(09 Nov 2014, 12:57 am)Bus_User wrote You should work in the media, talk about exaggeration! Going by the reports, if this train was on fire then i am doubtful passengers would remain on the train for 20 mins.
Seems similar to the last incident where smoke was reported to enter the interior but does not fully mean there was a fire... could be a brake overheating issue or something like that. Either way, can't cover the cracks that its another reliability issue though.
I was going by the only 'report' I read: the one citaro5284 copied and pasted to this forum. If customers are being 'choked by smoke' it sounds quite serious indeed, and if this is a recurring issue (which seems to be the case), then I'd suggest that this reiterates the doubts I had about refurbishing old stock again opposed to buying new trains. I wasn't aware that passengers remained on the train in question for 20 minutes as I was only going by the 'report' I read on this forum - how could exaggeration be what I had in mind, if this is the case?
Regardless of what the specific issue may be, smoke is considered to be a fire in the eyes of a normal customer. If smoke bellows into the interior of a train, that is going to be an unforgettable life experience. A train I was on in the summer of 2013 came to an emergency stop in one of the tunnels at Gateshead and someone thought it would be a good idea to smoke weed whilst we waited; as if the journey wasn't bad enough to start with due to being overcrowded with many people heading to the Evolution festival on Newcastle Quayside, the lack of 'fresh air' in the train once it had been lighted made things ten times worse. Looking back, I don't think I was in any danger at all, though at the time I was very scared indeed and, like many others, I was stood on chairs trying to get air through the windows.
There are reliability issues, and there are issues which make people lose faith in the system. The same would apply to buses catching fire too, though thankfully recent examples haven't been major and everyone has been evacuated at first signs of a light on the dash suggesting something was wrong, and nobody has had to endure being 'choked by smoke' or anything similar...