In an emergency, make the call
How good we are at spotting and responding to emergency situations? asks East Midlands Railway’s Richard Lavelle.
How good are you at identifying an emergency and reacting to it appropriately? It doesn’t even have to be in a railway environment but an ordinary everyday situation. If you think you’d do well, then social psychologists may disagree. In a famous experiment at Princeton University in 1968, researchers staged an emergency and measured how long it took participants to intervene, if they intervened at all. The experiments found that the presence of others inhibited helping, often by a large margin. They called it ‘the bystander effect’.
With this in mind, should the railway be concerned about emergency calls? Let’s take an emergency scenario like cows on the line. The industry’s own incident data shows that train drivers can be reluctant to make a rail emergency group call (REC) and that in some cases this has had serious consequences. What are the reasons behind that reluctance?
Is there an element of the bystander effect at play? If a train had just passed on the other line, say, wouldn’t it have been reported already? Or do other factors come in, like embarrassment that the broadcast will be heard by trains and signallers over a wide area? Or even the fear that you might get blamed for the delay to multiple train services if it turns out to not be an emergency? While these concerns are an understandable human response, they should never get in the way of a REC call being made.
On that last point, making a REC call for what you, in your professional judgement, consider to be an emergency situation, will never carry any kind of blame. The timeless adage of ‘better to be safe than sorry’ definitely applies here.
With animals on the line, the Rule Book is clear. Section 43 of Module TW1 (Preparation and movement of trains) says: ‘You must carry out the instructions in this section if you see a cow, bull or other large animal within the boundary fence, even if it is not an immediate danger to trains. You must tell the signaller by making a railway emergency group call on the train radio equipment.’
You don’t have to go far back in history to find evidence to back up the importance of making an emergency call.
You don’t have to go far back in history to find evidence to back up the importance of making an emergency call: a derailment caused by cows on the line at Godmersham in Kent in 2015. The initial report of a cow on the line was made using the normal GSM-R call function. When a later service struck the herd of cows at the same location, the emergency call function couldn’t be used as the cab was damaged in the collision and the GSM-R unusable.
There is, of course, a better-known incident that sent shockwaves through the industry and prompted major changes: the 1984 Polmont derailment. That incident happened when a push-pull express train travelling from Edinburgh to Glasgow struck a cow which had gained access to the track through a damaged fence. The train derailed, killing 13 people and injuring 61 others, 17 of them seriously. This incident brought about a Rule Book change so that any large animal inside the railway boundary should be considered an emergency situation.
In 1984, GSM-R was still a dream. But now it’s ubiquitous, maybe we take its effectiveness for granted. At East Midlands Railway, drivers are told: if you think it’s an emergency, make a REC call, you can always cancel it. To cancel a REC, you must proceed with the call and reach a clear understanding with the signaller.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to never face an emergency, here’s some questions to think about:
Would you be able to give an accurate description of an animal’s location when you’re travelling at high speed?
How would you identify that location to someone else?
What would you do if the GSM-R was damaged in the collision?
Main image credit: DoctorWhoEditor2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
