david.hill64

The fact that Labour appears to be willing to continue leasing trains via ROSCOs may be an indication of some economic competence by Rachel Reeves.  Some posters here seem to believe that investors should be willing to accept low returns on their investment for the good of the industry, but why should they? Would you invest your savings in an account paying 1% pa when you could get 2% in an alternative account with the same risk? No sane person would. Similarly the backers of the ROSCOS - the big financial institutions - have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to protect their investment. If you cannot get the return on money by investing in rolling stock leasing it will be invested elsewhere. Only when there is too much money in the system would it make sense to take on a lower return.

Pension funds may be willing to take on lower returns for zero risk investments - such as railway infrastructure - where there is a guaranteed income stream for decades, but rolling stock leases are not guaranteed for the life of the rolling stock even if DfT does provide protection after the first lease expires.

Having listened to the Green Signals special edition I am rather more positive about the future, if things happen as planned.

I would imagine that everyone - of whatever political persuasion - must agree that the current situation of micro-management (or is it macro-mismanagement?) by DfT has to be done away with. If successful rail professionals are allowed more control, that has to be a good thing.

One disadvantage with the current structure is the duplication of posts that are essential in the structure of the operating companies but must yield savings when combined. Head of Safety, Chief Engineer, Head of Finance, Head of HR etc. If removal of some of these frees up money for front line posts that is good.

But I do see some difficulties especially if there are currently different conditions of service for staff doing similar jobs in different companies.

The ASLEF dispute needs to be settled. Drivers deserve to be rewarded well for their job, but they also need to realise that it is a 24/7 railway. It is clearly a nonsense when Sunday working is entirely voluntary. So get everyone round the table and work out what the industry can afford and how staff can benefit.

New rails are covered in mill scale, they are ground to provide a smooth surface.

Old rails can suffer from corrugations leading to the effect known as 'roaring rails'. As well as the noise, the higher wheel-rail forces generated damages bogie and track components.

Old rails can also suffer from rolling contact fatigue. Grinding removes the incipient cracks before they grow. If this isn't done you get a Hatfield disaster.

4 hours ago, thegreenhowards said:

I don’t think I’m being selfish to ask whether £10 per ticket is a reasonable price to pay for a tiny reduction in risk. 

No, you are not being selfish, but that misses the point.

Under UK Health and Safety Law, risks have to be As Low As Reasonably Practicable if they cannot be eliminated or made negligible. This is calculated using an economic figure for the Value of a Fatality Prevented. Currently for single fatality events this is about £2.4 million. (Sorry I don't have the current figure to hand and my search function is being slow). So if you think that there is a chance over the lifespan of the Mark 1 coaches used by WCRC that one life might be saved by fitting CDL, then WCRC needs to spend up to that amount. The court's assessment was that CDL fitment was reasonably practicable. Whether that results in a £1, £10 or £100 supplement to the fare to cover that cost is WCRC's business. Personally, given the experience with stewards and bolts, we know that that mitigation measure is not as effective as CDL.

Yes the risks are small. Fortunately we are at the stage now where the railway is inherently safer than it's ever been. Unfortunately that means that the cost of further risk reduction is high. However, if the risk is not ALARP then measures need to be taken to make it so. In the case of these relatively low probability risks, the ORR has been able to take a pragmatic view and allow generous timescales for the enactment of the fitment programmes. 

12 hours ago, GrumpyPenguin said:

Parents are also responsible for keeping their brutes under control & out of danger.

Tends to become more difficult once they reach teenage years and above.................

2 hours ago, thegreenhowards said:

This thread seems to have come down firmly on the side of the ORR. To my mind we have a classic David v Goliath situation, with the ORR being an arrogant, overbearing, undemocratic beaureacracy which is completely out of touch with how ordinary people assess risks (for example look at the different attitudes to working on ladders at home and at work). WCRC have clearly made some mistakes but thank goodness that some organisations are prepared to put their neck on the line and stand up against unnecessary expenditure and state sponsored bullying. I for one, don’t want to travel in mark 2s or spend an extra £10 for a useless safety initiative.

 

I apologise if I’ve missed it in the 70 odd pages on here, but how many people have been injured in the 40 years of running steam on the West Highland?

 

Andy

There are many readers of the Daily Telegraph who agree with you.

If it was your child, killed while standing on a platform and hit by the uncontrolled opening of a hinged door, would you consider the £10 a useless safety initiative?

As they say with financial investments, history is no guarantee to future performance. Same with safety: we no longer think just about preventing what has happened in the past, but what is reasonably foreseeable. What ORR is doing is entirely in keeping with UK safety law.

Small wheels: 19" Goods I think.

On 09/04/2024 at 04:20, Crewe North said:

Thanks to the LNW tender interchange policy some POW's did run with Whale tenders....

 

John

And even Robinson ones.............

5 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

I've fired off a letter to the Daily Telegraph to let them know some of what WCRC didn't say.  But I doubt they'll print it because surely they don't want WCRC's lovable steam trains shown up as not even bothering with their own safety mitigations!!

