Industry Insider

How good is the planning for severe weather?

“This leads to the unhelpful railway tradition of moving people away from your station by encouraging travel on any service that is broadly in the direction of the intended destination, giving someone else the problem.”

Severe weather has disrupted train services across wide areas of the country, testing the effectiveness of contingency plans put in place by Network Rail and the train operators.

Weather forecasting is much improved, and includes a warning sequence (introduced in 2011) from the Met Office which provides three distinct categories.

Yellow: Be aware. Severely bad weather is possible over the next few days and could affect people in the concerned area. Yellow means that you should plan ahead thinking about possible travel delays.

Amber: Be prepared. There is an increased likelihood of severely or extremely bad weather affecting people in the concerned area, which could potentially disrupt people’s plans and possibly cause travel delays, road and rail closures, interruption to power, and the potential risk to life and property.

Red: Take action. Extremely bad weather is expected. Red means people in the concerned areas should take action now to keep themselves and others safe from the impact of the weather. Widespread damage, travel and power disruption and risk to life is likely.

In the most recent sequence of events, the area covered by Greater Anglia was the first to receive a red warning. The response was to produce a plan that confined operations to a limited timetable on the main Norwich-London and NorwichCambridge routes with the withdrawal of trains on secondary routes.

The predicted bad weather did not materialise, which is a problem for a rail operator that has instituted an emergency timetable - it is not easy to reinstate services once train crew and station staff have been stood down and information systems re-programmed to reflect the timetable that is to be provided.

All very embarrassing for GA, which acknowledged that the plan was inappropriate for the way things turned out, with apologies all round. But this was obviously not the train operator’s fault.

We were all soon to find out that the red warnings were real enough, but the public disdain that followed the GA false alarm caused other operators to act with more caution in curtailing services.

It is a difficult thing to do at short notice, with passengers arriving at stations with essential journeys to make. It can often involve leaving individuals with nowhere to go other than to wait at the station for the resumption of services.

This leads to the unhelpful railway tradition of moving people away from your station by encouraging travel on any service that is broadly in the direction of the intended destination, giving someone else the problem of providing onward transport or other assistance.

It is obvious that trains are going to be stopped by large snowdrifts and severe icing that has happened on lines equipped with third rail current collection.

With a reluctance to call a halt to operations until these conditions are apparent, the inevitable has happened. Passengers find they are trapped for many hours in trains that cannot move, either for movement authority reasons because of trains ahead or because the conditions do not allow further running for the individual train.

Inevitably, the question will be asked about NR’s response in taking preventative measures. Conductor rail icing is a wellknown issue on third rail routes, and the procedures in place to deal with this on an unplanned basis will need to be looked at.

It would not be anticipated that there would be a need to send out a de-icing train between Southampton and Weymouth on an afternoon in March, whatever weather forecast was received. But the inability to do so resulted in passengers being stranded overnight in a train at Brockenhurst (attracting plenty of media coverage).

There are many questions to ask about the plan available to rescue passengers when it is evident that the train will not move for some hours. At least the train was at a station, although this does not seem to have helped in bringing in emergency catering or detraining people to a rescue centre, which is something local authorities should have a plan to provide.

Lewisham was another location where excessive delay occurred, with the result that passengers decided that the best solution was to detrain and walk the short distance to the station. This mirrors events at Kentish Town in May 2011, when a train lost power on the approach to the station and was not moved for three hours.

The conditions became unbearable. The train was overcrowded, and passengers became distressed as the air-conditioning failed and toilets ceased to work, with the driver unable to communicate because the public address system stopped working after 40 minutes when the battery exhausted. Initially, passengers opened doors for ventilation, but as the delay continued they began detraining and walking to the station.

Then-operator First Capital Connect was prosecuted by the Office of Rail and Road because it failed to protect the safety of 700 passengers trapped on the broken-down train, and had not adequately planned how to deal with stranded trains or provided those on board with accurate information, working ventilation or toilet facilities.

Improved guidelines were promised. The Rail Accident Investigation Branch is to investigate the circumstances at Lewisham, which will highlight whether procedures were adhered to in this case.

It is hard to plan for events that happen infrequently, which means control staff and others may not have experienced the issues they are faced with. Even so, they have responsibility as the railway is a system under the sole control of its operating management.

Lessons will be learned from the current disruption, in terms of the capability to keep routes clear of snow by ploughing. A variety of equipment is available, ranging from that fitted to trains to the NR fleet of 28 independent snowploughs and two snowblowers.

It is to be hoped there are procedures for the immediate mobilisation of this equipment when weather warnings are issued for given geographic areas. They are located at depots throughout the country.

It is more difficult to draw up plans to rescue stranded trains in bad weather, but an option is to extend the Thunderbird concept of providing stand-by locomotives and traincrew, as is regularly used on the East Coast Main Line.

“It is not easy to reinstate services once train crew and station staff have been stood down.”