Whenever i approach a red light on a German route I always press the pzb acknowledgement button but most of the time I end up emergency braking. Even when I’m under 25km/h the emergency brakes come on, am I doing something wrong?
I’m not an expert on German signalling but there is no need to acknowledge when approaching a red signal. It will automatically switch to 500Hz monitoring on the approach to red signal without you having to acknowledge. Perhaps by acknowledging it, it may interpret it as that you are trying to release the monitoring hence giving you an emergency brake application because it is a fail safe. Are you getting this message on the screen: “Unzulässiges Befreien” which means Unjustified Release.* If so what I said above would make sense. *My thanks to ProfCreeptonius for the well written guide
Could you possibly post a link please Olaf. I've just begun to dip my toes into the German routes and I'd like to use the safety systems without having rage quit moments.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15rMbxCG19bHquN53hhgNKMIb7BczH6nAMv9p-EBvLO4/edit Here it is, again credit goes to ProfCreeptonius. I do find PZB bit of a pain to be honest. I don’t understand why every time you are supposed to acknowledge, you just don’t get an audible warning like AWS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fairly comfortable with PZB and can do it without getting any brake applications (usually!) but just seems tedious. Also, you might spend ages learning all the important rules about PZB and signalling only to find something trivial giving you brake applications like sometimes you have to release PZB when setting off from a station (70/85 will be flashing) and if you forget, you’ll be getting an emergency brake application at 25kph.
Yes on first checking it out it does seem to be more complicated and less driver friendly than it needs to be. Yes tedious might be a good word. But I suppose it's something you get used to. At least it's not like on Japanese railways where the driver has to physically point at the signals and warnings to acknowledge them. I wonder with the use of PZB if German railways have a better safety record than elsewhere? But that's way off topic. Anyway thanks for the link, I'll take a look.
