The (as they are now) Virgin East Coast trains have a sign on the (customer use) power sockets saying "This outlet is for phones and laptops. Please, no hair-dryers or toasters."
The outlet in the picture says "220V~100W", so regardless of the max capability of the outlet, that's only 0.5A. Good enough for phone/laptop use. I imagine the precise socket is chosen for compatibility: to allow people to plug in low power devices that still have three-pin plugs, otherwise they'd be a bit out of luck. Of course if you're planning for a whole carriage of people plugging in their laptops, then the total power draw is going to be potentially several times higher than 1.2kW. (And maybe that's another reason for using high power capable outlets: if the bus is capable of delivering high power, you might not want to use something that will catch fire at a small fraction of that power.)
If course it's somewhat shoddy not to have limiters per-socket (how do they handling someone pouring beer over them?), and definitely very shoddy not to have limiters on the carriage as a whole. Still hard to see how it could have caused a problem. Unless the oven was faulty and flat out shorted the supply. (Still shoddy, but more explicable.) And I'm betting that though that may have shut down the train, the rest of the network was not directly affected, except that an unexplained train stoppage *should* block anything likely to connect with it until you've figured out what has gone wrong.
There was a news story over here a year or so ago about people plugging things in to the cleaner sockets - one or two at the end of the train, but standard UK 3-pin sockets. The detail there was that they were designed to be used in-station, once locomotive power was disconnected and the train connected to external power over an umbilical. So the power delivery in-transit was unregulated and potentially quite dangerous to both man and machine. (Also quite shoddy. You can see that they might not want to include regulation equipment if it would never be needed operationally, but they could at least include either a locked power switch or an automatic interlock to turn the sockets off when on internal power. You'd almost think certification would require that...)
Pretty sure this is a spoof site. See the other leading story, "Un physicien disparaît dans un mini trou noir engendré par l’accélérateur de particules du CERN".
The outlet in the picture says "220V~100W", so regardless of the max capability of the outlet, that's only 0.5A. Good enough for phone/laptop use. I imagine the precise socket is chosen for compatibility: to allow people to plug in low power devices that still have three-pin plugs, otherwise they'd be a bit out of luck. Of course if you're planning for a whole carriage of people plugging in their laptops, then the total power draw is going to be potentially several times higher than 1.2kW. (And maybe that's another reason for using high power capable outlets: if the bus is capable of delivering high power, you might not want to use something that will catch fire at a small fraction of that power.)
If course it's somewhat shoddy not to have limiters per-socket (how do they handling someone pouring beer over them?), and definitely very shoddy not to have limiters on the carriage as a whole. Still hard to see how it could have caused a problem. Unless the oven was faulty and flat out shorted the supply. (Still shoddy, but more explicable.) And I'm betting that though that may have shut down the train, the rest of the network was not directly affected, except that an unexplained train stoppage *should* block anything likely to connect with it until you've figured out what has gone wrong.
There was a news story over here a year or so ago about people plugging things in to the cleaner sockets - one or two at the end of the train, but standard UK 3-pin sockets. The detail there was that they were designed to be used in-station, once locomotive power was disconnected and the train connected to external power over an umbilical. So the power delivery in-transit was unregulated and potentially quite dangerous to both man and machine. (Also quite shoddy. You can see that they might not want to include regulation equipment if it would never be needed operationally, but they could at least include either a locked power switch or an automatic interlock to turn the sockets off when on internal power. You'd almost think certification would require that...)
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment