The Bristol Railway Archive

I was at Pilning this afternoon where a HST broke down. I bet they don't normally see this kind of activity there!

Good job that it wasn't raining. I had thought you had been making a reference to the presence of rail-road JCBs in the yard.

I wonder what the passengers thought of the facilities?

Oh dear!!

What did they do with all the passengers? Herd 'em over the bridge and onto the other HST and back to Newport?

Nope, it was a Swansea bound train that broke down so they made them wait at Pilning for two hours, with other services crawling past on the avoiding line.



Eventually another HST arrived from the Severn Tunnel to take the passengers back to Parkway where they joined another Wales bound train.

You could probably imagine that they weren't happy.

The phone box will probably need emptying for the first time in years.

LOL!
That said though it was a Phonecard box for a long time...just get off the train need to make a phonecall..."aah a phone box brill..... ah no phonecard"

Even when I was 12 I thought it was a bonkers idea so why anyone thought it was a good idea is beyond me!

Did anything turn up to tug it away..was it that broken?

I left before anything else arrived, I wanted to beat the rush hour traffic home to Gloucester.

I've got a bunch of pics that I can post if anyone's interested.

Yes!

Please post. This is a *bit* of an incident!

A. Extremely rare that an HST should fail completely like this. Must have been braking or control systems, as one, let alone two MTU's, would *never* have given up like this ...

B. Signs of skillful driving to actually stop in the platform at Pilning. Stopping at a platform with a failed train doesn't happen by chance!

C. Would have been a rather larger incident had the HST packed up *in the tunnel* .... think about this one ....

D. Questionable that there was no other up train to stop and pick the passengers up and take them back to Parkway .... What was going on?

Seems to me that a potentially difficult inicdent was handled admirably by all the opo's, but that subsequent recovery may not have been that great.

Top marks for being on the scene! Tell us more ....

I was also at Pilning station when the HST came to a sudden halt,On the front was 43079, on the rear 43018,

jules wrote:D. Questionable that there was no other up train to stop and pick the passengers up and take them back to Parkway .... What was going on?

When the passengers had been detrained an up HST was stopped at Pilning to ferry passengers back to Bristol Parkway so they could continue their journey on an alternative service.

Alex

stumpytrain wrote:

jules wrote:D. Questionable that there was no other up train to stop and pick the passengers up and take them back to Parkway .... What was going on?

When the passengers had been detrained an up HST was stopped at Pilning to ferry passengers back to Bristol Parkway so they could continue their journey on an alternative service.

Alex

Yes but TWO HOURS later? HSTs are half-hourly on that route.

As I said, when the passengers had been detrained. They were hoping the train could continue forward. That was the cause of the delay.

Alex

More activity up at Pilning yesterday... Railtrack Autoballaster on the down line (possibly Loop?) with plenty of PW activity and Orange Vests. Unfortunately I could only see this from the road running between Easter Compton and Pilning Village.