ABSTRACT
The advantages of fully automatic driverless trains have been discussed at many a conference such as this. Foremost among them, direct manpower cost savings as well as indirect organizational costs. Other advantages include being able to dispatch trains into service at short notice to meet demand or maintain schedules all at short notice leading to better service recovery, reliability and adherence.
All this can be achieved without having to mobilize and wait for a train driver to get on board a train before it can be despatched.
Yet under certain failure scenarios driverless trains need a longer time to recover as members of staff need to be mobilized to site – for example a train stalled between two stations requires track access by the member of staff. And when trains need to be manned or manually operated, many staff must be mobilized immediately to minimize delay to the affected train and other trains not to mention the member of staff must be able to respond correctly in handling the train fault.
After the March 2004 Madrid train bombings and the July 2005 London train bombings, driverless train systems with the advantage of lower manning level appeared to be in competition with the security need to intensify patrol on trains and stations which require to higher manning levels.
So are there still advantages with driverless trains and what are the lessons learnt from the North East Line that we can share for consideration of future driverless systems after seven years of highly successful operations of fully automatic driverless train system?
