fun

How do the Norwegians unfreeze their points?

The heavy (for England) overnight snow has had me up to the station and straight back home again after it seemed clear that the entire rail network has been thrown into seasonal chaos. So it’s time for a quick blog to muse on that most-popular of British topics - the state of the railways.

Or specifically, why can’t our rail system deal with unusual weather? I was informed this morning at Brighton station that virtually all the points had frozen. Trudging back home felt rather like being sent home from school because the pipes had frozen. Quite nice really, but not very useful as it’s a big week for us at work.

Frozen points didn’t seem to be a problem when I worked briefly in Norway, however, with all the trains running very efficiently. (The train that took me to the winter resort of Geilo, where I was working, ran on the celebrated Bergen Line, which must rank as one of the great train journeys of the world and one of Europe’s highest, but that’s another story.)

Of course, snowy, icy weather is par for the course for much of the year in the Nordic countries, so I guess they’ve had some practice at dealing with harsh winter weather, but surely we can learn from their expertise on frozen points. It’s not as if we’ve had no warning that snow was coming. Surely we could have got a few chaps out there this morning with hair dryers or something to warm up those tricky tracks interchanges.

So I’m curious to know what the Norwegians’ magic trick to de-ice their points is? Is it some kind of vicious-looking blowtorch, or perhaps it is heated rails? My advice to Network Rail is for them to go over to Norway to find out, and bring a few of the mysterious point de-icing machines back home with them. Except of course they won’t be able to, because there’s no trains running to the airport today, and with no gritting machines in evidence, they’d be daft to chance it on the roads to boot.