Comment by iso1631
1 month ago
There in America your trains have steps down to the floor so letting people off at level crossings are fine. You also tend to have
American railways are far less regimented than European or Chinese, when you have 3 trains a day you can do stuff like that
You can do it in any train system designed to be resilient to failures. The Germans have apparently designed a system that incentivizes (or even forces) the conductor (or the dispatchers) to do ridiculous things that waste hours of their customer’s time to fix instead of simple and obvious things that take minutes to fix like just stopping at the next available station.
Around here if the Conductor gets a call from dispatch telling him that a station is unavailable, the dispatcher will already have cleared the train to stop at some logical alternate location. That might mean another train station in the same city or a specific level crossing. It might mean delaying or stopping conflicting traffic. They’ve thought ahead and planned a way to fix the problem _without_ carting passengers an hour out of their way.