What I'm still trying to figure out is, if the Operations Center, signals, interlockings and the ATC system are all fully backed-up and remain operational during a loss of commercial power, why would they have to send maintainers out to set up switches by hand?
That sounds like without commercial power the system is not fully functional.
Or it could possibly be the problem was that after several hours of no commercial power the batteries in the field were no longer being recharged and themselves were down.
I'm just curious to know.
Again about twenty years ago I was riding in the head car on a Brewster express. It was early afternoon, it had been very hot and humid and then a violent summer thunderstorm moved through the area. At Mt. Vernon West there was marble-sized hail falling.
The storm blew over quickly but as we moved through Bronxville station the train made a very sudden stop, possibly the engineer dumped it. Looking out the front window I could see a good-sized tree had come down just north of the station, right across our track, track 1. Our engineer popped out of the cab and said he had seen it start to go. It was a miracle he was able to stop in time. He did a great job.
When the tree came down it also pulled down the 'high line.' Crews responded fairly quickly and within an hour the tree had been removed. We then proceeded north at restricted speed account the signals still being out. I was standing at the front window and we stopped at each dark signal. I think each time the engineer had to get verbal permission to proceed past it. I don't really remember that for sure, though.
En route we saw a headlight coming south -- it was one of the GP35ms -- and the conductor and engineer joked, "hope he's not on our track!' He wasn't, of course, but at first it was hard to tell. Something like that makes you appreciate signal systems!
Anyway we finally made it to White Plains. The agent there at the time (who I was friendly with) told me, "You guys were lucky. There's nothing else running, the signals are out." I told him I knew that, that the tree that went down fell right in front of our train, that if it hadn't been for the engineer being very alert we could have easily hit it.
I was commuting to a job in White Plains at the time so it was a real break in the routine.