2w ago

UK: Passenger forced to run along London platform with hand trapped in doors of moving train

www.theguardian.com Passenger forced to run along London platform with hand trapped in doors of moving train

Investigation launched after late-night ‘trap and drag’ incident on Elizabeth line in which man was freed by staff

Summary

A passenger on London’s Elizabeth line was forced to run several meters along a platform at Ealing Broadway station after his hand became trapped in the closing doors of a departing train on 24 November.

Railway staff intervened to pull him away, and the train stopped after moving 17 meters. The passenger sustained minor injuries.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) is investigating the incident, part of a series of similar “trap and drag” cases, to improve safety measures.

Transport for London and the operator, MTR, are cooperating fully.

14 comments

Reminder, if you see someone trapped in a door, pull the emergency stop. A man was dragged to his death by a train in my area recently.

So, the safety mechanism shouldn't have permitted that.
But on the other hand, I kind of feel like at least some of this is a human factors issue here too. One assumes that the passenger in question had missed the train and was trying to stop the doors from closing so that the train couldn't leave so that he wouldn't need to take the next. I've seen signs on trains with automatic doors warning people not to obstruct the train doors. It's a problem for other people on the train if people keep blocking the train from moving by tripping the safety system, but given that it's in the blocker's interest to halt the train so that they can get on it, you can tell people not to do it, but they're probably still going to do so.
I wonder if a better solution would be for the door that halts the flow of passengers to be on the station platform rather than letting people right up to the train and then having the train door be what's expected to terminate the flow. Like, have a second set of turnstiles spanning the platform that just stop letting people in at a certain point.
- Wikipedia lists many countries that use platform screen doors as a safety measure, for both train and bus platforms. Below, Bogotá.
  
  The Elizabeth line is already built with platform screen doors, although I believe they're only on underground sections. I don't know enough about this station to say whether it had them; I expect not.
  Platform screen doors tend to be used underground mainly for airflow management. They are not primarily for safety.
  They work less well outside. No overhead structure to anchor to, weather has a larger impact (particularly snow/ice), and they can become something to climb rather than an obstacle.
  
  Ah, interesting, thanks!
  Not a lot of passenger rail here in the US, though now that you show that picture, I think I recall seeing an internal airport train that has some kind of similar screen.
  pokes around
  Yeah, I think that it's the airport train at Atlanta that I'm thinking of, looks like they have them.
  reads further
  It sounds like the goal of these are somewhat different. Hmm. According to that article, there are some problems with providing direct passenger access to the space with the rail lines -- people committing suicide using the train, people falling onto the tracks, people intentionally running around in the rail tunnels via access from the platform, unwanted movement of air between the passenger and rail area, and people tossing garbage into the track area, and this avoids those issues; the passengers still get access to the train interior when there's a train present, but not to the track.
  considers
  It might also provide a second safety mechanism -- I assume that the train can't move if either the safety mechanism on the station platform door or the train door detects that its door is obstructed from closing, but I think that this would still permit the potential for people running late for a train aiming to halt the train from leaving by tripping the safety mechanism on both doors.
  kagis
  Hmm.
  https://old.reddit.com/r/tall/comments/613ogj/guys_head_gets_stuck_between_train_doors_xpost/
  Based on the comment on this post, on the London subway, they partially mitigate people trying to block the train from leaving by not always fully reopening the doors if they hit an obstacle. This guy apparently got his head wedged in the door, and I guess whatever degree to which they will reopen, if any, wasn't enough to retract it.
  Wow...really? Tube doors close HARD there's no mechanism that makes it release.
  Seriously? That's really dangerous. In Melbourne our train doors close fairly weakly, and if they hit something they open straight away. Never heard of anyone getting stuck in a train door around here.
  If you take the tube in London for a couple of weeks you'd want them to close hard. The amount of idiots who end up delaying hundreds of people because they can't wait 90 seconds for the next train is staggering.
  But it's not that bad, really. The doors aren't violent, they're resolute.
  
  Hey look it's star citizen
- “…on the other hand…”
- I feel like there are massive, unsolvable problems with this idea (besides the considerable cost):
  The Elizabeth line already has a very small space for passengers to wait. Thus, you're severely restricting the amount of available space even if the turnstiles end up quite close to the train, because in your idea, the area beyond the turnstiles shouldn't be occupied until the train is deboarding/boarding.
  The turnstiles would substantially limit throughput solely to prevent this extreme fluke situation. Trains' efficiency lives and dies on their boarding and deboarding times, and this means that both people boarding and deboarding need to go through a turnstile (at best, the people boarding need to).
  If you have the turnstiles too close to the train (which there's a lot of opportunity for in such an enclosed space and assuming you want to maximize the passenger waiting area), then you're encouraging people to hop the turnstiles to catch their train, which could actually be substantially more dangerous through risk of fall, especially if part of your body falls under the train as it's departing ("mind the gap").
  
  Yeah, completely unsolvable apart from the fact these have been solved in other countries 🙄 - not with turnstiles but with the additional doors which line up with train doors.
  It's the usual British "it won't work" without even trying to explore what other nations (just accros the channel) implemented.
  
  The Elizabeth line already has a very small space for passengers to wait.
  You'd need some amount of more platform space than you would with the present system, true enough.
  the area beyond the turnstiles shouldn’t be occupied until the train is deboarding/boarding.
  It could be occupied prior to that. The limit would be the departure of the previous train.
  hop the turnstiles
  I'm thinking of the security turnstiles that you can't hop. They look like this sort of thing:

14 comments