Safety at the platform-train interface, RAIB brief: West Worthing, and overspeeding risk
Letter from the editor
In Right Track 42, I closed my letter with a note on incidents involving people sitting over the platform edge, now to be known as ‘SOPE’ events. The call for action, and for improved reporting, was given even more pertinence on 05 April 2023, when a young person was struck by a train at Sudbury & Harrow Road station. They’d been sitting on the platform edge. They suffered life-changing injuries.
The cross-industry People in Trains and in Stations Risk Group (PTSRG) is working both to raise awareness of the problem – which has risen since the pandemic – and to improve reporting. Good reporting focuses action where it’s needed, and that’s exactly what happened back in 2010, when we reported a rise in risk at the platform-train interface (PTI). That led directly to a poignant dramatisation of the subject in RED 28 and eventually all the PTI work that we’re familiar with today, including the existence of the PTSRG itself.
RED 65 returns to the issue, and so does this issue of Right Track. Marianna White, one of our engagement managers, looks at how train dispatch has changed over the years. Believe it or not, it was once totally normal to open the door of a train and jump to the platform while it was pulling in.
Claire Volding, Route Control Manager at Network Rail, meanwhile, describes how RED 65 was made, offering a few top dispatch tips into the bargain. Elsewhere, Dominic Morrow, Rail Safety Specialist at Southern, discusses operational assessments, and Bessie Matthews, a Shunt Driver with Freightliner, is on the radio. Over and out.
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In the REDNetwork Rail’s Claire Volding reports on the latest episode of RED, which looks at platform-train interface risk.
Radio Ga Ga?Along with my licence, oranges and shunter, I am incomplete without my radio, says Freightliner’s Bessie Matthews.
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