Name: After 140 years, this old technology still keeps trains safe
Uploaded: 2022-02-09T00:26:59.000Z
Duration: 6 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- 140 years ago, the Callander and Oban railway,

along four miles of remote hillside railway track.

that system is still in operation today, 140 years later.

And so far no one's been able to come up with anything better.

- The West Highland lines travel hundreds of miles

There are different hazards depending on where you are

Through the Falls of Cruachan, the hazards there

are definitely rockfall and boulder fall.

We're now at Bridge of Orchy on the West Highland line

and the hazards here are much more natural landslides

and debris flows down the steep-sided mountains.

Rocks that are very small can pose a risk to the train operations.

So something as small as a microwave can cause a train a problem.

Something as big as a washing machine could lead to derailment

Definitely stopping the hazard at source is the best option for us.

In a typical year we will spend somewhere in the region

that prevent landslides or improve the resilience

of our infrastructure to extreme weather.

- So Scotland's railway is about 3,500 track-miles.

so we need to look at other ways of keeping the trains safe,

which is where the rockfall detection comes in.

- By modern standards, it's a really basic system.

Just these wires along the track, held under tension,

If a big boulder falls down, it hits a wire, the wire snaps,

and the signal at each end of that bit of wire changes to show danger.

Repeat for 17 signals over the four miles of railway.

The system was nicknamed Anderson's Piano after its inventor

that the wires sometimes make in high winds.

- Anderson's Piano is a very old system, 140 years.

Keeping something like that going in a modern environment,

There's not a user manual or a downloadable book

We need to pass that down through generations

And then there's just getting hold of the kit.

A lot of it was bespoke, made in foundries in the Victorian era.

Some of it is just availability of material.

So getting hold of some of the wire can be quite challenging.

And we think we've managed to find a reasonable source

The kind of rural fence that will use that kind of wire,

the manufacturers are striving to make it stronger and stronger

and we don't need it stronger for Anderson's piano.

We need it to break when there's a rock comes through it.

It's not perfect detection in terms of screening out.

animal movements if they do get inside the boundary.

It's a physical task that involves lifting weights

and manually moving signals back into place.

So we can't do that when the trains are running,

It's a physical job that involves human beings.

There's not a big reset button that we can push.

The first we know there's a problem is when the signal goes up

and normally the first person to see that is the train driver.

We are not able to respond someone to the problem when it occurs.

We need to wait until after it's occurred,

because the first time we know about it is when a driver tells us.

- Modern rail safety rules mean that ideally,

no one should ever drive a train past a signal that's set to danger.

If that is ever needed because of a fault somewhere,

it requires checking and double checking with central control.

If a train goes past a danger signal without permission,

If it was because the driver was negligent,

But the rules for these signals have to be different,

and they go against everything that a modern train driver learns.

to a speed where you will be able to stop before you hit any obstruction,

And that would never be allowed on a new system.

- It's offering us a level of protection,

so there's a line of defence there that works quite a lot of the time.

so stopping the rocks falling is definitely better

than detecting them when they have occurred.

So we put a great deal of effort into containing

Subtitles ListPlay Video

After 140 years, this old technology still keeps trains safe

resilience

physical

improve

capacity