"They don't have major holiday weekend signal failures in the rest of Europe"..?

[whole diary]

[SandTEngineer]

Hi Stuving, as its a long time since I did french at school have you found an English translation anywhere?

[stuving]

Hi Stuving, as its a long time since I did french at school have you found an English translation anywhere?

No, and I'm sure there won't be in this case. For one thing it seems not to be on SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways)'s own web site, only the ministry's one. (That's the ministry of the ecological and solidaire transition - and there's no English for that as we lack the French notion of solidarité.)

The media have been merrily putting their boots in on this, and it looks as if the useless communication to the public is what will be remembered most. Two specific examples:

One train, I'm not sure which day (but not the Sunday), was shown as cancelled on line, by phone it was leaving from Austerlitz, and on Twitter it would leave on time from Montparnasse. It left from Montparnasse, but 1:10 late and unsurprisingly with many empty seats.

A TGV^▸ (Train a Grande Vitesse) through Brittany stopped short at Auray (not quite a village, but..) at 20:30, so its passengers had to await the next. SNCF staff were sure one would arrive, but had no idea when, and after four hours (thus at 00:30) it had still not turned up. So those waiting were sent off to a (paid-for) hotel, though the train did in fact arrive at 01:30. So internal communications were not much better.

As to the technical side, I still can't fathom how it can be impossible to localise a fault at all within the whole poste, before disconnecting everything a bit at a time. It was also said that the racks of equipment did not map onto the track, so there was no way to take half of it off-line and still use half of the tracks into the station. Maybe 7-day railway was not a known concept here in the 1980s either, but I'm sure the general idea had been thought of.

[SandTEngineer]

Thanks.  Shame its not though as I'm sure it would be a good (technical) read.....   However, I think I can understand some of the basics of what went wrong.  When I have digested it a bit more I will try and explain it in not too technical terms

[Worcester_Passenger]

Go to Stuving's link and write down the title. Come back to your browser and you type the title into Google, then you'll get the link again, but this time with a 'Translate' option. Clicking on that gives you a start on the English. But ... be aware that it's not very good (understatement) when it comes to very technical terms.

Company staff out on the concourse dealing with the passengers are translated as "waistcoats". But you know what they mean.

[chuffed]

Go to Stuving's link and write down the title. Come back to your browser and you type the title into Google, then you'll get the link again, but this time with a 'Translate' option. Clicking on that gives you a start on the English. But ... be aware that it's not very good (understatement) when it comes to very technical terms.

Company staff out on the concourse dealing with the passengers are translated as "waistcoats". But you know what they mean.

Well I suppose that's better than 'Ribena' girls ...never did see any Ribena guys tho.

[stuving]

Thanks.  Shame its not though as I'm sure it would be a good (technical) read.....   However, I think I can understand some of the basics of what went wrong.  When I have digested it a bit more I will try and explain it in not too technical terms

I find it's not the jargon that's the problem - mostly that has only one meaning, and can be looked up (e.g. enclenchement=interlockiing or d’astreinte=on call). It's more the words with multiple ordinary meanings, used in a particular idiom. And often - like those gilets rouges - they are easier to cope with untranslated.

Having looked at it again, I can work out that in the system's label of PRCI-PVSI, PRCI means it had computer route-setting (remote, in this case) and relay interlocking. PVSI I have not found. Note that it is seen, in the continental fashion, as implementing 150 routes (itineraires) directly and interlocking them rather than point settings.

The fault is described as on the power supply (24V), and capable of changing a signal state - so presumably not to ground. I still do not see how its first appearance can be as "fleeting insulation/isolation" - I guess faute is missing there. But if that does mean a fleeting intermittent fault, would isolating a rack of relays to test it have a high chance of finding the fault? 

If you are struggling with any words, let me know and I'll try to help.

[Electric train]

The fault is described as on the power supply (24V), and capable of changing a signal state - so presumably not to ground. I still do not see how its first appearance can be as "fleeting insulation/isolation" - I guess faute is missing there. But if that does mean a fleeting intermittent fault, would isolating a rack of relays to test it have a high chance of finding the fault? 

Signalling supplies tend to be earth free, IT - Isolate Tera (sorry more French) and not TN Tera Neutral or TT Tera Tera systems.  The reason it allows a first earth fault to happen without blowing a fuse. IT systems do rely on good insulation monitoring.  The risks as high impeadance earth faults or fleeting earth faults when a second earth fault happens.

I am sure S&T^▸ (Signalling and Telegraph) Engineer will agree trying to locate a fault can take a long time, the charging down blind allies often happends especially when presure is being applied. 

Posibly the question that should be asked is not why the fault happened or what the fault was, as that is a matter of fact, but SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) should be asking how they managed the faulting process and the management of the wider incident.

[stuving]

As a follow-up to this string of ... difficulties, the bosses of SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) and its network bit (Pepy and Jeantet) were summoned today to stand on the minister's naughty carpet (she's Élisabeth Borne, previously head of RATP but also both a préfet and a socialist politico). To recap, there was the big signals upgrade overrun in July, plus a couple of smaller ones before that, both at Montparnasse, and also a software upgrade that did much the same to St Lazare in December. The problem just before Christmas was more a matter of ticketing and PR^▸ (Public Relations), but all of these raised the well-known complaint of no or wrong information.

After this meeting, some concrete plans were announced for work on that information process, including weekly publication of data on train problems and the cause, and something like the red/amber/yellow weather alert system applied to railway "storms".

The main plan, however, makes no sense: it is to do an audit of the robustness of the system and make a shopping list of investments to improve it. Now that would no doubt help with some of the "routine"problems, like broken OLE^▸ (Overhead Line Equipment, more often "OHLE") and signals. But the biggies are due to doing upgrades, so surely the need is for a better plan for doing that, not a bigger list of things to do. Bearing in mind that Paris does have some spare terminal capacity at all times, and linking lines to use it, I would suggest something like this:

1. Rebuilding the systems bit by bit, with whole railway back working after each step, is bound to go wrong sometimes. To avoid the overruns, you'd need to close large chunks of the network for months, or allow several days each time with the "closures service" operating. Neither would keep the commuting bunnies happy.

2. But such issue only happen rarely. So go public on all of that, and say "we'll keep that recovery period as short as we can, provided you accept that once in a while it'll have to be extended". You publish a limited service plan that could be used for several days, and promise 3 hours notice that you are reverting to the normal timetable (as passenger need to go to different stations). In most cases this reversion happens overnight, so everyone knows by the night before. That gets round the issue of a control room full of headless chickens improvising a service and issue contradictory messages to the waiting public.

It would at least be interesting to see how it went down, and whether the meejah in France would help to get the message across or (as here) not.