Practitioner viewpoint

JUST A few years ago it was common for maintenance and inspection work on the railway to be carried out ‘red zone’. This equated to working on the infrastructure with trains running as scheduled, with a worker appointed to look out for oncoming trains and warn their colleagues in time to allow them to step clear of the tracks before the train reached them. When considered against the hierarchy of control, this approach falls towards the bottom. With only procedural controls in place, and a heavy dependence on human factors, and it failed many times, sometimes with catastrophic impact.

Last week Network Rail was prosecuted for two incidents where members of staff lost their lives after being hit by passing trains during ‘red zone’ working, one at Margam in Wales on 3 July 2019 where Michael Lewis and Gareth Delbridge were killed and the other at Surbiton in Surrey on 9 February 2021 where Tyler Byrne also died. Before these incidents the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), the safety regulator for the railway, had served improvement notices requiring the industry to find safer alternatives to ‘red zone’ working, and the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) reports into these incidents further underlined the need to implement more robust risk control strategies, with less reliance on human factors. A national campaign followed, which has led to prohibition of red zone working, but has it actually reduced the risk? Or simply shifted it to another position in the system?

The difficulty is that the railway is a safety critical system operating at capacity. It’s old! With many of its features dating back to the golden era in the 1930s and 1940s when the UK led the world in the evolution of railway travel and transportation. While there have of course been upgrades and innovations since then, the basis of the system is still largely unchanged, but usage is now very different.  It’s now a 24/7 railway, operating at capacity with both passenger and freight services.  Inspection and maintenance are essential to ensure that the system remains safe, and upgrades and improvements are also required to keep the infrastructure fit for the future.    

The railway is a complex system. Complete shut downs cause huge inconvenience to users, and transfer risk to other transport systems, as demand is diverted resulting in congestion and increasing the risk of accidents. So there is an imperative to keep these to a minimum, and to conduct routine inspections, planned and reactive maintenance and enabling work for improvements while keeping trains running.  

With ‘red zone’ working prohibited, many activities are now conducted under ‘line blocks’, where the signaller to ‘protects’ a section of track by holding a signal at danger (displaying a red light) to stop trains entering until the work group calls to say that they have completed their task and moved clear of the infrastructure. But does this actually represent an improvement in risk control? 

The responsibility has passed from the track workers to the signaller, but there is still an overriding dependence on human factors; identifying the correct signals to protect the section; placing a reminder correctly to prevent the signals being cleared inadvertently; agreeing when work has been completed, everyone is clear of the line and it is safe to resuming train running. This is exacerbated when several work groups sign in to one line block, when line blockages extend over shift changes, when signallers are managing multiple line blocks at the same time or when other unplanned demands cause distraction. Effective communication is essential, but this too is difficult when the people involved are remote from each other, radio or phone signals can’t always be relied upon, and the people involved are managing multiple tasks at the same time.

It feels to me that the level of protection afforded to track workers has still not changed substantially.  Responsibility has shifted to another part of the railway system, but we are still a long way from moving up the hierarchy of control to a level where physical safeguards are in place, as is commonly the case in other industries.

So as we remember Michael Lewis, Gareth Delbridge, Tyler Byrne and the many other workers who have lost their lives on the railway, we need to challenge ourselves to embrace new ideas, innovation and technological advances to help identify better ways to balance risk and protect workers on the railway.

Louise Ward is group director ESG and projects at Freightliner Group. For more information, visit www.freightliner.co.uk