Carmont Task Forces
Independent units set up to improve the way NR responds to severe weather and manages its earthworks.
TWO independent task forces, led by relevant experts, are working with Network Rail to improve the way the national track owner manages its cutting and embankments and the way it responds to severe weather.
Dame Julia Slingo is leading the weather taskforce, drawing on her experience as a former chief scientist at the Met Office.
Robert Mair will lead the earthworks taskforce. He is a crossbench member of the House of Lords and a former president of the Institute of Civil Engineers.
Slingo’s work will look at how NR uses data and research to better understand how rainfall could potentially damage infrastructure at a local level.
She will examine how effectively NR uses existing forecasting and monitoring systems and how they might be improved.
Mair will check how well NR manages its drains and earthworks, and whether or not it needs to better integrate its efforts. He will review NR’s controls and assess whether they are effective or whether they are too onerous for frontline staff.
He will also suggest whether NR might learn from other organisations and establish whether NR is fully aware of the latest technologies that it could use.
NR Chief Executive Andrew Haines said: “With more and more extreme weather and tens of thousands of earthwork assets across Great Britain, our challenge is massive. And while we are making record investment in these areas, we have asked worldrenowned experts Dame Julia Slingo and Lord Mair to help us address these issues as effectively as possible, and at pace.”
The two appointments follow
August 12’s fatal derailment of a ScotRail HST on a landslide at Carmont in Scotland ( RAIL 912).
In the accident’s immediate aftermath, Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps called for an interim report from NR by September 1 into the railways’ resilience to flash floods. He instructed NR to follow it with a final report later in the autumn.
Meanwhile, the police and Rail Accident Investigation Branch examinations of the accident site continue. NR spokesman Nick
King told RAIL: “We are currently constructing an access road across farmland next to the incident site, to allow us to bring in specialist
equipment. The site itself is being inspected by the RAIB and we won’t confirm timescales for the recovery of the carriages until those on-site investigations are complete.”
King said that NR tentatively expected to have the site back in early September, but added that investigators might want further access as each vehicle was recovered but before they were removed from site.
He suggested that taking another month to reopen the railway would be a conservative estimate.
Scottish Transport Minister Michael Matheson said in late
August that it might be several weeks before the line reopened.
British Transport Police referred questions about handing back the site to Police Scotland. Police Scotland spokesman Ashleigh Barbour expressed surprise that anyone should question how long the investigation was taking, explaining that the site was really complicated and that teams were working day and night. She later added that RAIB had primacy on site.
A RAIB spokesman said: “The recovery of the train is hampered by difficult access and must be done with care to ensure both safety and preservation of evidence. It will therefore be some weeks before the line can be re-opened. RAIB’s presence on site will continue until such time that the train can be safely recovered by the rail industry.”
This issue of RAIL went to press three weeks after the accident with the site still in investigators’ hands.
This compares with the 25 days it took to investigate Hatfield’s accident in 2000 and then repair and reopen the line ( RAIL 397). After Ladbroke Grove’s high-speed, head-on collision that killed 31 people on October 1999, it took 15 days to reopen the line ( RAIL 369). @philatrail