As adverse weather conditions continue to impact the industry’s ability to run the railway safely, experts at RSSB share what they’re doing to reduce risk. Ant Davey, Editor and Podcast Host at RSSB, reports.
In my article for Right Track 40, I talked about some of the ways extreme weather challenges the rail infrastructure and the people who work on it. Then, it was extreme heat and rainfall events that were affecting the network. Now, there are some unseasonably low temperatures outside. On some routes, snow ploughs have already been in operation. Just a few weeks ago we had to deal with flooding on some routes.
That cold weather is going to keep more people together indoors, with the windows closed – just the conditions a virus enjoys. So, in episode 55 of RSSB’s podcast, Claire Shooter, our Public Health Manager, talks about how best to stay healthy while winter viruses are around. She’s also written the Pandemic Playbook, a guide to how to plan for and respond should another serious disease start to spread. It’s available for RSSB member companies and their staff to read.One of the mitigations for weather-related risk is to impose blanket speed restrictions (BSRs). These can reduce the harm from a collision with objects on the line, or any other cause of derailment. But they can also raise the level of knock-on risk across wide areas of the network. Limiting the area across which a speed restriction has to be imposed can reduce that risk. To do that, those parts of the network that are at most risk from different types of extreme weather must be identified.
That’s the task that Vincent Ganthy, our Futures Lab Systems Engineer, talks about in episode 53. With the Carmont incident still in mind, our experts worked together to identify places on the network most likely to be affected by extreme rainfall. This is only the first type of extreme weather for the Whole System Risk Model (WSRM) to address. The end goal is for the WSRM to cover the network and identify increased risk across a range of extreme weather types.
Revisions to just two standards—about the interface between OLE and AC powered trains—are predicted to lead to savings of over £27m across the next five years. You can hear more about the changes, including bonding requirements and the cant rail warning line, in episode 52. While on the subject of standards, in episodes 54 and 56, Director of Standards Tom Lee talks about why we need standards, standards committees and how the latter work.
That’s speeding things up covered. In episode 51 we get to hear from Simon Morgan, Head of Corporate Safety, about what Network Rail is doing to slow things down, specifically, across its 10,000-plus strong fleet of road vehicles. With as many as half of all rail industry work-related deaths caused by road traffic collisions, this is an area of safety management that has some way to go to achieve ‘everyone home safe every day’.
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