Hatfield Still Relevant
WHEN will politicians or shareholders realise that failure to maintain infrastructure adequately will ultimately re-sult in catastrophic failure? Reducing infrastructure maintenance spending, or worse still taking a maintenance holiday, will certainly save money in the short term, and the track or signalling will continue to function for a while. But, in time, problems will start to surface, and if nothing is done to correct them, it will not be long be-fore the rate of deterioration starts to accelerate to the point when major intervention is needed. Any savings will be dwarfed by the huge cost of returning the infrastructure to a state of good repair.
The amount of maintenance needed to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair should be determined by the volume, weight, and speed of the trains using it and the age and condition of the assets. If you want to sa-ve money, then cut the traffic to reduce wear and tear.
Britain’s fatal Hatfield derailment five years ago this month, caused by a shattered rail resulting from inadequate maintenance, quickly led to the implementation of 400 severe speed restrictions which brought the rail network to its knees, and ultimately resulted in the demise of the private infrastructure owner, Railtrack. Network Rail, Railtrack’s successor, has just been found guilty of health and safety offences associated with the Hatfield derailment in which four people died and more than 100 were injured. Network Rail seems to have learned the lesson, as its chairman, Mr Ian McAllister, commented after the trial: “Maintenance of the railway has fundamentally changed since the Hatfield tragedy. Since Network Rail took over, maintenance has been taken in-house rather than being outsourced, and we have changed our approach from a ‘find and fix’ maintenance regime to one of ‘predict and prevent’.”
Unfortunately, this dire warning of what can happen when infrastructure maintenance is neglected seems to have gone unheeded in Denmark, despite a derailment last year which occurred in very similar circumstances to those at Hatfield, but miraculously did not result in any deaths. This year, Denmark’s state-owned track authority, Banedanmark, has been forced to implement numerous speed restrictions across the network becau-se the track is in such poor condition causing major disruption to train services. (IRJ om danske sporproblemer)
Banedanmark managers were told by the transport ministry not to lobby for more money. This is outrageous. If the politicians fail to heed the warnings of railway managers, then the managers have a duty to go public. All too often, railways have suffered because managers failed to stand up to their political masters. As more than one manager remarked: politicians are only interested in investing in new projects. Even in neighbouring Sweden, where the track authority, Banverket, has received a huge increase in capital spending, Banverket regards itself as under funded for maintenance and may have to close lines as a result. Politicians are happy to be remembered for opening a new line or station, but do they also want to be remembered for being in charge when passengers are killed because the railway was not maintained properly?
Things came to a head last month when the CEO of Banedanmark announced his resignation because he no longer felt that he had the backing to continue. A former CEO of the passenger operator, Danish State Rail-ways, has been brought out of retirement to take the reigns at Banedanmark temporarily.
We now have a situation where the transport minister is blaming Banedanmark for failing to inform him prop-erly about what needs to be done. Members of parliament are blaming the transport minister for failing to scru-tinise Banedanmark sufficiently and control it adequately. The minister has instructed Banedanmark’s new CEO to produce within eight weeks a new report on what needs to be done. In any event, the railway has finally got the minister’s attention. Hopefully, an action plan can now be drawn up and implemented before there is an-other accident, the consequences of which may be far more serious.
David Briginshaw, Editor-in-chief International Railway Journal
