Sometimes at a terminus late at night a person might close up everything then go to drive their train into a siding and then it turns itself off. That’s ok. It’s supposed to do that. It’s just checking stuff. All you have to do is sit and twiddle your thumbs for a few minutes til it turns everything back on and once you have motors available you zoom off.
OR, you can sit and gaze around the cab if you don’t fancy twiddling your thumbs right at that particular moment. Perchance your gaze may alight on the emergency brake button which is pleasingly big and red. If such a circumstance were to occur you might happen to notice that the emergency brake button is at a very peculiar angle and give it a little poke whereupon you might find that the whole thing spins round in an anticlockwise direction.
Coincidentally, anticlockwise is the direction you spin it in to release the emergency brake. Had you wished to apply the emergency brake you’d give it a push and it spins clockwise and applies the brakes. But you probably don’t want to push it. You might ponder that a spinning emergency brake button is not something you really want on a train and perhaps you should be calling up the Controller to mention it. But before you do…hey, wonder if it also spins in a clockwise direction? So you might test that. And then hear a soft thunk of brakes applying. And then you might be left frantically spinning the button to no apparent point in either direction.
And if such a thing should ever happen to you then definitely will be calling the Controller and then you’ll be answering some extremely pointed questions about how comes the emergency button came to be pressed in the first place. And you’ll come up with the most half-arsed explanation ever proffered to anyone, ever, including when your parents told you that Fido was going off to live on a farm where he could chase chickens. And then the Controller will most likely tell you that your signal is going to return to danger and can you confirm that you will not be moving your train? And then you’ll burst out laughing all over the radio because that’s kind of the problem here. And then you’ll have to wait a bit for them to fetch a man who will turn up and say “Oh that’s bad, we don’t have a tool for that”, and then he’ll shrug and bring out a big hammer and give it a go anyway.
And after a bout of thumping and cussing he’ll tell you it’s fixed. Well not fixed, exactly, but it’ll move. And then you’d probably high-tail it into the siding as fast as you can because you want to get rid of this damn train as quickly as possible.
And the moral of the story is TWIDDLE YOUR FUCKING THUMBS.
