Tuesday, April 03, 2007

GO Conductor did not hear the alarm

I have posted Dylan's Comment as he wrote it below but as stated here below, I spoke to the Lady operating the door and she had no idea the alarm was going off. It was not a matter of not being able to shut the door and reopen it. She did not hear the alarm. That is the issue. What if it was not simply the doors not open but someone having a heart attack. Not hearing the alarm could mean life or death for the individual. Thanks Dylan for your comment its good to see someone from Go Transit is paying attention to the blog, its just that I wish someone at Go Transit would make a change to bettter safety instead of just posting a response to my blog.

This happened last week, it was an evening train the 7:43 train to be exact. We pulled into burlington and I was in the cars west of the handicap car. There were a lot of us there and the doors opened and everyone got out that were east of the handicap car. We all moved to another car to get out and realized those were shut too. We hit the yellow bar but nobody came. We made our way to the handicap car and said to the operator finally a door is open. All the doors in the west end of the train were shut so we pushed the alarm. "Oh I didn't even hear it" she replied. "I must not have hit the button hard enough to open them"

But what if an actual emergency had occurred, nobody would have responded and it would have not been until she made her walk of the train from end to end that she would have realized the emergency.

Talk about safety. I guess that is what happens when you reduce the staff on the trains to an unsafe level.

If you have any complaints about GO Transit let me know and I will post them here. Email them to me at chrisw_88@hotmail.com

1 comment:

Unknown said...

When you press the yellow strip, the train conductor in the locomotive gets the alert. He then radios it to the conductor operating the doors by either using the private channel or passing a code over the public channel (such as code X in cab Y).

Regarding the doors, there is no need to panic. There is a random bug on the new Accessibility cars. Sometimes only doors on one half of the train are opened. The only solution is to close the doors and reopen them. The door conductor monitors people getting on and off the train. S/he will see that people are not getting on or off the train on one end. S/he cannot simply then close the doors - doing so will result in the doors slamming shut in front of a person's face on the other end of the train (and that will result in a real medical emergency). The door conductor will wait until all passengers have got on and off on the end with the doors open and then close and reopen the doors.