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

[whole diary]

[stuving]

Two years ago on this weekend I posted "SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) have developed their own version of Sod's law, which is that something always goes wrong on a summer holiday weekend. The weekends in July and August are when the long-distance network is busiest. " Then it was fires.

This is the busiest of all weekends, and this time it's a total signal failure just outside Paris-Montparnasse. Their S&T^▸ (Signalling and Telegraph) have been working all night to try to find out what is going on - concetrating on the cables and comms links (sound familiar?)

No English report yet ... I'm sure one will be along shortly.

[stuving]

Here's a report, from RFi:

Chaos at Paris railway station as holiday-makers' trains cancelled
Issued on 30-07-2017 Modified 30-07-2017 to 14:19

There was chaos at one of Paris's main railway stations on Sunday as hundreds of holiday-makers found all trains heading for Brittany and the south-west had been cancelled. The SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) rail company announced a gradual return to normal at midday.

Traffic jams clog the nation's motorways on the last weekend of July, when many French families hed off on holiday, so wise travellers take the train to avoid delays.

But, if their train was due to leave from Montparnasse railway station this Sunday, they were to be disappointed.

All trains, including high-speed TGV^▸ (Train a Grande Vitesse)'s heading for the other end of France, were cancelled because of an electrical failure.

The SNCF rail company sent text messages and emails to customers overnight but that did not stop hundreds turning up at the south Paris station only to find their train was not there waiting for them.

To make matters worse information screens were blank and, despite technicians working all night, the origin of the problem had not been found on Sunday morning.

At about midday the SNCF announced a "very gradual" return to normal but added that many trains would be leaving from other Paris stations for the rest of the day.

Another electrical fault caused disrupted services at Montparnasse station on 17 July.

That "very gradual" restart of services was so gradual that no-one noticed it for several hours ... during which the usual complaints rained down on SNCF and their Twitter account. Information, lack of and misleading nature of, was close to the top of that list. One advantage SNCF do have in Paris is that switching to another terminus does work to some extent, where in London even the track to allow this is in many cases missing. Of course that also adds further opportunities to be confusing, by announcing a train will leave from Austerlitz and then reversing that later on. And some trains were using Dreux as a Paris terminus - as far out as Didcot!

[IndustryInsider]

Bloody useless Network Rail! 

[stuving]

SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) are still saying they don't know what the underlying fault is. By shifting all TGVs^▸ (Train a Grande Vitesse) to Poitiiers and south into Paris-Austerlitz, and presumably getting half the tracks into Montparnasse usable, 85% of passengers will have been got away today. Having that much spare terminus space isn't really surprising on a Sunday - that would be true in London - but being able to use it is another matter. 

[Electric train]

Bloody useless Network Rail! 

I know Network Rail often seems Omnipotent but even NR^» (Network Rail - home page) mystical powers cannot cross that much water 

[grahame]

SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) are still saying they don't know what the underlying fault is. By shifting all TGVs^▸ (Train a Grande Vitesse) to Poitiiers and south into Paris-Austerlitz, and presumably getting half the tracks into Montparnasse usable, 85% of passengers will have been got away today. Having that much spare terminus space isn't really surprising on a Sunday - that would be true in London - but being able to use it is another matter. 

Hmmm ... perhaps during the closure of Waterloo some trains from Basingstoke could run to Colchester (silly idea - I'm sure there's no route  ) with people doubling back into Liverpool Street once the get out onto the GE main line.

[stuving]

SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) now say their 50 technicians didn't find the problem again last night. Various statements and comments refer to damage to cables, missing insulation, a damaged battery - so it sounds like an intermittent short-circuit. However, if it was even a half-modern system you would expect locating that to be pretty straightforward. The effect, however, is that the whole Vanves sector has been operated manually, presumably mostly be locking it on fixed routes, hence only at one-third capacity.

TV has shown pictures of blokes in tabards prodding relays in big racks, but they are most likely to be library clips and not evidential. And then there's all the work done over the last three years to cope with the two new TGV^▸ (Train a Grande Vitesse) lines served from Montparnasse (Rennes and Bordeaux). It's not clear whether that involved modernising the signalling in the Vanves sector itself, or just interfaced it to the brand-new control centre at Montparnasse. (Yes, the one that controlled the chaos yesterday.)

