Clapham: 30 Years On

At 8:10 am on the morning of December 12 1988, a crowded commuter train, the ‘Poole’ service, ran head-on into the rear of another train which was stationary in a cutting just south of Clapham Junction station.

After that impact the first train veered to its right and struck a third oncoming train, fortunately there were no passengers on this stock movement. As a result of the accident 35 people died and nearly 500 were injured, 69 of them seriously.

The stationary train had come to a stand after signal WF138 unexpectedly changed from green to red in front of the driver. The driver of this service brought his train to an immediate stand and used a line-side telephone to contact the signaller and was about to return to his train when the Poole train, driving on green, did not have a chance to stop before colliding with the stationary train.

At the same time an ECS train heading south was also involved in the accident after striking wreckage of the derailed ‘Poole’ train. The driver of the stationary train immediately contacted the signaller again to inform him of the accident.

A BTP officer travelling on the stationary train joined the driver and together they summoned the emergency services.

Police, ambulance and fire brigade arrived on the site within minutes but it was only at 13:04 that the last casualty was evacuated to hospital and it was 15:45 before the last body was taken from the accident site.

RMT would question what has changed in the rail industry in the intervening 30 years and what lessons has the rail industry really learned? When looked at the overall number of passengers killed on the railway both Clapham Junction and Ladbroke Grove, some 11 years later, stand out bleakly against an ever-improving number of passenger fatalities.

If Clapham is taken out of the above figures the decade long average fatalities fall to three (1979-88), figures not achieved until a decade later. Similarly, Ladbroke Grove gives a spike in the number of passenger deaths in the 11 year period after Clapham.

The Inquiry ordered by the Department for Transport into the Clapham disaster was chaired by Anthony Hidden who completed his report in 56 days and made 93 recommendations for safety improvements. An initial internal investigation showed that a wiring fault meant that the signal WF138 would not show a red danger aspect when the track circuit immediately in front of the signal was occupied.

Work associated with the Waterloo Area Resignalling Scheme meant new wiring had been installed, but the old wiring had been left connected at one end, and loose and uninsulated at the other.

The Waterloo re-signalling project had been planned with an unrealistic expectation of the number of trained and competent staff. Installation and testing was carried out at weekends during voluntary overtime, the technician involved having worked a seven-day week for the previous 13 weeks.

The recommendations included important points on training, competence and areas designed to address the underlying causes of management failures that were ultimately responsible for the accident.

Hidden noted the Automatic Train Protection (ATP) was being developed for industry by British Rail but thought implementation timetables were to slow and called for it to be fully implemented within five years. If industry had complied it is arguable that ATP could have prevented both the 1996 Watford train crash (one dead) and Southall in 1997 (three dead).

But many of the lessons that should have been learnt from Clapham still occur. In 2017, a Rail Accident Investigation Branch report into a serious irregularity at Cardiff Central on 29 December 2016 revealed that some of the lessons from the Clapham Junction accident appeared to have been forgotten.

In that incident, a pair of redundant points had been left in an unsafe condition and undetectable by the signalling system. The alertness of a driver prevented a serious accident from occurring. Excessive working hours, the cancellation of route-proving trains and a lack of detailed planning were cited as contributory factors to the incident.

The RAIB concluded that the incident revealed that lessons learnt following Clapham appeared to have been forgotten. Excessive working hours and a lack of detailed planning were cited as contributory factors.

Many think that Hidden also made recommendations on hours railway workers were allowed to work and that those hours were clearly set out. In fact Hidden did no such thing. Instead he made recommendation 18 which states “BR shall ensure that overtime is monitored so that no individual is working excessive levels of overtime”.

That is all he said. Nothing about shift length, nothing about rest between shifts, nothing about maximum hours in a week and absolutely nothing about any number of consecutive days worked. It was the industry itself who dreamt that all up and called them the Hidden Rules as if they had been reached by some sort of scientific analysis of the risks and hazards of working long hours and developed a clearly defined set of parameters that would ensure worker safety. Far from it, what they came up with was a set of limits which was the maximum they could get away with.

The Hidden limits eventually arrived at was: no more than 12 hours in a shift; at least 12 hours rest between shifts; no more than 72 hours in any seven-day period and no more than 13 consecutive days without a day off. And even then, these weren’t set maximum hours as if the “exigencies of the service” required it that they could be broken.

Clapham showed why fatigue and limiting workers hours are essential to control safety but there are many reasons for long working hours not least of which is workers’ rates of pay. Poorly paid workers, workers blighted by austerity, need to work longer hours to make ends meet.

There is a lot of evidence that, especially with some contractor communities, the 12- hour shift can often be preceded by and, or followed by onehour, two-hour or even at the extreme three-hour journey times.

In 2013 two track workers from Doncaster were killed in a road accident on the A1. They had driven up to 2½ hours, worked their shift and were on their journey home when they were involved in a collision.

The following year three Carillion workers were killed after their shift was completed and on the drive home to South Wales, driving time at least 1½ hours minimum.

Only this year we have reports of a worker doing ‘essential work which no other worker could do’ involved in a collision after driving from Wolverhampton to Peterborough – two hours minimum - working a hard, physical shift and then involved in a near fatal road accident on his way home. What was the ‘essential work’? shovelling ballast.

RMT has been campaigning for years to reduce the hours workers are required to work with no loss of pay. The safety benefits are set out in the RMT publication Fatigue Kills but the union demands a decrease in working hours which does not result in low wages for workers.

It is also clear to RMT that the fragmentation of the rail industry that started after Clapham means that there is an ever greater disconnect between management of the risks from railway operation by the TOCs that are striving for ever greater profit for their shareholders while Network Rail, responsible for operating, maintaining and renewing the track are having workers efficiency stretched to breaking point.

RMT’s fear is that these pressures on workers will eventually lead to another tragic rail accident like Clapham unless the industry takes radical steps to reduce hours, reduce travelling times and make the railways the safest form of public transport.