5 Eurostar trains fail due to condesation in the electrics

It certainly seems that they can't tolerate rapid changes in temperature. Whether that's a c*ck-up, or an unfortunately unforseen circumstance remains to be seen, depending on the actual cause.

Sylvia.

It's certainly a problem that nobody had ever warned me about until discovered the hard way, about ten years ago!

It was summer, rather than winter, but the same principle, nevertheless.

I'd been working at night and was driving home at about 3am. I noticed that the temperature had dropped quite considerably (I was in shirt sleeves at the time) but it didn't occur to me that it might cause any problem.

I entered the Blackwall Tunnel (which is a small two-lane tunnel under the River Thames). The northbound tunnel was closed for maintenance, so there was two-way traffic in the southbound bore, which made what happened all the more terrifying - because I suddenly went blind!

There was still warm, humid air trapped in the tunnel and, as soon as my cold windscreen hit it, condensation immediately formed on the outside. Of course, my reaction was to wipe the misting away on the inside, while trying to slow down, at the same time keeping mid-way between the tunnel wall on my left and the oncoming traffic on my right! Of course, nothing happened! I was also acutely aware that the tunnel bends somewhere around that point ...

Realisation suddenly dawned and I hit the windscreen wiper and started to breathe again ...

No. Electrical and electronic systems designers have known about environmental issues for decades, and there is no excuse for having mission critical power switching gear going down for such a trivial cause and effect.

As far as I am aware it has only happened to the Eurostar passanger trains. They were using car transporter trains to evacuate the failed Eurostars.

For those who don't know the breakdowns happened in the channel tunnel between France and England closing the tunnel for hours.

This led to cars being in 12+ hour traffic jams as the car transporter trains were disrupted. Made worse by UK border control staff in Calais being on strike causing massive disruption to the ferries ib the same area.

So the motorway gets turned into a huge lorry and car park known as operation stack. I was listening to onw woman on the phone from her car who had moved a quarter of a mile in 13 hours, with a 3 year old in the back and no contact from the police or other services.

Raveninghorde wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Pennsylvania Railroad had a not-unsimilar snafu decades ago when their famous GG-1 electrics encountered an unusual snowstorm consisting of very fine, dry snow in very cold weather. The powder got into places it wasn't supposed to, of course.

--Damon

Those Tin whiskers are a bitch ;D

Cheers

Can someone explain how after all these years this happens now ??

It has not been this cold since the chunnel has opened for business in

Some thing has changed recently.

What has changed ?

don

It appears to me that by some accounts, the problem was the first snowstorm producing fine dry powdery snow blowing into the locomotives in a new way since 1994. That is only 25 years, and I have seen winter weather do nasty things in ways it does less often than that, such as blizzards in areas that only rarely get them, and really thick ice storms (as in 20-50 mm of rain falling while temperature is well below freezing).

Since the longest period major oscillations in weather phenomena so far as I know appear to me to be the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and a possibly-loosely-linked lower-frequency component of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (both ballpark 60 year periods), I would look at weather for the past 70 years for problems that could occur again.

Also, consider that the various atmospheric and oceanic phenomena whose last names are "oscillation" are at least generally not nice clean ones - but modulated in both amplitude and frequency by similar-frequency and lower-frequency random noise. Some of these "oscillations" may merely effectively be resonant bandpass filters (a few of them with Q rather low, maybe closer to 1 than to 2) acting on random noise of some sort.

Heck, global temperature had a great single-year spike in 1998, due to an extreme El Nino. Only 1 of the 5 major global temperature indices goes far enough back to get a previous similar 1-year spike, and that one occurred in 1878 (by at least 1 account having an El Nino). These spikes are 120 years apart, roughly 2 periods of the AMO and of the lower frequency component of the PDO.

It appears to me that one should look back through a stretch of time of more than 120 years, maybe 140 years, to see how the brown slop has some significant chance of hitting the fan.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Talking about Ice storms, In around 1979 LI NY had a nice one 1/2" ice on every thing. Snapped wires, trees, Driving was impossible. Its been 30 years since.

That 100 yr or 50 yr storm is still possible. The conditions have to be just right. Nothing has really change.

Cheers

It has to be colder to produce dry powdery snow. So much for Global Warming!

Heck with 30 years ago, New England had a massive ice storm last year. We are still repairing the damage (no help from the feds at all!) a year later.

talk about unusual failure modes... I heard about a radio tower that survived a heavy ice storm that coated it all over heavily with ice, but later when the sun came out and melted the ice on only one side, it collapsed due to the differential loading..

Mark

PeterD wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

why do you expect help from "the Feds"?

So they had their coldest snowstorm in 15 years. The most extreme winter precipitation event in any of several directions in 100 years in many locations stands out. Many locations in eastern USA have had only two blizzards since before 1888 - one in 1888 and one in 1993, both in the first half of March.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Don, try living at what was the US Army cold weather test site. The lowest recorded temperature was -69 degrees F. All the snow was dry powder, and drifts above the second story windows weren't uncommon. The winter was usually between -20F and -40F. At times it was too cold to snow, and the humidity was 0% but that didn't stop the summer snows from blowing down off the mountain tops. Anything you can imagine happening to those tunnel trains has happened to the railroads in Alaska for generations.

Which causes one to wonder why they didn't consult the guys up there, or at least the guys in northern Scandinavia. NIH phenomenon?

Probably they should learn from more modern ones:

OTOH in safety critical areas like the Eurotunnel it often makes sense to keep things simple.

Probably dumb and or ignorant periodic service and maintenance practices that left the cavity open to the elements.