "time out" before they reach the destination, stranding passengers in the middle of nowhere. Or, will make a tired crew operate the trains, and tired people aren't very good at safety sensitive tasks.

There was an incident a few years ago where a LIRR track crew member stepped in front of a train going 78mph and died.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

The employee that died had been on duty for 38 of the 50 hours leading up to the fatality. One of the NTSB's recommendations is to implement software that avoids worker fatigue:

"The FRA encourages the use of certified biomathematical models, such as the Fatigue Audit InterDyne Model and the Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool (FAST) by railroads to help them develop work schedules for safety-sensitive employees that align with healthy work-rest scheduling practices; however, these safety measures do not apply to roadway workers. 14 The work schedules developed through biomathematical models avoid many pitfalls causing worker fatigue that arise from excessively long work hours, highly variable work shift times that disrupt human circadian rhythms, and infringement on sleep opportunity times."

TL;DR: it's not about the trains crashing into each other. It's about sleepy people making bad decisions that gets them or their colleagues killed.

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usr11063y ago

> It sounds like it was a crew scheduling issue.

I'm not from the NL, but I have travelled there by train. My feeling is that they have very dense traffic, but in a relatively small country most trains don't travel more than 2 hours. That means each driver and each conductor needs to make 4 different trips a day. And because they need breaks they proably switch trains during a working day. If all this planning has been computerized for many years it just means that nobody knows what to do next if the computer screen remains blank. Probably they don't get a printout in the morning like it was some decades ago. No idea how adaptively the system would react during the day dependening on delays and disruptions.

Just guessing, maybe some insider knows more.

rgj3y ago

20 years ago, the NS - the Dutch National Railroad company - tried to remove complication from the railroad schedule and got a lot of criticism from their employees because it would mean they would travel less far from their home stations. Train drivers said “so we will only be driving around our church”. It led to a lot of protests and eventually a lot of the plans were revoked.

See https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondje_om_de_kerk (in Dutch, use Google Translate to translate to a language of your choice).

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