Level Crossing Misuse

[whole diary]

[stuving]

Flashing Red lights are an absolute stop in law. Whereas steady Red lights just mean stop.

What's the difference you may ask?

Well an absolute stop means you must absolutely stop. For example, emergency services can treat a stop red light as a give-way sign when responding to an emergency call, but they must stop at an absolute stop red light. Yes - that means that even the police/fire/ambulance have no legal defence for jumping the red lights at level crossings (or other places they exist, such as lifting bridges).

I saw an example of that last night at Wokingham Station.

At about 0:25, I glanced out of the window and saw lots of blue lights flashing. An emergency ambulance was waiting at the crossing, which had its barriers up and wigwags on. It waited for half a minute or so, then crossed. Immediately afterwards the barriers came down and a train quickly arrived (5C86 ECS^▸ (Empty Coaching Stock) to Reading to Staines, so not stopping at Wokingham).

So what was going on? Did the ambulance driver ask for clearance to cross, and wait for confirmation? I imagine they would probably use radio to their control, but might have got out to wave and shout to the signaller (it's too far for me to see that).

[inspector_blakey]

Can't say for sure what happened in this case, but here's my best guess...

In general manually controlled level crossings (like the one at Wokingham) or CCTV^▸ (Closed Circuit Tele Vision) crossings are operated as follows:

a) Road signals start, then barriers begin to lower: this may happen automatically, but may also be manual. In the case of barriers being lowered manually, the signaller will press and hold a "lower" button that will first start the road signals, then bring down the barriers. If the signaller takes their finger off the button during the lowering sequence, it will stop until the button is pushed again.
b) Once the barriers are fully down, the signaller will visually check the crossing either by looking through the window if the crossing is near the box and can be seen clearly, or by checking the CCTV monitor for crossings some distance away.
c) When the signaller has established that the crossing is clear of people and vehicles they will press a "crossing clear" button on their panel/console. The signals protecting the crossing are interlocked with both the crossing equipment and the "crossing clear" button, and will not clear unless the red road signals are operating, the barriers are proved down *and* the signaller has pressed "crossing clear".
d) After the train has passed, the barriers may be raised automatically by the operations of track circuits/treadles, or manually by the signaller.

In this case I would *guess* that the signaller had started the lowering sequence but stopped it before the barriers had started to come down upon noticing the ambulance. Not sure how the ambulance was given permission to cross, mind you. I doubt it would have involved radio calls to their control and it would take a few minutes for ambulance control to get in touch with railway control and then the signaller.

In the situation where an emergency vehicle with "blues and twos" is stuck waiting at a level crossing, there's virtually nothing the signaller can do: even if they were to throw signals back to danger in front of an oncoming train the system is designed to "tiem out" and lock routes up for around 3 - 4 minutes after this has happened precisely to prevent any hasty and potentially dangerous moves like raising level crossing barriers in front of a train that has just seen its signals return to danger. It's therefore simply a case of waiting for the train to pass and raising the barriers; emergency crews should havt the local knowledge to be aware of alternative routes round busy level crossings in my humble opinion.

[plymothian]

An ambulance on blues and twos arrived a few seconds after the barriers at Paignton LC^▸ (Level Crossing) closed yesterday but despite sounding its horn had to wait the 5 minutes until the train had passed. The friend I was with at the time surprisingly commented that it was illegal to raise the barrier and pass the wigways.

[plymothian]

An ambulance on blues and twos arrived a few seconds after the barriers at Paignton LC^▸ (Level Crossing) closed yesterday but despite sounding its horn had to wait the 5 minutes until the train had passed. The friend I was with at the time surprisingly commented that it was illegal to  pass the wigwags even if they raised the barriers.