01.11.15
The rail regulator at work to boost rail resilience
Source: RTM Oct/Nov 2015
Anna O’Connor, head of projects at the Office of Rail and Road, discusses how cross-sector working can help deliver an effective rail operation.
As the combined safety and economic regulator for Britain, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) works to ensure that our rail network delivers a safe, efficient and reliable service to passengers and other customers. At this time of year, the railway is no different from other modes of transport in being affected by extreme weather, including snow and ice, so attention always turns to the resilience of the network in the face of the elements.
Although increased resilience comes from tackling a number of factors, the ORR’s Rail Safety Directorate (RSD) has been working to ensure that Network Rail has a better understanding of the risk profile of engineering assets across the network. Understanding the condition of assets is fundamental to mitigating risk and achieving an efficient response when things go wrong; we’ve pressed Network Rail on this point and have taken action to ensure focused examination of the structures and earthworks that make up its civils assets.
The scale of the network brings home the levels of risk; there are 32,000km of track with some 8,000km of cuttings and 9,300km of embankments. The challenge is further heightened by the age and variable engineering design standards of the assets; in some cases the details of construction are lost, leaving Network Rail with only a basic understanding of asset condition, and therefore its resilience. And the increasing demands on the network must also be considered – the first quarter of 2015-16 saw passenger journeys up 4.7% on the same period the year before, to 412.5 million – so the potential impact of an asset failure through flooding or landslip are ever higher.
Ultimately, though, the assets are always vulnerable to varying conditions, particularly rainfall. The regulator has a significant role to play to ensure that risks from asset failure at a time of more frequent extreme weather are addressed to ensure improved resilience and management of safety risk, and therefore performance. Part of that is accepting the need to prioritise which assets are improved – not every embankment can be brought up to modern standards overnight – but as a series of landslides caused by severe weather in 2012 show, getting the prioritisation wrong can be a significant precursor to a significant failure of resilience.
In boosting resilience, ORR has a number of levers available across its functions – issuing safety enforcement notices as well as using the economic regulatory escalator to progress concerns – so the organisation can choose a tool which is proportionate to the issue.
Since 2012, although weather has been more benign, our approach has contributed to the fact that, though earthworks failures have still occurred, there have been no further derailments.
However, boosting resilience is an ongoing process and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. ORR as regulator is well placed to co-ordinate and address concerns from across the industry and help communicate them to Network Rail – we’ll continue to make the case that proper understanding of asset condition is crucial in forecasting the impact of the weather.