Not only did I not manage to get away from the office early today, but the train journey home has been fraught with problems. And there’s no sign of a flake of snow so far.
The train has been stop/start all the way out of Waterloo. Eventually the driver explained that the on-board computer was detecting that one of the doors was open, and applying the brakes – obviously an issue with one of the microswitches.
Once we’d got to Woking, they made a decision that it should be OK to continue. If I’d had any sense, I would have jumped off and waited for a working train at that point. Except, of course, we would then have got stuck behind this one.
Right now, we’re stopped in a tunnel. The brakes have apparently locked. They are trying to override the computer. The doors are “completely safe”.
If I don’t make it back, tell my family what happened to me.
You get reception in a tunnel?!
(oh – just before I hit Publish – they’ve just announced they’ve overridden the computer and unlocked the brakes at the expense of several safety devices, so we can continue at a slow speed to the next station, where the train will terminate. Fortunately, that’s my station…)
OK, clearly at the mouth of a tunnel.
“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you do that.”
Hope you did make it home safely. We had a bad experience in a train from Southampton recently – it was night, the train stopped, the lights went out, the PA went dead… I was not happy!! That one managed to get to Woking finally where we had to make an unplanned change.
That sounds fairly scary, Sue. The train did make it to my stop, so I was OK in the end.
Computers are taking over the world.
I was on that train too, and yes, it was scary. The slightly longer story is that it seemed to run out of oomph while we were going along. It was after we’d slowed to a halt that the lights went out.
The conclusion we came to was that he’d tried that age-old technique of fixing problems with complex equipment:
“Turn it off, wait for a bit, and try again.”