08-15-2017, 09:15 AM
(08-15-2017, 05:57 AM)jamincan Wrote: Perhaps it relies on their being a small intersection between the sort of people who know what it does, and the sort of people who would deliberately derail a train. In any case, I don't think the procedure for the trains using the Spur Line would change with the new LRT - they are still going to go very slowly through Waterloo. Perhaps their stopping distance is short enough that they would have time to stop the train before hitting the derailer.
If the crew see the red as soon as it is visible, the train will be able to stop before reaching the derailer. Source: I witnessed a train-auto collision at that location. The train stopped before the engines had even fully cleared the crossing. By contrast the signal is visible from well down the track, probably almost as soon as the train has started crossing Allen St.
This is related to why I think a lot of the safety stuff around the freight interacting with the LRT is a bit much. At the speeds they go in this area, line-of-sight is a perfectly valid way of navigating, or backup to an automatic signalling system. Not at all the same as large fast mainline freights. I’ve seen videos of trains going into emergency stop. It takes a significant fraction of a minute before you can even tell that anything is different — eventually you realize the train isn’t going quite as fast, then after a longer time it gradually slows down and eventually screeches to a halt. Meanwhile, whatever they hit has been shoved a kilometre or so down the track. Around uptown, by contrast, a train stops much like a transport truck does: they hit the brakes, and they stop.