Harrow Crisis

The Harrow Crisis was an incident in the Thames Republic that took place on 18 Sep 2083. The incident caused the Metropolitan line and parts of the London-Aylesbury Interlink line to suddenly shut down due to a loss of signalling concentrated near Harrow-on-the-Hill. The network was restored in less than seven hours after quick-thinking engineers reactivated decommissioned signalling infrastructure in the Interlocking Machine Rooms (IMRs) at Harrow to bypass the proprietary modern systems. The IMRs, which had been preserved as museum pieces and left in situ, were simply able to be rewired back into the existing signalling hardware, and still worked perfectly after nearly 57 years of disuse.

A later incident report revealed the loss had arisen from a cascade failure of the proprietary signalling system Steward Smartrak, developed by a subsidiary of Helios Corporation that later went out of business after the London Revolution just a few decades prior. The proprietary nature of the system rendered it unable to be repaired by TfL engineers on the day. Concerns were raised that other lines might be affected by the issue at any time, so after the incident, plans were developed to replace the proprietary system with a domestically built, open-source alternative throughout all TfL lines. It also acted as a wakeup call for the Thames government, which initiated the National Infrastructure Resilience Program (NIRP) in an attempt to search for and replace other occurrences of unmaintained proprietary software in critical infrastructure.