Why Britain's Trains Fail in the Heat: The 27°C Rail Secret

It is thirty four degrees in London and Britain's railway is falling over. East Midlands Railway has cancelled its regional services. Nottingham to Worksop, gone from midday. Nottingham to Leicester, gone. Trains pulled out of service because they broke down in the heat. Passengers told to make essential journeys only, to travel before noon, to carry a bottle of water. Out west, Great Western has locked its points, physically bolting sections of track into one position so they cannot move, just to protect the route into Paddington. Thirty four degrees. Not fifty. Thirty four. And the country that invented the railway is telling people to stay home. Everybody's first thought is the same. Spain runs trains at forty. Arizona runs trains in a desert. Why does Britain collapse at temperatures half the planet calls a nice afternoon? The answer is not incompetence. It is a number, set into the steel decades before you were born. In this video we explain exactly what heat does to a railway. Steel rails sitting in direct sun run about twenty degrees hotter than the air, which is why a thirty degree afternoon means a fifty degree rail, and why a rail in Suffolk once hit sixty two. We explain buckling, the moment a rail that cannot expand snakes sideways out of line and derails whatever hits it. Then we get to the number that explains everything. Every welded rail on earth is installed at a chosen stress free temperature, the point where it sits perfectly relaxed. In Britain that number is twenty seven degrees, because twenty seven was the traditional British summer rail temperature. In America it is set as high as forty three. And we explain the trap, why Britain cannot simply raise it, because a rail tuned for summer tears itself apart in winter. We finish with what Network Rail actually does about it. Speed restrictions, white paint, and a quarter of the network still sitting on wooden sleepers. The steel does not know the climate changed. It only knows what it was told when it was laid. #RailwayHistory #BritishRail #NetworkRail #Trains #Heatwave #UKRailways #TrainHistory #Railway #Engineering