We have issued 80 prohibition and improvement notices in the last six years. There has been a lot of enforcement and some important prosecutions.”
ORR welcomes plans for a fundamental change in the role of the COSS (Controller of Site Safety) at Network Rail and its contractors. There are thousands of people doing this work. It wants the person in charge of safety to become much more involved in the planning process, taking responsibility at an earlier stage.
“We have to shift this culture,” says Prosser. “We have to get the guy on the ground in charge and finding better ways for people to look out for each other.”
SPADs
The number of signals passed at danger (SPADs) increased by 17% last year. ORR says train operators should focus on better driver training and management to lower that figure. It is also pressing train operators to upgrade on-board equipment that applies an emergency brake if the driver makes an error.
“As operators lay on more services, drivers will see more red lights. We have to mitigate that as best we can,” says Prosser.
“We thought we might have cracked SPADs. Clearly not. We are very focused on that. It is a grind, trying to encourage the industry to upgrade TPWS where it is getting old. There are better models on the market now.
“We need better understanding of the risk at multi-SPAD locations, and better vigilance in driver management. We have driver management aids now, to monitor how well drivers do. We should use them more.”
The ORR highlights track geometry faults - rail twists - as a particular issue in parts of southern England.
Nationally, Network Rail has been getting a grip on the problem. But not in Sussex, because of “insufficient resources to deal with long-term under-performance, low level of renewals, poor planning and contractor failures, poor track access levels (especially on the Brighton Main Line and inner-London routes), and inherent design problems associated with the south London metro area”.
The ERTMS in-cab signalling system will be rolled out on the Great Western Main Line following electrification, with the East Coast Main Line to follow. This should have a dramatic impact on the number of trains passing red signals. But for much of the rail network it remains years away - perhaps 20 years on some routes. Technology will come to the rescue, but not soon enough for the director of rail safety.
More passengers
Here’s a phrase you will never hear from a passenger about to step off a train: “the platform-train interface”.
The ORR’s media handler apologises for not being able to come up with a better phrase for it. But “Mind the Gap” is every bit as important now as 30 years ago, when BBC Radio Sussex journalist Ian Collington recorded the warning in a voice familiar to generations of commuters.
The ORR says harm to people at the ‘platform-train interface’ increased in 2013-14. Four people died falling from the platform onto the track, and there were 1,250 other platform injuries.
Record passenger numbers makes this “a risk management priority in the short term”, according to the annual safety report. More needs to be done to make platforms safer places for travellers.
The statistics indicate that roughly half the total accident risk to passengers is found here. And 80% of the accident risk is at stations, mostly involving slips, trips and falls on stairs, on escalators and at the platform edge.
But look at the figures in the context of rapid growth in passenger numbers, and a different picture emerges. When measured per passenger, the risk from boarding and alighting from trains actually fell by almost a fifth.
Additionally, over the past decade, two-thirds of all the fatalities involved people who were drunk - 21 of the 32 deaths at the platform edge involved what the ORR calls “passenger intoxication”.
That does not diminish the industry’s responsibility, because it knows that people with impaired judgement frequently choose the train as a safer way home than alternatives. But it does help to explain the extent of the problem.
After the ‘platform train interface’, the next highest area of risk is at level crossings.
Here there is good news: in 2013-14, there was a further reduction of 12% in the level of risk at crossings.
