You can't leave the gym

[Chromatix]

The buses with rear doors here are operated by the driver. Now, the driver being at the front of the bus, he doesn't always notice a passenger waiting there, but other passengers are usually helpful in reminding him.

[Dreamstalker]

That's probably why the emergency handles on most trains I've been on are above head height.

The ones on the subway and older streetcars are; above the door, and some are two-stage (break a plastic cover to pull a knob that will release the actual lever). The new streetcars were built by a company that everyone suspects was the lowest bidder...not a year into service some of them were breaking down and the new ones aren't reliable in low temperatures. The Type 7 (older, Japan-built) cars have generally survived longer than the new ones have.

[Chromatix]

That reminds me of the trouble with British railways these days. BR, as a nationalised organisation, did everything in-house, and was scarily efficient at it due to having learned to cope with ever-diminishing budgets. Then privatisation came along, and everything went to hell.

The most profitable sectors of BR were the InterCity services - so they were hived off first to the highest bidders. That worked relatively well, but it left the remainder of BR in even worse financial shape, as InterCity was effectively cross-subsidising everything else.

The next parts to go were the freight services - which attracted investment and soon became profitable, since BR had been unusually shy of freight traffic - and the infrastructure (track, signalling, etc) which was handed to a holding company which was specifically instructed to farm everything out to the lowest bidders. The actual infrastructure workers were sold off to contractor companies, along with their many depots, who promptly started competing to be those lowest bidders.

Finally, the local and regional services were franchised off to the highest bidders. They were expected to either provide their own rolling stock, or to lease it from three "rolling stock ownership" companies, to whom the BR fleet had essentially been gifted. The franchisees promptly repainted their leased stock in garish colours and gave themselves fancy and impractical names.

After a few years, the result of infrastructure maintenance by the lowest bidders was a sharp and noticeable reduction in safety, despite a similarly sharp and noticeable *increase* in costs. The Navigators illustrates this well. This culminated in a series of serious accidents - which resulted in responsibility for infrastructure being transferred back to the public sector. Subsequently, safety has improved, although costs are still high when compared internationally.

And then new rolling stock started to appear, as part of a program to replace the oldest ex-BR stock, which was beginning to be considered "unsafe" despite having been in use for many years by millions of commuters. Apparently the risk of a head-on or a buffer-stop collision had increased due to a reduction in the average experience level of drivers (ie. older drivers had retired and their replacements were hastily trained), and the older stock was less crashworthy than newer stock.

The new stock was heavier than the old, despite being mostly made of aluminium rather than steel. It required more power to achieve the same performance. Fortunately, the modern, solid-state traction systems were more powerful and allegedly more efficient than the old, electromechanical ones. But they did still require the power supplies on many commuter lines to be upgraded to cope with the increased load. Until they were, the new trains had to be limited so that they actually ran slower than the old ones.

And there was another problem which showed up as soon as the first serious winter arrived. In cold weather, ice collects on the top of the conductor rails. Ice is a pretty good electrical insulator, so a collector shoe running over an icy rail will receive only intermittent power. The older, electromechanical control systems were just fine with this - they would draw power when they had it, and the train would still move reasonably well. The newer inverters, however, had real trouble with bad power - they would tend to remain shut down for a fraction of a second after power returned, after which there was a fair chance that the power would be gone again. And of course, the less well-built the traction package, the less well it could cope with bad power.

The relative problems with overhead wires are less severe but of similar character. British railways have significant areas electrified with each system.

It will hardly surprise you to learn that the Japanese and German sourced traction systems coped better than the French ones. Meanwhile, the ex-BR stock were all running British built systems, some dating back to the immediate pre-war era, which had been transferred to newer bodies (sometimes more than once) when *they* became life-expired. But the long pause in rolling stock procurement surrounding the privatisation initiative had effectively destroyed the British rolling stock manufacturing industry.

Freight locomotives are now routinely bought from American builders, even as 50-year-old English Electric locos are still in daily use (and not just among preservationists). Some of these engines have been the subject of protests by drivers' unions over the conditions in the driving cab - they are noisy and lack proper ventilation for hot weather. But they are cheaper than some alternative designs. A version of the same loco is also sold in the rest of Europe - with air conditioning and extra sound insulation.

You just can't make some of this stuff up.