11-27-2020, 10:28 PM
(11-27-2020, 07:50 PM)dtkvictim Wrote:Quote:By early October 2019, the automated doors of the vehicles used by Ottawa's Confederation Line experienced faults if pried open or held back by passengers; this resulted in numerous service disruptions, some lasting up to 90 minutes due to a lack of proper procedures to isolate and disable the faulty doors while a train was in service. The vehicles also began encountering integration issues with Thales' SelTrac train control system that led to the on-board computer for some trains in service needing to be rebooted, causing delays of up to 20 to 30 minutes.[10]
I read an article which said that any train with a door that wouldn’t close would be locked out by the ATP (automatic train protection) and could only be moved under old-school procedures essentially involving written authorization to use sections of track.
Total engineering fail; ATP has no business absolutely preventing a train from operating just because of door problems. There should be a procedure to inform the system that the door has failed, possibly install a temporary barrier, and continue on, even in service if appropriate.
What horrors lurk in the design away from areas where I can confidently assert the designers screwed up?
I hope this isn’t the way of the future: software industry practices applied to other industries. By this I mean products which, while technically meeting the spec, fail to operate in the way which anybody who actually thought about the problem for a few minutes would realize they should operate. The customer should not be responsible for thinking of all the obvious, goes-without-saying, features and putting them explicitly in the spec.