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The fight back against unrealistic safety demands has started
On 8 March the train operating companies and the Rolling Stock Companies were due to put in their submission for an exemption under the Railways (Safety) Act 1999. The exemption would replace the requirement to withdraw Mk 1 stock from service after 31 December this year, unless it was fitted with some form of anti-over-ride device, by substituting other safety measures.
When March came with only 25 sets of cup & cone parts ordered and nothing happening in the depots, it was clear that anti-override was off the agenda. Equally, it was now clear that the HMRI's beloved cup & cone had proved a total failure. It provided fewer safety benefits than predicted, increased other risks for travellers and workforce and saved only 0.5 equivalent fatalities a year.
When this column last reported on the subject, the big problem was that for cup & cone to work as advertised, sort of, the inter-unit gangways and their buffers had to be removed. This was desirable anyway since walking between cars over a coupler designed to sheer under higher than nominal forces could be a bit twitch making
On top of which, there were associated safety issues to do the inability to distribute passengers along eight and 12 car trains to reduced overcrowding. So the ROSCO cup & cone team did some more work and came up with a means of keeping the gangways operational.
This was fine, but there was still the risk of doing the splits should the sheer out coupler let go under you. The modification also means more work under the train when units couple up, where the lack of buffers could be a bit twitch-making too.
So if cup and cone is ineffective and dangerous, what's the solution? Simple, stop Mk 1 units running into other in the first place.
And how do you do that in a way that produces a credible exemption under the Railway (Safety) Regulations? Easy. Promise to fit all Mk 1 stock due to remain in service after 31 December this year – which pretty well means all Mk 1 stock - with the Train Protection & Warning System.
So the exemption is being sought on the basis that TPWS fitment will be completed by the 31 December deadline. Of course it's not that simple. You have to make a case for the exemption, which occupies a document a good inch thick. And you have to support your arguments, which takes up another foot of bumph. But it does look as if the industry has played the HMRI at its own game.
Hopefully, if an exemption is granted, and if it isn't it is already too late to cup & cone all the Mk 1 fleet, one of the more extreme examples of the HSE's irrational approach to rail safety will have passed into history.
Cup & Cone was, of course, very much the baby of former Chief Inspecting Officer Vic Coleman. At his valedictory appearance in the post in December last year, Vic was unrepentant and defended the original decision. But he added ‘if the industry finds that there is information we didn't have at the time, if it (fitment of cup & cone) proves to be impossible, if the enormous deadlines are coming, then it can make a presentation. But I can't help feeling that the sympathy level – however good the analysis – the sympathy level of having left it until 12 months from the deadline before actually coming to a conclusion about the work that's needed … is not likely I think to fill the HSC with that degree of confidence nor indeed the … public'.
Clearly Vic still felt bitter about the industry's lack of action of Mk 1 crashworthiness which was why the HSE commissioned the development of cup & cone. ‘I personally feel quite vehement about this because £1.5m of the HSE's scarce budget, which was a whole third of our annual budget a few years ago, went into developing cup and cone because nobody else would do it. We were looking for industry to seize this challenge. We didn't get that, we had to act'.
Still, I suppose in the overall scheme of things a couple of million down the tubes on an ill thought out system that didn't work very well, is neither here nor there. Come to think of it, that could describe HMRI under the HSC.