Will She Be Staying In A Hotel With...
News1 min ago
French Railways
you would think someone might have got the tape measure out
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Your post appeared just as I'd finished reading that story on the BBC website.
Although it cost far, far less, you might like to hear of the blunder by the lot I used to work for:
When the franchise changed from one company to another, someone realised that the all of the station supervisors' rubber stamps (used to authorise travel passes etc) would need to be changed. So they ordered new rubber stamps for every station across the whole network, completely forgetting that (because East Anglia is fairly rural) the vast majority of those stations are actually unstaffed halts. They ended up with dozens of rubber stamps, each showing the name of a particular station, for stations where there was nobody there to use them!
Although it cost far, far less, you might like to hear of the blunder by the lot I used to work for:
When the franchise changed from one company to another, someone realised that the all of the station supervisors' rubber stamps (used to authorise travel passes etc) would need to be changed. So they ordered new rubber stamps for every station across the whole network, completely forgetting that (because East Anglia is fairly rural) the vast majority of those stations are actually unstaffed halts. They ended up with dozens of rubber stamps, each showing the name of a particular station, for stations where there was nobody there to use them!
Oh well, if you'd like something on a slightly larger scale here in the UK, I'll suggest Bombardier's construction of an entire fleet of Class 170 trains, used by rail operators across the country, which were powered by engines that were far too noisy. So they then spent a great deal of money improving the internal sound insulation on all of the trains, so that passengers were less bothered by the noise, only to find that platform staff were reporting the noise as a potential safety hazard because they couldn't hear messages sent over their radios. So the whole fleet had to be withdrawn from service for a second time in order to fit them with quieter engines.
Unfortunately Bombardier failed to take that opportunity to sort out a known problem with the sliding toilet doors, meaning that trains were returned to service with doors that would either trap passengers inside the toilets or, more frequently, open unexpectedly at particularly embarrassing moments!
Unfortunately Bombardier failed to take that opportunity to sort out a known problem with the sliding toilet doors, meaning that trains were returned to service with doors that would either trap passengers inside the toilets or, more frequently, open unexpectedly at particularly embarrassing moments!
France do not have a monopoly of stupendous b*lls-ups.
Great Britain had the daddy of them all in the late 1940s. Yes the infamous "Ground Nut Scheme" which no one realised needed a fairly heavy annual rainfall,but they built the scheme in a drought area.
The loss to the tax payer was over £50 million (don't know what that equates to in 2014 )
That is just one of many disasters in our illustrious history.
Great Britain had the daddy of them all in the late 1940s. Yes the infamous "Ground Nut Scheme" which no one realised needed a fairly heavy annual rainfall,but they built the scheme in a drought area.
The loss to the tax payer was over £50 million (don't know what that equates to in 2014 )
That is just one of many disasters in our illustrious history.
network rail are also having problems with structure gauge - see here
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>>>apparently there is no direct French for "wrong kind of snow/leaf"
When I had to to make station PA announcements I carefully avoided referring to 'leaves on the line'; my actual announcements might have made more sense in French though!
e.g: "We apologise for the late-running of services on the St Edmundsbury Lines. This is due to track adhesion difficulties, resulting from the presence of compacted vegetation debris upon railheads". (I also used 'arboreal residue' quite often!)
;-)
When I had to to make station PA announcements I carefully avoided referring to 'leaves on the line'; my actual announcements might have made more sense in French though!
e.g: "We apologise for the late-running of services on the St Edmundsbury Lines. This is due to track adhesion difficulties, resulting from the presence of compacted vegetation debris upon railheads". (I also used 'arboreal residue' quite often!)
;-)
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