20 Aug. Vauxhall not accessible to trains in service

[taylor]

Mid-afternoon all service was terminating on 4 at Victoria and northbound service was starting from there. Any insight as to why the turn-back siding and platform 3 at Victoria were not being used, as several southbound trains became backed up? Taxis were also being used to transport operators. Any available  but not private insight gratefully received.

[Dstock7080]

Due to an ongoing situation with a person under a train at Vauxhall, traction current was off from Stockwell to Victoria, this includes the siding and northbound platform. Only the southbound platform could be used for reversing from 11.50 until 17.30.

[trt]

Massive shout out for all the ERU teams involved in sorting that one out.

[taylor]

Thanks Dstock7080. According to the Infrastructure Line Overview (ILO) for the Victoria Line (Diagram 1)(*), from Brixton going north, Track Current Section (TCS) Codes are assigned as follows: V01 Northbound (NB) from Somerleyton Road via Brixton Platform 1 to just north of platform 1 at Rita Road near Stockwell, V02 Southbound (SB) from Rita Road just north of Stockwell P.4 to Somerleyton Road, V03 (NB) from V01 to Gillingham Street, V04 (SB) from Gillingham Street to V02, V05 (NB) from Gillingham Street to Dover Street, V06 (SB) from Dover Street, including the trailing crossover from s141 to s140 just north of Victoria, platform 4 and 22 and 23 roads, the turn back I mentioned, to V04. Switching off V01 to V04, from Somerleyton Road to Gillingham Street (covering Vauxhall), would have left roads 22 and 23 and platform 3 at Victoria (TCS V05) energised from V06. Now if TCSs V01, V04 and V05 are supplied from the same feeder, but fed alternately (NB then SB and so on), and if they were switched off, it would not have been possible to operate across the crossover S141 to S140 as the NB, V05 would have been dead as far as Dover Street. All that is what I was thinking when I posted above, hence my comment, which I repeat here about ‘available, but not private insight'. Also, so if you or another member has any, I would be very interested. It could be that there were traction current adjustments after 2013. The introduction of the 2009 stock, which was completed on 30 Jun. 2011 started to use the Westinghouse ‘Distance to Go Radio’ ATO a few months later.
T

(*) Copies of this document were sold openly a couple of years ago (without NDA). I don’t mention it often, but mine is accurate to 2013 a year to 18 months after the Victoria Line ATO upgrade.

PS. A friendly colleague apprised us to what had happened at Vauxhall and the staff at Victoria were their usual marvellous selves. As we got off our train, we thought that the much-discussed through-put calculations for Victoria must have gone through the roof. We ushered a monoglot Polish lady all the way to an Orpington train (not our route) upstairs. My wife (from Los Angeles) almost had to write an her affidavit that that train would halt in just one stop in Brixton!

[Tom]

I can't remember what the exact current arrangements are but I would not use the ILO drawings to make decisions in an incident, and nor would any controller - there are specific drawings for this sort of thing which are not made public.
In practice it's not uncommon to take off a current section either side of the one you want to turn off, or to open section switches to make part of a section dead - which appears to have been the case here. Depending on the switches that were opened this would have prohibited reversing via the sidings.

What I don't understand is how you think section V05 (your description, not how it is officially known) would be fed from V06? The two sections are independent of each other.

[taylor]

Aug 23, 2023 21:09:36 GMT Tom said:

...

What I don't understand is how you think section V05 (your description, not how it is officially known) would be fed from V06? The two sections are independent of each other.

Absolutely. My rotten parsing. I should have written: Switching off V01 to V04, from Somerleyton Road to Gillingham Street (covering Vauxhall), would have left roads 22 and 23 energised from V06 and platform 3 at Victoria from V05. 

Thanks for the update.