French Railways

[emmie]

you would think someone might have got the tape measure out

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/21/trains-too-wide-for-platforms_n_5363781.html?ncid=webmail1

[craft1948]

One can only imagine the "zut alors"

[emmie]

zut alors merde you mean

[Buenchico]

Your post appeared just as I'd finished reading that story on the BBC website.

Although it cost far, far less, you might like to hear of the blunder by the lot I used to work for:

When the franchise changed from one company to another, someone realised that the all of the station supervisors' rubber stamps (used to authorise travel passes etc) would need to be changed. So they ordered new rubber stamps for every station across the whole network, completely forgetting that (because East Anglia is fairly rural) the vast majority of those stations are actually unstaffed halts. They ended up with dozens of rubber stamps, each showing the name of a particular station, for stations where there was nobody there to use them!

[Bazile]

too wide for the platforms .

So are these trains overhanging the platform ?

[emmie]

this is rather more of a balls up than blunder, and a tad bigger than a number of unused rubber stamps. I know our own mistakes some time come back and haunt us, the powers that be who don't realise their mistakes and costs a packet to rectify, but this is a goodun

[emmie]

Sky News reported 1,300 platforms out of a total of 8,700 will be modified to accommodate the new trains.

More than 300 platforms have been altered so far, with another 600 due to be completed by the end of the year and the rest to be done by 2016, the broadcaster said.

[Bazile]

How are they too wide for the platforms - aren't the width of train tracks just a bit smaller than the width of the trains .

Are the width of these trains therefore much wider than the width of the tracks ?

[Buenchico]

Oh well, if you'd like something on a slightly larger scale here in the UK, I'll suggest Bombardier's construction of an entire fleet of Class 170 trains, used by rail operators across the country, which were powered by engines that were far too noisy. So they then spent a great deal of money improving the internal sound insulation on all of the trains, so that passengers were less bothered by the noise, only to find that platform staff were reporting the noise as a potential safety hazard because they couldn't hear messages sent over their radios. So the whole fleet had to be withdrawn from service for a second time in order to fit them with quieter engines.

Unfortunately Bombardier failed to take that opportunity to sort out a known problem with the sliding toilet doors, meaning that trains were returned to service with doors that would either trap passengers inside the toilets or, more frequently, open unexpectedly at particularly embarrassing moments!

[Old_Geezer]

One can see how it occurred: but before the train purchase, is the suggestion that there were two fleets of trains in operation, or did the passengers at the stations where the platforms were wider apart have to leap from the train door to the platform ?

[SirOracle]

France do not have a monopoly of stupendous b*lls-ups.

Great Britain had the daddy of them all in the late 1940s. Yes the infamous "Ground Nut Scheme" which no one realised needed a fairly heavy annual rainfall,but they built the scheme in a drought area.

The loss to the tax payer was over £50 million (don't know what that equates to in 2014 )

That is just one of many disasters in our illustrious history.

[Hopkirk]

We had better not laugh too much, or the French might remind us of the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) fiasco

[pixie373]

(gallic shrug)

[mushroom25]

network rail are also having problems with structure gauge - see here
http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/11153.aspx

[Peter Pedant]

they measured the wrong kind of railway station.

they vary apparently depending on when they were built


apparently there is no direct French for "wrong kind of snow/leaf"
you have to use a completely different construction....

[Buenchico]

>>>apparently there is no direct French for "wrong kind of snow/leaf"

When I had to to make station PA announcements I carefully avoided referring to 'leaves on the line'; my actual announcements might have made more sense in French though!

e.g: "We apologise for the late-running of services on the St Edmundsbury Lines. This is due to track adhesion difficulties, resulting from the presence of compacted vegetation debris upon railheads". (I also used 'arboreal residue' quite often!)
;-)

[emmie]

a case of Schadenfreude,