Runaway Train

The last few weeks have been pretty good for London Underground. Delays and disruption have largely been avoided on all lines, save for the planned works on the Circle and H&C. This good service coincides with the fact that London is noticably emptier than usual during the month of August. Is this a shame, meaning that the one time the Tube works almost perfectly for weeks on end, no-one is around to see it? Or is it confirmation of the old railwaymans quip, that the service would run so much better if it weren't for the pesky passengers doing things to mess it up?

That run of good service was shattered today, and not even the most passenger-hating old Steam Age relic could pin this one on rail users. In the wee hours of this morning, an engineers train was heading southbound and home after a night's work when something on the locomotive failed. Since the loco was at the north end of the Northern line, the decision was made to couple it up to an out of service '95 Tube Stock (Northern line train) and tow it to one of the northern depots. For "reasons now under investigation", the engineers train broke free and the train rolled away. It rolled for 13 minutes and almost four miles, from Archway to Warren Street where a steep upward gradient into the station brought it to a halt.

This is incredibly serious, and is under investigation both by LU and by the big boys, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch. The Northern line had opened and was operating passenger services at the time - only the quick thinking of the Northern line controllers in moving trains out of the path of the runaway prevented a collision. All trains on LU have coupling mechanisms, and "emergency couplers" of the type fitted to the engineering train simply couple the two trains by a mechanical lock, which is normally pushed hard in place by compressed air. It would appear that in this case, the engineers train's emergency coupler broke in some way.

Questions obviously need to be asked about this, and with the RAIB on the scene, they will be. The one I most want an answer to is this: why was there no member of staff on the engineers train to operate the brakes? Most engineers trains have an operator at each end. Was this the case in this incident? If so, were both operators in the assisting train and if so, why? Unless the brakes were the faulty component on the train which necessitated the pull-out in the first place, it seems very odd to me that the brakes on the loco were not operated.