The evolution of safety in the rail industry
Martin Frobisher talks us through Network Rail's commitment to safety and innovation
Martin Frobisher, Group Safety & Engineering Director, Technical Authority, Network Railand Non-Executive Director, RSSB
Your career in rail already spans over two and a half decades. Can you tell us why you wanted to join the industry and some of the different roles that you’ve had?
I wanted to join the industry because it’s a job worth doing. It’s a worthwhile activity, providing public transport, and it’s good for the environment. In truth, when I started, I didn’t expect to stay for too long. But railways get into your blood. I’ve really enjoyed working with people in the industry. Everyone’s really down to earth, and it’s a great place to work.
I’ve done a number of roles, working in maintenance projects and various operational roles as an engineer. I’ve also worked in different parts of the country—the East Coast, the West Coast, and now nationally, in my current role.
Safety is an essential pillar of the industry. How is Network Rail working to make GB rail safer?
Our biggest challenge at the moment is climate change. The winters are getting wetter and windier, and the summers are getting hotter. Climate change is real and it's happening now. It's presenting a big challenge for the safety of some assets. We’ve been doing lots on technology to improve the safety of our embankments. We’ve also been working on drainage to make sure it’s better understood, modelled, and managed. All of that reduces the risk of bank slips.
In addition, we’ve been working with RSSB to produce really good risk models of how to run trains safely in extreme weather called PRIMA. I think that’s an excellent piece of work that RSSB has led. It allows us to get the best out of the network in extreme weather. And that’s going to become more and more regular as the years go by.
We’re also improving safety for railway workers. A few years ago, we got rid of the Victorian lookout flag as the sole method of protecting railway workers. We’re now working to reduce the use of railway detonators and replace them with more effective ways of protecting engineering possessions. There’s now more protection for line blockages, too. There’s lots happening.
How does safety culture contribute to protecting the lives and well-being of our colleagues?
I think safety culture really means means caring about one another. Why do we do safety? We do safety because we care.
If somebody has an accident, the damage and the harm is terrible. In my career, I’ve witnessed many really tragic accidents. I was the first person from the railway inside the police cordon at the Tebay accident. Four of our colleagues had been struck and killed by a runaway trolley. I can also recall sitting in a hospital with a colleague in the East Midlands who’d lost a leg under a road-rail machine and just seeing the damage that we’d done to him and his family. And sitting with the families with lost loved ones in the Margam accident.
The importance of safety culture is actually about protecting lives. It’s about caring about one another and seeing the awful damage that we do when accidents happen. Once we’ve got the right motive, it leads to all sorts of practical things, like getting rid of Victorian lookout flags or detonators and improving electrical safety. It starts with care and ends with doing the things that are needed to make the workplace safer.
What are the primary safety challenges in Network Rail’s upcoming projects?
It varies by project. The big change we’re making is how we protect that project work. At the moment, we have hundreds of people walking around in the dead of night, placing detonators on the railway at the limited possessions. But sometimes they can become disoriented and move into unsafe places. We’re replacing that way of working with modern methods of electronic protection. We lock people safely out of the signalling system and protect them properly so that they’re as safe when they’re working as when they’re passengers on trains.
The Covid-19 pandemic was one of the biggest health and safety challenges the industry's faced. What lessons did Network Rail learn from that unusual time?
During that time, the way we worked with our trade unions was brilliant. We had a really close working relationship. We, at Network Rail, were meeting with our safety reps on a daily or weekly basis to put in place the protections that we needed to get through the pandemic. We did it in real collaboration with our safety reps and with the National Safety Council.
Railway workers were out there keeping the railway running at a time when other parts of society shut down. Everybody was worried and fearful, but we got to some really sensible protections that kept the railway running and kept people safe.
Can you share your personal experiences and reflections on your contribution to the fight against the pandemic?
During Covid-19, I did some work as an army reservist, helping build one of the Nightingale hospitals. The speed and pace at which we built a hospital was amazing. It was a project like I’ve never seen before. Normally, we’re very precise about the design and procurement phase, and we build it according to the plans. But we just didn’t have the time. We built a template bay for the hospital and then we just replicated it 1,000 times. Nothing got in the way. We built it to a good standard, very quickly, and we got good value. It was fascinating. Everybody there had a massive sense of purpose.
What opportunities exist for the rail industry to strengthen its position?
We’ve a real opportunity to collaborate more widely with other railways across the world. On a global scale, the UK is pretty small. The people who supply equipment to the UK’s railway work on a global basis—organisations like Siemens and Hitachi are worldwide. To get the most out of our supply chain, we need to collaborate very effectively with other nations.
Post-Brexit, that gets harder. We’re no longer dealing directly with the European Rail Agency. In the long term, collaborating with other railways on technical issues, making the most of our global supply chain, and getting consistent standards and specifications is vital.
RSSB has a huge role to play as the UK owner of the interoperability regulations. As well as my role at RSSB, I have a role at the International Union of Railways. I’ve been Chairman and Vice Chair for the European region. Collaborating with other European railways is vital. We all face the same challenges, we all have the same supply chain, and there’s a lot we can gain from technical collaboration.
