24
HEALTH+SAFETY
RAILSTAFF JULY/AUGUST 2020
REPORT BY COLIN WHEELER
WHITE ZONE WO S
afety expert Colin Wheeler reviews the report and picks up on one suggestion, that the UK adopt the concept of White Zone Working. He says: “It is time for us to end the dangerous practice of work and inspections of track being done whilst trains are running. Flags, whistles, horns and detonators or their electrical equivalents are not good enough!”
During the year, RAIB received 391 notifications, leading to 51 preliminary ‘examinations of evidence’. These led to 23 full investigations that will be or have been published as reports or safety digests. In 2019, RAIB published 17 reports and 10 Safety Digests, plus one interim report and an Urgent Safety Advice. Together, these generated 57 recommendations. Altogether, since RAIB became operational in 2005, it has published 447 investigation reports.
On 21 May, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) published its annual report covering activities between 1 January and 31 December last year. The report includes a series of summary documents highlighting safety learning from six categories of railway accident that, taken together, are the cause of 40 per cent of RAIB’s investigations.
In writing the report, RAIB’s chief inspector, Simon French, comments: “2019 saw a significant number of investigations involving one or more fatalities.” He adds that four reports were published relating to fatal accidents – three to members of the public and one to a member of staff. Additionally, at the time when the report was published, four further staff fatalities were under investigation.
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I congratulate Simon French and the RAIB on this year’s report. There are still lots of statistics, graphically presented, but this year the focus is on just six types of railway accident, featuring them as “key learning documents”. This is an improvement. For me, it evokes memories of the format under which I worked when we received annual reports from Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate, signed off by its Chief Inspector, who was usually a retired senior army officer!
FATAL ACCIDENTS
© BTP
Oakwood Farm UWC, 14 May 2015.
© Matt Buck
THE RAIB'S ANNUAL REPORTS LOOK BACK AT ACCIDENT INVESTIGATIONS OVER THE LAST TWELVE MONTHS AND MAKES SOME RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE FUTURE.
SIX CATEGORIES The six listed accident types are all supported by numbered appendices entitled “Summaries of Learning”. Those featured are: 1. Design and operation of user-worked level crossings and, in particular, how to manage the interface between road vehicle users and the railway. There are 5,800 level crossings in the UK - 1,500 are across public roads. Between 2005 and 2019, RAIB investigated 47 collisions and eight near misses. 34 of these incidents occurred at user-worked crossings. 2. The protection of trackworkers from moving trains. Since 2005, there have been 45 incidents involving track workers – eight resulted in fatalities and 12 in injuries. 22 such incidents have occurred in the last five years.