[SandTEngineer]

I'll go and help them for a small fee.....

[stuving]

Still looking ... and tonight Montparnasse will close completely from 22:00 to 6:00 to allow more time for uninterrupted prodding, waggling, controlled application a micrometer hammer and other forms of electro-entomology. The signalling apparently dates from the 90s, whatever that implies.

[Worcester_Passenger]

Quite a lot of the signalling round here dates from the '90s.

[stuving]

SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) are now saying they have found whatever was wrong, but not yet fixed it. So normal service will resume tomorrow - maybe. The transport minister has demanded a report on the ... subject ... by the end of the week; in the past SNCF have been pretty honest about doing these and making them public.

[stuving]

You may have seen, in some of the reports of this "grosse pagaille", mention of the previous one at Montparnasse. That was a power failure on 17th July, but while it affected the whole station (and one train just outside it) it was fixed within three hours. Which I guess is only a "petite pagaille".

However, there was an even more recent "local difficulty" on the same line, on 23rd July (Sunday). Paris-Rennes is now only two hours, but this TGV^▸ (Train a Grande Vitesse) took nearly nine - arriving at 2 am. Power failed as it passed Le Mans, and it took over five hours to find a loco to go and drag it there. Apparently it was "at just the wrong place, a junction"... though at least it wasn't during a hot day. This, of course, is a brand-new high-speed line.

[IndustryInsider]

Silly me thinking railways in Europe always ran like clockwork...

[stuving]

They did, in fact, fix the problem this morning. Services won't quite be back to normal until tomorrow for the usual reasons of trains and crew being out of place.

Various politicians, including the prime minister, have been opining about how unacceptable this all was and guessing why it happened. The transport minister referred to the new LGVs^▸ (Large Goods Vehicle) and the number of TSRs^▸ (Temporary Speed Restriction) recently on the other lines (heat-related, no doubt). Apparently this tells her that they have a two-speed railway (er ... yes?). And of course for others it's due to inadequate spending on maintenance, the boss should resign, etc, etc.

SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) have limited themselves to saying it was faulty insulation, and due to the work done recently rather than age and decrepitude. They promise us this report on Friday.

[stuving]

That report to the minister by SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) has appeared today. That means they have produced a 28-page report, with graphics, in less time than the incident itself lasted. That kind of impressive, but maybe not in the way they'd like.

The story is still that it's some cabling fault, almost certainly an intermittent short to earth. However, describing it as "isolement fugitive" sounds wrong to me, and I'm baffled as to where it was - in a signal or power supply. The signal box dates from 1987, and is a big shed full of relays (i.e. a power box) but now controlled remotely.

The process of fault-finding was that they disconnected each bay of relay chassis where all cables were connected via multipole connectors. That didn't find it, so they moved on to the few bays with individual wire connections. At the same time they rechecked the earlier tests, and found the fault in a cable - which was disconnected during those tests and thus not tested. This cable had been put in during work in the last month as part of the "modernisation" for the new LGVs^▸ (Large Goods Vehicle).

On Sunday, after the first fruitless night of searching, the planned restart at noon was delayed due to cable faults introduced by all the frantic plugging and unplugging done overnight. Hence they kept running trains until 3 a.m., and so had little time for testing the next night.

They did, in fact, fix the problem this morning. Services won't quite be back to normal until tomorrow for the usual reasons of trains and crew being out of place.

That's not quite true: having been running with a single track in and out, all points clipped, and all signals red - stop and proceed by sight - they were able to turn the block signalling on, but still with only the one clipped path. However, by still using Austerlitz that allowed more trains to run.

There's more about the plan - basically what not do do in future - and also how they got their information systems so screwed up, notably on Sunday. Basically, because the late start meant the plan had to be reworked too late, and so the implications of trains in the wrong place, and inaccessible depots, were missed and led to frantic replanning. As the various information systems are driven from separate data sources, and mostly captured by overstressed humans, they often made no sense. Plus for example the big departures board at Montparnasse can't show "from Austerlitz", blocking ticket sales for a train meant it showed as cancelled on voyages-sncf.
com, etc.

The report is here - nowhere does it say the technology is relays, but there are photos at the end.