> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.

Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.

Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.

▲

potato3732842 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.

This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.

Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.

Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.

▲

krisoft 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.

Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.

Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.

> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about

Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?

▲

potato3732842 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?

They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.

The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.

	▲	krisoft an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they affect the decision making of the various entities in this story. So I will leave that part to you. I personally don't form opinion on things I don't know about. What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.

▲

garbagewoman 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait, are you saying you did?

	▲	krisoft an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Wait, are you saying you did? I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post. You can too. Here is a general layout for passengers: https://www.bahnhof.de/en/troisdorf/map You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ On top of that you can see the platforms in question on wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/S13_Troi...