Comment
Railway’s problems require immediate attention
rail@bauermedia.co.uk @RAIL
I watched from afar the problems at Paddington in early December, when fallen overhead lines left passengers and trains stranded, almost within sight of the Great Western Railway’s London terminus.
It’s clear that all is not well on Brunel’s old line - once so effectively run by Felix Pole, who coincidentally received a knighthood for his railway work 100 years ago.
Those stranded trains came only a few days after the Office of Rail and Road announced an investigation into poor performance across Network Rail’s Wales and Western Region. A few days later, Wales and Western Region Managing Director Michelle Handforth resigned.
One of the stranded passengers was Handforth’s boss, NR Chief Executive Andrew Haines. Writing about the events of that evening, he said: “For once I had the pain of experiencing [disruption] at first hand, both as a customer and as a colleague looking to support others in a testing circumstance. It wasn’t pleasant and I had the benefit of being with a great crew on a train with auxiliary power.”
He then added: “We failed as a system. Too many individual actors seeing risk from their own perspective meant it was harder than it should have been to get things done whilst maintaining safety.”
It’s worth delving a little into that statement. Almost all of those stranded passengers doubtless viewed the railway as the railway. Whether they were travelling on an Elizabeth line Class 345 or a Great Western Railway IET, they will have looked to the railway to get them on their way.
And few of them will have known or cared that the fallen power line and the tracks are Network Rail’s responsibility.
At face value, it’s easy to blame fragmentation for the evening’s problems. But even within a unified British Rail there were boundaries. Separate departments managed track, rolling stock and operations. There has always been tension between them, but they had to work together to deliver their service to passengers - just as today’s separate companies must work together.
It’s at times like this when managers earn their money. It’s not easy to plan the recovery of several stranded trains. It’s not easy to evacuate hundreds of passengers from those trains. But as Haines notes: “Multiple self-evacuations, because of the pace at which we were able to move or even access trains, cannot be regarded as good practice.”
It’s not the first time that passengers have taken themselves off trains, particularly when they’ve been stuck for hours with no toilets. The Rail Accident Investigation Branch looked at this back in 2018, after an incident at Lewisham in which seven trains became stuck after one struggled to draw power from the third-rail because of ice.
