^Obviously we don't have all the facts here, but Ml's explanation is certainly less than satisfying.
Radio channels do get congested in the Hamilton-Aldershot-Burlington area, and the scenario where an RTC has trouble reaching a train quickly is all too believable, especially where the train is crossing between territories and likely changing radio channels. The question would be, did the RTC drop every thing else and keep trying, and is that even possible.
Verster's excuse related to HBD alarms is a bit lame. When a train receives a "no alarm" messsage from a HBD, the transmission is very short - a few seconds - and RTC's are experienced in carrying on with communications despite those interruptions. If on the other hand the train received an actual "trouble" alarm, its primary course of action would be to a) stop immediately and b) contact the RTC (who also sees the alarm on their console) - so how a HBD alarm worked against the intended direction to stop is hard to understand.
One presumes that the complainant here was an experienced security officer qualified to assess the severity of the situation (and likely recognized that the victim was at severe risk)....Not all trespasser reports have that credibility, but this one clearly should have. (the trauma of trying to prevent the incident, and having the system break down, and then witnessing the victim struck.... is a huge thing to bear. All the more credit to them for speaking out.)
To me, this incident simply portrays the reality of "another day in the life of a railroad". First, if every trespasser spotted led to full stoppage of trains, we'd have a lot more stoppages. Second, every link in the chain is a busy worker responding to many things at once. The premise that a "stop your train" message will get through the system immediately with 100% certainty is not where things are at out there. The weak links in this event likely apply to every RTC and every train in the country. ML simply runs more trains in the most populated urban area, so the failures are most likely to happen here first.
Stepping back - While I am a huge believer in transparency in our society, I'm not a fan of society's faith in solving problems by first broadcasting them in the press (where the issue may be embellished in the interest of story telling) and thereby putting the "accused" against a wall (and invoking some combination of silence, lawyering, and spin doctoring).
Personally I would see the need for more regulatory action on this one so that there is some rigourous professional analysis and in a venue that is less sensitive to spin. I suspect the regulator may have also not seen a problem here, and changes will be opposed by the railways who will argue that their system is good enough (and costly enough) and works most of the time. That's an issue that the Toronto Star can't fix by itself.
- Paul