 

Good luck with that! I made the mistake on engaging with the online comments. Never received so many downvotes for any point I've made. I had the audacity to suggest that perhaps WCRC was not as innocent as they claimed and that preventing fatalities was a good idea. The top voted post suggested that Brighton beach should be off limits as people might walk into the sea and drown...........

I have just been reading the Telegraph article. The view of the Telegraph readers is that the nanny state is getting in the way and that WCRC should be allowed to get on with it.

29 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Whilst accepting the partisan nature of this thread, those showing support for posts reducing safety, is exactly what it is…a show support for reducing safety on a thread debating challenging of safety by another operator… which I find hypocritical.. surely safety is safety, not selective safety ?

 

 

Seat belts are useful in situations where the passengers can be subject to very high jerk rates and decelerations, such as motor cars colliding, or planes entering extreme turbulence.

These situations tend not to happen in railway crashes. I knew someone who was in the Clapham accident, fortunately at the rear of the train that crashed into the stationary train. He was unaware that they had been involved in a devastating crash that took the lives of many.

I am unaware of any railway that has thought it necessary to provide seat belts as a safety control measure.

24 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Were those researchers from the accountancy team by any chance ?

 

No, they were led by my erstwhile bridge partner, Sandy Scholes. A tremendously accomplished individual who was in charge of BR Research's vehicle structures department. He also represented BR/UK on the European committees responsible for developing crashworthiness standards: external and internal. He had a better understanding than anyone else of how to reduce risk to passengers in an accident. 

11 hours ago, arran said:

https://www.westcoasttoday.co.uk/news/jacobite-petition-builds-up-a-head-of-steam-as-business-owner-warns-of-devasting-effect-of-suspension

In this report WCRC is quoted as saying that the timing of the resumption of the Jacobite services is 'entirely out of our control'. 

Actually not: if WCRC bothered to make their stock compliant with the regulations, they could start to run again. The timing of the fitment is entirely under WCRC control.

However, if your business plan is to evade the regulations for as long as possible, then I agree.

I expect the hardware costs of a CDL installation will be quite small. Preparing the paperwork, getting the approvals and staff training will add a lot. 

If you don't want to do something, inflating the costs is a good way of stopping it.

11 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Nearly every train was slam door, bar some commuter EmUs

none had any form of door lock.

none had any stewards.

How many have fallen to their deaths in the last 5 years to 2019 which is much more relevent ?

 

Old numbers mean nothing unless your proposing to go back to those standards.

why not dig up numbers from. 1829 when trains had no roof and no door latch either?

 

remember a judge has to be neutral.

 

 

Modern safety management has moved on from reacting to past events and putting in place standards, rules and regulations to stop them happening again to a proactive risk based approach. We now brainstorm things that could go wrong - and past experience is still vital - and try to assess the probability and consequence of the hazard materialising. 

Even if there were no accidents associated with slam door stock in the 5 years up to 2019, that doesn't preclude the possibility of one or more fatalities this year.

I agree that the probability is low, but it isn't zero. There will also be an increasing number of passengers who have never experienced the joys of leaning out of a window to use the door handle. Lack of familiarity with the set up is likely to lead to error. Perhaps the probability increases as years pass?

Having identified the hazard, its associated risk (= probability * consequence) needs to be managed. If it cannot be eliminated then it needs to be As Low As Reasonably Practicable. WCRC has a duty to demonstrate this. If they cannot then they will be in breach of their legal obligations. If WCRC proposes something other than CDL then they will have to demonstrate that the alternative is a more effective risk reduction measure. That is how the judge will decide.

17 hours ago, 11B said:

https://westcoastrailways.co.uk/news/jacobite-letter-from-mps-re-wcr

 

Just found this on WCR web site

 

So still no exemption, but now getting MPs to try and get one 🤦🏻

 

Ian

I wonder if they told the MP's about their appalling disregard for safety in other areas?

It's all well and good saying that they have not had a serious injury attributable to the lack of CDL. Ernie hasn't given me the £1m prize for my premium bond holding yet, but that's not to say that he won't next month.

They talk about it being a 'temporary exemption' but admit they have made no submission to fit CDL. How long is temporary? Till the stock rots?

If WCR doesn't understand its legal obligation to manage risk in line with UK law then they ought not to be allowed to operate anywhere. 

1 hour ago, johnofwessex said:

 

Fascinating figures.

 

Interesting to see how much safer the UK is compared with Western Europe never mind anywhere else.

Particularly for workforce safety. I have long suspected that there is a direct link between the high costs of maintenance for UK rail and our reluctance to kill or maim our staff.

2 hours ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

 

CDL is something of a red herring in the Great Central accident, and if the coaches had CDL, there is every chance that the guard would have unlocked the doors anyway. Selective door opening, which is a different discussion entirely, would probably not have been used even if it were available, because the train was expected to stop in the platform, not partially beyond the platform end.

