A united front against trespass and suicide
A Conversation with Mark Killick, Chair of the Trespass and Suicide Prevention Strategy Group.
Mark Killick, Director of Safety, Engineering, and Asset Management for Network Rail Southern region
Can you start off by telling us about your career and role as Director of Safety, Engineering, and Asset Management at Network Rail?
I started as an apprentice when I left school at 16. I joined Network Rail about 15 years ago, having spent about the same amount of time working in the automotive industry. Since joining Network Rail, I’ve had a variety of interesting and challenging roles.
I started off on Network Rail High Speed, the HS1 link between St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel. Then, I moved into maintenance within the Sussex Route, and then up onto the London Northwestern Route, as it was then—now the Northwestern Central region. I spent a couple of years as an area director on the West Coast Main Line, looking after maintenance and operations, and then became the Chief Operating Officer for that route. Later, I was appointed as the Route Director for the Wessex Route before moving into my current role at the beginning of 2024. So, I’ve gained a wide experience in terms of running the railway: stakeholders, operations, maintenance and engineering, asset management, and communications.
I’ve also been privileged to be supported by Network Rail in some academic studies. I received a Master of Science degree at University of Birmingham, looking at railway systems engineering. It was really useful to get my head around the whole complex system of the railway.
I love working for the railway. I think it’s so important, what we do, and I get a real buzz from trying to make it better every day. We connect people, we drive economic prosperity, we support logistics with freight. There’s a big personal connection to me around the importance of what we do as an industry. And that was highlighted in the COVID-19 pandemic—how we kept the railway moving, supporting key workers and critical freight, while keeping our people safe.
You’re in your second year as Chair of TreSP SG. What are some of the major challenges the railway industry faces in this area?
Suicide on the railway is tragic. It causes a lot of distress to everybody involved and a huge amount of delay and disruption to our customers. I’ve experienced that first-hand in my roles on the West Coast and in Wessex. It’s something that I’ve lived as a COO and Route Director, seeing the impact on our people, particularly drivers, mobile operations managers, and the British Transport Police. And the wider impact of managing disruption across the network and wider system risk. Suicide on the railway and the impact of trespass is something that I’ve been working with in my leadership roles for years. So that’s why I was keen to get involved in leading TreSP SG with RSSB.
We’re just entering the second year. We now have trespass and suicide prevention together into one group, as particularly within Network Rail, the same teams tend to deal with both aspects, so it’s sensible to bring that together.
The group has representation from London Underground and our train and freight operating partners, BTP, and ORR. It’s an industry approach. Our aim is to look at the areas where we add value by coming together as an industry, rather than individual pieces of work. We set out not to replicate the tactical activities happening in the routes and within train and freight operators.
One of the key focus areas is around how we share good practice that’s happening across the industry. Through getting involved with this group, I’ve found some brilliant work going on that I perhaps wasn’t aware of in my day-to-day role. We’re about to launch a ‘One-Stop Shop’, hosted by RSSB, where we can signpost to all resources available—whether that’s rail safety education, research projects, or local initiatives—and share that across the industry. People can then pick up on best practice and apply it to their specific areas.
Can you share how TreSP SG is currently tackling those challenges?
The One-Stop Shop will be an information hub, bringing information and resources for all the major challenges together. Leaders and practitioners can go to a single place and really get a feel for what’s out there.
Another area that we’ve looked at is how we could influence rail safety education. Last year, with support from the managing directors of all train operators, freight, TfL, and the BTP, we wrote to the Secretary of State for Education. We asked for rail safety education to be made part of the national curriculum. We haven’t achieved that yet, but we’re working toward that influence at a national level to drive improvement.
We’ve talked a lot about how we capture better data, particularly around setting standards around motivations for trespass. We’re recognising that trespass is triggered by lots of different things. It could be a mental health crisis, taking a shortcut home, vandalism, or somebody messing around on the railway and not realising the risks. By capturing better data around the motivations for why people end up on the railway in an unsafe position, we can make sure that the mitigations are appropriate.
Looking to the future, what key research or projects would you like to see TreSP SG focus on?
We’re in the process of developing a risk model, building on a great piece of work by the Strategic Road Network and Highways England. This is around the likely causes for people accessing our railway from structures like bridges.
There’s a lot of focus across the industry on delivering a Minimum Viable Product. But it can be difficult to always know what the ‘viable’ part of that is. We’re building a model that will help put numbers and some science around that, and it’s been successful for the Strategic Road Network. It considers a number of different factors, more than just pure incident data that we currently look at. It helps us come up with a sensible and proportionate level of mitigation. It’s a good example where we can do it once, for the industry, and provide a tool that supports local decision making.
How can rail leaders that aren’t members of TreSP SG positively influence the issues that you’ve talked about?
The One-Stop Shop is designed for industry leaders to understand what’s going on in the trespass and suicide prevention space and allow them to review that within their own business. It’s important to be able to see what’s working well elsewhere and not have to reinvent the wheel!
Finally, what do you think is rail’s greatest underappreciated strength?
I think there are two things. First, the people are rail’s biggest underappreciated strength. There is just such a lot of passion everywhere I’ve worked in rail. People are genuinely passionate about the railway and want to make it better. That’s something that I’ve not seen in other industries I’ve worked in. As leaders, we need to make it as easy as possible for them to actually do that. We need to help remove the barriers that sometimes stifle that.
Secondly, it’s our green credentials. That’s not necessarily talked about enough—we are a really green form of transport, and with new technologies such as batteries, we can become even greener by reducing the number of diesel trains. We need to continue to double down on our efforts to be an even greener mode of transport both for passengers and for freight.
Learn more about the work of TreSP SG and how you to get involved.
Visit TreSP SG webpage
Access the Trespass and Suicide - One Stop Shop.
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