2 ms·

Anecdote: A few years back I was travelling on a Virgin Pendolino train (an Alstom Class 390, probably) in the UK that was having a few problems. Speed changes

Anecdote: A few years back I was travelling on a Virgin Pendolino train (an Alstom Class 390, probably) in the UK that was having a few problems. Speed changes were causing a lot of juddering, and as I remember the interior lighting and air conditioning was being unreliable. After limping on for a while, the train stopped at a small non-scheduled station and the crew announced that we'd be stopped there for a while, and not to be alarmed if the lights went off (it was night). This duly happened, the ventilation flans stopped, the interior doors all moved to the open position, seat booking indicators turned off, etc. After a pause that was probably a minute or two, everything came back to life and we resumed the journey. Basically, they rebooted the train. It was interesting to realise that such a large, complex, fast-moving machine could be reset like that, with several hundred people embedded inside it.

tialaramex 8y ago
On trains with the original version of the UK's TPWS protection system you have to reboot them if somebody mistakenly leaves them on top of the TPWS transmitter when shutting down, for example stopping slightly short of the usual position in a terminus station. In this state when the train boots up TPWS is in an error condition, so you have to override that, move it a few metres, then reboot it to get rid of the error. Newer models recover without being rebooted. Failing to reboot caused at least one accident because the TPWS was just left overridden and so wasn't protecting anything. Since a series of UK rail disasters involving trains whose safety systems were switched off, running in passenger service without the safeties is prohibited.