No one wants to listen, until it’s too late
In the last few days I've been contacted by frustrated drivers who say there is a broken distant signal that relates to a home signal that protects a junction. The distant signal has been “stuck on yellow” for nine months – following a lightening strike – with one driver describing it as an “accident waiting to happen”. A fault report has been raised, so I'm told, but there appears to be no urgency to fix it. The implication being that it has 'failed safe' by displaying the most restrictive aspect, so nothing can go wrong. History, however, tells a different story – the rule book being written in the blood of railway staff and passengers.
The line joining the junction in question is relatively little used, so 9/10 a driver on the main receives a yellow at the distant and a green at the home – this being described by some who regularly drive over the route as a “SPAD trap”. It's convenient for some to pass the buck onto drivers, but life isn't that simple. In the six years in the lead up to the Ladbroke Grove crash, there were 67 SPADs on the approach to Paddington, plus six SPADs at signal SN109 – the signal at the centre of the accident. To this day, there are 'problem' signals across the network with higher than average SPADs. No one sensible can believe that it's all about drivers – questions need to be asked about layout design and signal sighting.
If there is, and I hope there isn't, ever a collision at the junction with the faulty distant signal, how will any investigation view the fact that a signal has been faulty for a prolonged period? I doubt if it will look on things very kindly, nor I suspect will it be sympathetic to any organisation that tried to blame the driver – a 'look over there' attitude will only take one so far before people realise that they should be looking closer to home. More seriously, how will such revelations comfort family members, whose relative died?
In a wider context, it is hard not to believe that the faulty distant signal is symptomatic of a wider problem regarding infrastructure maintenance. Look at the number of landslips, temporary speed restrictions and broken rails that plague the network.
Staff feel gagged – hence why they contact journalists such as myself to raise their fears – by strict social media policies, but that creates an atmosphere of fear. For example, during the recent RMT strikes a hastily trained up contingency train manager – who was normally a desk bound manager – repeatedly attempted to dispatch a train (giving the driver two on the buzzer) against a red signal. The driver lost patience and left the cab to ask the train manager “What the fuck do you think you are doing?”. When I approached the train operator for a comment, it refused to deny the incident happened and accused staff of “gossiping”. How can we expect operational staff to feel safe in raising safety concerns, when they are haughtily dismissed as “gossips”?
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