Making our railway safer
AUGUST 12 2020 was a devasting day for everyone who works on Scotland’s Railway.
The tragic loss of our two colleagues, driver Brett McCullough and conductor Donald Dinnie, and our passenger Christopher Stuchbury, continues to affect how we think about safety and drives us to improve how we operate and maintain our network every day.
As an industry, we are committed to learning the lessons of Carmont and to working together to deliver on all the recommendations made by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB).
As the RAIB report says, high speed trains have a good safety record. We will also work with the Scottish Government and its rolling stock steering group to review our train fleet now and in the future.
We take our safety responsibilities very seriously and are doing everything we can to reduce the possibility of a similar accident occurring again on Scotland’s Railway.
Since the accident, we have made significant changes to how we operate services during periods of extreme weather, and we have increased our investment in new technologies to help manage the impact of climate change on Scotland’s Railway.
We took immediate steps after the accident to inspect similar sites on our network and to review how we manage extreme rainfall events.
We put in place new control measures to slow trains down or to close lines when extreme rainfall is identified as a risk, and we invested in new technology to monitor convectional rainfall events.
Convectional rainfall can be harder to accurately forecast than the frontal weather patterns we are used to in Scotland. The new monitoring tool will help us to spot and react quickly to rain of this kind.
The use of EWATs (extreme weather action teleconferences) has also been further strengthened since Carmont, to ensure the potential impact of any storm is fully assessed and additional resources deployed ahead of time.
This approach - of increased use of forecasting and speed restrictions - has been used successfully to manage specific rail lines, or indeed the whole of Scotland’s Railway, during the recent winter storms such as Dudley and Eunice.
We will continue to refine this approach, to reduce the level of disruption during extreme weather events to restart services more quickly after.
The Scotland’s Railway integrated control is also the first in Britain to establish a 24/7 specialist weather team, who are bringing a comprehensive oversight to the ever more severe weather caused by climate change.
This new team will help us manage the risks posed by extreme weather more effectively now and in the future.
And this investment in additional resource in our control is also being supported by increased investment in our frontline teams.
We are recruiting more specialist geotechnical engineering experts and creating new dedicated teams for drainage inspection and maintenance.
We’re also aligning our asset plans to make sure we have an integrated approach to earthworks, vegetation and drainage management.
Future renewals plans will consider all these contributing factors as we target our investment where it is most needed.
We are focused on creating a more resilient railway, given the increasing impact of climate change on our infrastructure and operations.
Scotland’s railway infrastructure is among the oldest in Britain, and many of our assets date from original construction by the Victorians and Edwardians.
Many of our lines in Scotland run through very challenging terrain, bounded by steep hillsides and miles of third-party owned land. On the 200 miles of the West Highland Lines to Oban and Mallaig, for example, over 70% of the line runs through mountainous areas.
We are investing heavily in Scotland’s Railway to improve the condition of our earthworks and drainage systems, and between 2014 and 2024 more than £200 million will have been spent on earthworks, drainage and bridge scour projects around Scotland.
Over the course of last year alone, we invested more than £40m in renewing or refurbishing over 150 earthworks as part of 25 major projects, and competed 20 bridge scour projects across the country.
Scotland’s Railway is also at the forefront of deploying remote monitoring equipment on our infrastructure, to help give us early alerts to any problems on our network.
Over the past year, we have installed wireless tilt meters at 30 locations, including on the Highland Main Line and the line to Kyle of Lochalsh in the North, and on the Glasgow & South Western line through Dumfries and Galloway in the South.
And we have plans to roll this kit out to more than 100 sites by 2024. The tilt sensors detect movement in slopes and send an alert via the mobile network to our train controllers within two minutes.
We have also installed river level monitors and scour telemetry on more than 25 bridges across our network, and over the next two years we will continue to increase the number of locations fitted with these technologies.
We are supporting research and development into a wider range of remote monitoring equipment, including smart drainage solutions (currently on trial on the Glasgow & South Western line). And we are exploring a potential laser-scanning application for our helicopter to survey slopes from the air, which may help our teams to identify changes in the ground conditions.
We are also increasing the use of our dedicated helicopter to carry out lineside inspections, and are now better able to engage quickly with landowners by using aerial surveys to highlight potential third-party risks to Scotland’s Railway.
From our day-to-day operations to our future planning, we are working hard to make our railway as safe and reliable as possible for the public, our passengers and workforce.
“We have increased our investment in new technologies to help manage the impact of climate change on Scotland’s Railway.”