 

RSR99 specifically excludes railways whose operating speed is 25 mph or less, and it seems that ORR and RAIB currently have no interest in extending CDL to these railways. Perhaps they will do so in future, but at the moment I see no signs of it. CDL is not even hinted at as a recommendation in the Great Central accident report.

I agree: my point was that the ORR will have door issues and their management on heritage lines under review because of incidents like that at the GCR.

Just now, adb968008 said:

I dont disagree, but why then are preserved railways not being asked to implement cdl… as they go at 25mph ?

There are indications that the ORR is concerned about the exemptions that apply to Heritage Railways, so we may well find further tightening of many issues.

There was an incident recently on the Great Central Railway where a passenger fell from a door in a situation where on a modern railway Selective Door Opening would have prevented the occurrence. It is likely that door issues will be exercising the minds of ORR staff.

1 hour ago, DY444 said:

 

I am a vehement critic of the ORR because I believe it has done far more harm to the wellbeing of the railways than good.  It has systematically redefined the "Reasonable" from ALARP to something no dictionary would recognise.  I would have much greater sympathy with it in this case if it didn't have such an atrocious record of imposing enormous cost for negligible, and in some cases zero, safety benefit. 

 

An interesting statement. Where do you believe the ORR has an atrocious record of imposing enormous cost for negligible benefit? Such an action goes against the entire basis of UK safety law where there is an obligation to eliminate risks or at least reduce them to a level that is negligible (clear that the residual risk is at a level that is acceptable - think SIL4 systems) or at worst tolerable (in which case they must be subject to regular management review). RSSB gives a VPF figure of £2.4m. If the ORR were imposing stricter requirements, I think it likely that the industry would have challenged the view in the courts, as West Coast have done.

I post this with genuine interest. I have been writing and/or assessing safety cases for railways for many years now, but not for UK applications, so may well have missed some unreasonable ORR impositions.

I wrote earlier about the joys for a Gloucester lad of seeing the Scots specials - what were later to be class 06 and 17 plus the different DMU's - but if I think about it there were earlier delights.

A trip to Bristol in 1966 showed me warships for the first time, including the original D600 series, and Falcon. Although Gloucester regularly saw Westerns on the London trains and Hymeks on a variety of things, Warships at that time were rare. The regular diesel classes were only Brush type 4 (47) and Peaks (45 and 46) with an occasional 25, 27 and 37.

That same year a trip to Birmingham brought me my first Brush type 2 (31) on a Norwich to Birmingham service and my first EEtype 1 (20) outside Bescot yard and my first EEtype 4 (40) on the Euston trains.

Later that year a trip to Derby works yielded all sorts of goodies: the original main line diesels (10000/1 and 10201/2/3) on the scrap line plus a variety of small shunters in the D29xx series and strange shunters that were a bit like the standard 08 but with jackshadt drives! Real wonders.

Coming from Gloucester, trips to Scotland in the 70's were very interesting: strange 0-4-0 shunters, claytons, white circle DMUs. All strange beasts.

On 19/02/2024 at 11:14, 30368 said:

I am much more exercised by the news that the three ROSCOs made £400m profit, or a profit rate of 41%, in 2022/3. Compared to the Train Operating Companies, the ROSCOs have very little risk, either safety or financial, given that the Taxpayer underwrites the TOCs. Now that is a railway news piece that is worth looking at...

 

Not sure what relevance this has to renaming, but perhaps worth noting that trains supplied via ROSCO leasing contracts are still cheaper than those procured directly by DfT.

I suspect that those institutions that have invested in new stock which is now off lease might take issue with your assertion that there is little financial risk.

According to research by New York University, Financial Institutions (other than banking) have an average profit rate of 65%. Interesting to compare this with returns from green and renewable energy, which are a mere 61%.

9 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

The only bit that isn't labelled is the infill in the six-foot and the cess. Is that ballast and, if so, why?

Wild guess: noise attenuation. That hollow box is going to be a nice sounding board. Ballast would not impede drainage and muffle sounds.

Aerodynamic effects cause pantograph uplift forces to increase with speed. The continentals accepted this but BR - who had the best vehicle dynamics experts in Europe - working with Brecknell Willis came up with a pantograph design that didn't behave in the same way. You may have noticed the aerofoils on the design. The whole ECML electrification system was modelled from the ballast up to the overhead system using the class 91 and overhead line characteristics to optimize system performance. We know that it worked at up to 155mph and with appropriate maintenance would have been OK for regular 140mph running, which is what it was designed for.

The whole lot had to be deigned to a price. BR was excellent at doing that. I remember in 1992 when I was working on the Taiwan High Speed Rail system a GEC-Alsthom engineer complaining about how cheap the 91's were and warning the team that they couldn't use UK prices to benchmark procurement.

It is certainly true that the headspan design suffers from a 'one down, all down' problem but it was probably the only way to get the project delivered within budget.