IRSE News 138 Oct 08.pdf

TECHNICAL
IRSE
Delivering a safe, workable and sustainable railway
by Francis How 1 , Dr Robert Davis 2 , Professor Ali Hessami 3
Paper to be read in London on 8 October 2008.
1. Technical Director, Railway Industry Association
2. Director, Technical Programme Delivery Ltd.
3. Director, Vega Systems Ltd.
The railway industry in Great Britain, and the signal engineering community in particular, has always focused on maintaining and
improving safety. In recent years the achievement of ever higher standards of safety has dominated engineering effort as never before.
The authors of this paper have contributed to shaping the current railway safety regime in the UK through signalling and
telecommunications standards, the ‘Yellow Book’ (Engineering Safety Management, published by the Railway Safety and Standards
Board) and CENELEC standards, and by their involvement in systems review panels and the management of projects and products.
They believe that the time is right for a broader and renewed focus on how system safety is managed within the context of a more
balanced approach to the delivery of societal benefits by railways.
WHAT DO THE RAILWAYS’
CUSTOMERS WANT?
The title of this paper suggests a breadth
which could easily fill a book or a doctoral
thesis, particularly given the topicality and
range of subject matter embraced by the
term sustainability. In a paper though we
can do no more than touch upon the
subject matter.
So within the limitations of a short
paper, what are we endeavouring to cover?
As signal engineers our focus has
traditionally been largely on maintaining
and improving safety. With the legacy of
some serious signalling-related accidents
on the main line railway in Great Britain
over the past thirty years, our engineering
effort has been dominated by the drive to
achieve ever higher standards of safety, at
great cost and sometimes to the exclusion
of all else.
But users and would-be users of our
railways take safety for granted. In
Maslow’s hierarchical Triangle of Needs,
safety and security are the most basic
human requirements, and in practice
railway users have a whole range of other
needs upon which their attention is more
immediately focused when they make use
of the railway network. Simply providing a
signalling system which is safe is not
enough, and in reality it never has been.
The demand on signal and
telecommunications engineers now to
provide safe, reliable, fast, cost-effective,
energy efficient, capacity-optimising,
intelligent, information-rich systems has
never been more challenging.
The technology we now use and the
way that we use it is rapidly blurring the
distinction between signalling, communications,
control and information systems.
To deliver the systems of the future
inevitably means challenging some of the
accepted wisdom of the past, doing some
things differently in future, and doing
different things as well.
However before thinking about our role
in the industry and the systems that we
provide it is instructive to think about the
expectations of customers who use, or
might use, the railway. If we consider rail
passengers, the following needs might be
expressed, in no particular order:
Trains should be on time (really on time,
not to within 10 or 15 minutes of time -
and no cancellations);
Train travel should offer good value for
money;
End-to-end journey times should be
comparable with other modes of
transport, or better;
Trains should provide levels of comfort
and facilities appropriate for the length
of journey (e.g. adequate seating,
toilets, catering facilities, Wi-Fi, at-seat
power points);
Journeys should be incident free (the
end-to-end journey experience should
be as advertised, almost to the point of
being boringly stress-free);
Interchange between trains and with
other transport modes should be easy
(particularly for those with young children,
the elderly, those with luggage etc.);
The railway should be accessible, in the
sense that a traveller who rarely uses
the railway should not require intimate
knowledge of how it works when
planning or actually making the journey;
Dependable and helpful information
should be available before and during
the journey which even infrequent
travellers can understand;
Stations should be pleasant and
welcoming with friendly, knowledgeable
and polite staff;
There should be a feeling of security
(e.g. against the unwanted attention of
other passengers, disorderly behaviour
or threat of terrorism);
Train services should be regular and
operate seven days a week more or less
without interruption for engineering
work.
Companies wishing to make use of the
railways for moving freight have their own
requirements, some of which are similar to
those of passengers and some distinct.
People do not generally choose trains in
preference to other modes for reasons of:
safety
(most people do not think about the
relative safety of different transport
modes);
environmental protection
(despite the interest in the environment,
travel decisions are rarely made on the
basis of carbon emissions, energy
efficiency etc.);
cost advantage
(in Great Britain at least, although
with rises in fuel prices this may be
changing).
2
Issue 138 October 2008
IRSE
NEWS