What do you define as 'disasters' here? The issues that affect the railway such as landslides, trees down, OHLE down and flooding have been pretty rife of late.
However, as the weather is nowadays much more influential on rail operations, largely owing to the relative delicacy of rolling stock and power supplies compared with decades past, it is an important factor, with far more abandonments of service, putting more people on the roads in dangerous weather.
My post was setting the scene that generally "weather events" haven't worsened - which means it's not meteorologists that are needed, but more likely engineers and geologists.
SargeNpton- you may be right, though I think you may find that the RAIB Report following the Carmont derailment: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/62274fe0e90e0747a49c94ca/R022022_220310_Carmont.pdf makes much reference to weather. A simple 'wordcount' (using Control F) indicates the following number of uses:
Absolutely spot on …you only have to look out of train windows ( I realise that sadly few people do these days as they are glued to their monitored handheld devices ) to realise lineside vegetation and trees are rampant; particularly in the always wetter areas like the SW of England.
It's not...
There are works happening all the time all over the country, both proactive and reactive
You're blaming the wrong people, biggest problem is £££, and guess where the £££ comes from?
Safety critical decisions are currently being made by people with absolutely no knowledge of the weather whatsoever. Becoming an actual meteorologist usually requires a degree. I don’t think anyone is suggesting MOMs and the like go to university for years to understand the correlations between wind, rain, and washouts. I don’t see how it’s a bad thing that these staff are being trained more directly in how the weather affects the railway, although “amateur” wouldn’t have been the word I’d have used in the press release!
Precisely the sort of thing this would be useful for.
However, they HAVE worsened, in frequency and severity, apart from snow-related ones, which have declined. Flooding is far worse and more frequent, and heat issues have increased, with buckled rails and speed restrictions. Accompanying this increase has been the trend towards closing the service down when problems are (sometimes wrongly or inaccurately) forecast.
By what metric?
Given that my posted north Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy chart shows no change over decades, we have to put this down to land use change or infrastructure rather than weather.
Yes, but notwithstanding that, the line was completely closed for no good reason owing to a "weather precaution". The information used by the decision-makers was either wrong and they made the right decision on that basis, or they made the wrong decision based on right information. I would call myself an amateur meteorologist, and I could see from the weather maps (isobar/pressure maps) of that occasion that the worst winds would be much further west than the North Downs line. The fact is that the railway shuts down more and more often as a precaution these days, for whatever reason, but the upshot of that is that a far higher risk is then created by putting those people onto the roads, which are far more dangerous in inclement weather than the railways are. The railway's decisions are way too parochial, rather than considering the overall societal risks caused by forcing people onto roads.
I don't see this posted, or referred to- have I missed it somewhere- can you indicate where and/or when you posted it.
Ah you might have to search for it yourself as it appears it's been vanished.
At Rannoch, yes, as there is a met station there (or was).
That is concerned with hurricanes in the tropics. What is the UK relevance?
Sorry, I can't find that in any posts. In any case the Atlantic is a vast area/system, and the specific impacts on the UK are only a small part of that, meaning that any supposed average lack of change will have outliers such as the UK. Most models indicate that the UK will have been most severely affected by climate changes (and I'm not attributing those changes to any one cause here). Don't forget, too, that it isn't just storms that have an impact, but a lack of them (in summer), leading to extreme heat/drought and the problems associated with that (buckling rails, dying trees, soil contraction, severe run-off on bone-dry soil, etc.).
Thank you <stuu> for the link to this authoritative peer-reviewed paper; I would hope and expect that there are people at Network Rail who pay heed to such helpful studies amnd making appropriate and timely responses.
.. and thank you
eepgreen> too. Investment in monitoring and evaluating, including in 'human capital' (and maybe AI for 'decision support') is (to my simple mind) needed, and soon, and ought not to wait until there is a predictable (let alone actually predicted) disaster.That reads as if they are referring to models and not data.
Given we're talking about broad-scale climate now, larger geographic areas are more valid and ACE is the number one accepted measure of cyclonic activity (ie, wind and rainfall).
Au contraire? I take as read your contention that 'ACE is the number one accepted measure of cyclonic activity (ie, wind and rainfall)'. Looking at the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulated_cyclone_energy (which I appreciate may not be as academically 'reliable' as the primary source), the chart seems to show that in the 15 years between 1995 and 2021 (26 years) there were 10 years in which the accumulated energy exceeded 150 'units', as against 14 for the whole period of study before that (1851-1994)(143 years). That seems to me to be a severe worsening of weather generally and 'weather events' particularly, and suggests you might at least accept that worsening weather is at least a factor, and not only local infrastructure/land use/population. Not that that justifies inattention to the infrastructure, indeed far from it- it confirms that more attention is required.
Or that local weather patterns have shifted somewhat. It doesn’t have to take much. To take an entirely imagined example, just imagine the difference in effect between a storm path that regularly tracks West to East centred on a line roughly where Pitlochry is and the same set of storms tracking West to East over Falkirk. This is not to deny that there have been changes in the way we react / levels of risk aversion.
With all due respect, given how complex local weather conditions can be, I'm not sure what you posted is very helpful.
Yes, but the whole North Downs line runs from Reading eastwards, not westwards, and so away from the area of worst winds, yet the whole route was summarily closed for the day. Frankly, it simply isn't good enough to panic (misguidedly) in this way and take people from a safer mode to a less safe mode.
Another key point - trains (and the railway as a whole) are far more delicate these days and fall over in anything but clement weather.
The disruption caused by weather now is somewhat different to 20/40 years ago. As highlighted we have a more cautious approach to life as a whole than we used to along with whatever you believe climate change is bringing along. The example of freight train on a flooded line but a passenger TOC wouldn't is a prime example of this, you only have to look at schools closures if bad weather is forecast and do not travel warnings.
I'm not sure you can say the infrastructure is more delicate but given the lack of appetite for risk in general is part of the impression it's more delicate
A lot of OHLE seems prone to failure, but I was thinking especially of signalling, when semaphores were robust and mechanical - essentially, the more equipment is controlled by electronics, the more delicate it becomes. Of course, I'm obviously not saying everything should be mechanical, but, say, a steam train (or even diesel - just with a self-contained power source) running with mechanical signalling is about as robust as you can get.
