Yesterday (the date is not important so don’t worry when yesterday was), there was a fire next door to a railway line and the firefighters believe that the fire may have caused a gas cylinder to become unstable. Thus they asked for the railway line to be closed for 24 hours to allow the cylinder to cool down naturally.
As it happens this happened to be a critical railway line and the Eurostar trains from London are unable to run causing all sorts of chaos for up to 10,000 Eurostar customers who were hoping to get away this weekend. Naturally they’re somewhat upset and they have my sympathy … being stuck where you don’t want to be in the middle of your journey is not something pleasant.
And of course there is all sorts of suggestions on how things could be improved. But so far nobody has concentrated on the gas cylinder problem itself.
Fires near gas cyclinders are not exactly uncommon, and the fire brigade always want a pretty large exclusion zone for 24 hours. This frequently causes traffic chaos around the area. Not normally international travel chaos, but it can still be pretty unpleasant. Of course when roads are involved there are usually alternative routes which makes things slightly less painful.
Of course I am not going to suggest that the exclusion zones are unnecessary … gas cylinder explosions are pretty nasty and I certainly wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a gas cylinder that had been near a fire and was ticking away. But rather than a 200-meter exclusion zone around an unstable gas cylinder when it gets hot, why not have a 200-meter cylinder exclusion zone around any critical piece of travel infrastructure like railway lines ?