RAIB Chief Inspector tells Network Rail to improve its control offices

Network Rail should concentrate on improving the way it deals with bad weather, according to RAIB Chief Inspector Simon French.

Speaking exclusively to RAIL, French said his priority was improving control offices so that controllers had the information they needed to make decisions.

He said: “The priority for me is for the railway to provide to their route controllers, and that’s Network Rail people, but very often its TOC people in integrated control centres, provide them with the information, procedures and training they need to be able to respond to this sort of very unusual extreme event.

“They have a really hard job. I was a controller, many years ago. I’ve done the job; I’ve walked the walk. I know how tough it is when things go wrong. When it’s quiet, it’s easy; when things start to go wrong, it’s hell on earth - phone calls, messages… it’s just data overload.

“Network Rail really needs to take this job for what it is - a safety-critical job - and they need to provide every support to the people who do this difficult job.”

Scotland has an integrated control centre headed by a Network Rail employee who reports to a ScotRail director. RAIB found that NR did not convene an ‘extremeweather action team’ meeting on August 11-12, despite weather forecasts that exceeded the trigger levels for such meetings.

It found that despite the disruption on the morning of the accident, NR did not establish a senior manager command meeting, known as a ‘gold’ meeting. (There were 30 incidents overnight including floods and landslips.)

RAIB’s report reveals that NR had not configured its real-time weather-reporting system to help controllers and those controllers were not trained on the system.

It added that it could find no evidence of audits taking place in Scotland that might have revealed that nationally mandated processes were being applied differently in Scotland.

RAIB’s report says: “RAIB has concluded that the way of working in Scotland’s route control had become normalised to the extent that senior managers did not notice the drift from mandated process.”

NR told RAIL it was “committed to ensuring our staff have the tools they need to carry out their jobs effectively”. It said it was making use of weather modelling and had created a ‘weather academy’ to train operational teams.