Collision and derailment at Neville Hill Depot (13/11/2019)

[LowLevel]

Surely the main underlying issue is the driver has had 2 SPADs previously. For most drivers that would be career ending. Why did he keep his key after 2 SPADs? The question must come down to driver management and why said driver wasn't moved to alternative duties earlier once it became apparent he maybe didn't have the aptitude for train driving (not everyone does).

Two SPADs would be very unlikely to be career ending in my experience unless they were of a particularly serious nature. I know drivers out there with more than 2 SPADs on their record.

Your post suggests that you haven't properly read and digested the report and you should be aware that all operational incidents are treated as circumstantial. If they indicate that there is a more serious underlying issue then sure they can be terminal but to suggest a long serving driver with personal problems and two SPADs on their record is immediately unsuited to being a driver is quite a leap.

One SPAD or other irregularity could in theory end a career in certain circumstances. Equally, it is quite possible for several to occur without the same result.

 

[OneOffDave]

I've been given loads of wrong information on training courses before but generally work it out for myself and start doing it correctly.

This is where the training needs to be correct. While a competent user might be able to work out what they need to do to get the correct result, there may be stuff going on in the background that they aren't aware of that comes back to bite them later. This happened in the early days with the Airbus fly by wire systems. The crew would do a thing and what they wanted to happen would happen so they'd assume the plane was operating in mode 'A' as that's how things appeared. However the plane was in mode 'B' which was all good until they tried to do a thing that mode A permitted but mode B didn't. The crew would try to rectify this but were starting from the wrong reference point which made things much harder to resolve. It's a common thing in incident reports that once systems start behaving in a way people don't expect them to they become overly focused on solving the problem and lose surrounding situational awareness. They also tend to not be aware of the time they are spending with the problem.

I think they should part teach some people as part of the development process, let them try to do things on the system and then see if there are any 'interesting' outcomes that get missed by the people designing the systems as they understand the logic so would usually do things the 'right' way

 

[notlob.divad]

I think they should part teach some people as part of the development process, let them try to do things on the system and then see if there are any 'interesting' outcomes that get missed by the people designing the systems as they understand the logic so would usually do things the 'right' way

This is quite an apt point. With the (non-rail) systems I commission, it is quite common for everything to be working fine, and us have no problem, then an end user / operator, touches the system and strange things happen. We go back have no problem, they have problems... the root cause usually being they are doing something with the system that we didn't expect to be done. Usually because it wasn't in the specification to be used that way. However many people get bogged down in testing that their system behaves the way they want it too and thus create tests to check that. Really good testers create tests to try and break their system to prove that it doesn't.

Other examples include both Murphys 6th and 11th law.

 

[alexl92]

I know nothing about these systems but with all the new technology in the Class 8xx series, do they not have some kind of collision sensor similar to modern cars that would prevent them hitting an obstruction at low speed? Surely such a thing could be fitted for use when moving around depots etc , with the option of a manual override for situations like coupling?

 

[bengley]

I know nothing about these systems but with all the new technology in the Class 8xx series, do they not have some kind of collision sensor similar to modern cars that would prevent them hitting an obstruction at low speed? Surely such a thing could be fitted for use when moving around depots etc , with the option of a manual override for situations like coupling?

No trains (in the UK) have any system like that.

 

[GB]

I know nothing about these systems but with all the new technology in the Class 8xx series, do they not have some kind of collision sensor similar to modern cars that would prevent them hitting an obstruction at low speed? Surely such a thing could be fitted for use when moving around depots etc , with the option of a manual override for situations like coupling?

In a depot you would be getting false positives all the time and end up shutting the system off.

 

[alexl92]

No trains (in the UK) have any system like that.

In a depot you would be getting false positives all the time and end up shutting the system off.

Fair enough, cheers!