Headbolt Lane to Kirkby not electrified due to "safety concerns" ?

[Justin Smith]

I was being very pessimistic on the costs of the batteries.

Bearing ion mind the extortionate cost of anything to do with railways (civil as well as mechanical engineering) I would bet the cost was more than you surmised. Just the inflexibility of having to use a separate sub class of trains on that route would make it a non starter for me, in a sensible world......

 

[TurboMan]

That hasn't actually answered the question though, how many people a year are killed because of the third rail system ?

That's not how risk management works. You don't wait for people to die before doing something.

 

[mikeb42]

That's not how risk management works. You don't wait for people to die before doing something.

Surely it does though? The very first thing you need to do to justify some policy change is to quantify the cost per life prolonged. You can't do that without knowing or at least estimating the a priori fatality probability. Fail to do this and you fail to identify all the other things you could do with your finite resources that would prolong more lives overall.

Presumably a proper cost-benefit ratio analysis has been done and is buried somewhere in that report.

Personally (and professionally) I'm highly sceptical of a lot of these as they frequently entirely fail to account for all the costs of doing, or not doing things that get externalised into the wider societal system but outside whichever industry they directly relate to. The deranged way that roadworks are mostly now carried out on the UK trunk network being a case in point, but not really one for discussion here.

 

[Djgr]

Surely it does though? The very first thing you need to do to justify some policy change is to quantify the cost per life prolonged. You can't do that without knowing or at least estimating the a priori fatality probability. Fail to do this and you fail to identify all the other things you could do with your finite resources that would prolong more lives overall.

Presumably a proper cost-benefit ratio analysis has been done and is buried somewhere in that report.

Personally (and professionally) I'm highly sceptical of a lot of these as they frequently entirely fail to account for all the costs of doing, or not doing things that get externalised into the wider societal system but outside whichever industry they directly relate to. The deranged way that roadworks are mostly now carried out on the UK trunk network being a case in point, but not really one for discussion here.

Agreed. You can't develop a risk management strategy without prior quantification of the risk.

 

[TurboMan]

Surely it does though? The very first thing you need to do to justify some policy change is to quantify the cost per life prolonged. You can't do that without knowing or at least estimating the a priori fatality probability. Fail to do this and you fail to identify all the other things you could do with your finite resources that would prolong more lives overall.

Presumably a proper cost-benefit ratio analysis has been done and is buried somewhere in that report.

I agree; the point I was making is that all of what you suggest should be done proactively, using the usual risk assessment calculation of likelihood x consequence. As you say, this quite often has to be an estimate, because it's not acceptable to wait until you have some solid data on the number of fatalities and weighted serious injuries, by recording the number of people actually being killed or seriously injured.

 

[Justin Smith]

That's not how risk management works. You don't wait for people to die before doing something.

So does anyone actually know how many people have been killed by third rail systems per year ?
1 ?
2 ?
10 ?
20 ?

There’s a footnote in the ORR policy document linked earlier that says that despite the 3rd rail network being half the size of the AC network it is responsible for 8 times more fatalities/injuries according to the RSSB

Where do they get those stats from ?
And what is their definition of "responsible for" ?

I agree; the point I was making is that all of what you suggest should be done proactively, using the usual risk assessment calculation of likelihood x consequence. As you say, this quite often has to be an estimate, because it's not acceptable to wait until you have some solid data on the number of fatalities and weighted serious injuries, by recording the number of people actually being killed or seriously injured.

How can they possibly make an accurate objective estimate of them ?

>>it's not acceptable to wait until you have some solid data on the number of fatalities and weighted serious injuries, by recording the number of people actually being killed or seriously injured.<<

Well we do not have to do that here because we have getting on for 100 years worth of experience of third rail systems !

 

[zwk500]

So does anyone actually know how many people have been killed by third rail systems per year ?

How many would you consider an acceptable sacrifice?

 

[takno]

How many would you consider an acceptable sacrifice?

That's a rather moot question if the answer is zero, but it's also a completely unreasonably confrontational view of the topic. If electrification means that rail operations will emit less deadly pollutants and that more users can be brought out of their unsafe and polluting cars onto the much-safer railways, and third rail electrification can be achieved at significantly lower long-term cost than overhead or batteries, then it's quite likely that third rail electrification will save lives.

 

[jfowkes]

Where do they get those stats from ?
And what is their definition of "responsible for" ?

The footnote in the ORR document is, in full:

This is borne out by data from RSSB’s safety risk model – despite the legacy network being only half the size of the AC network (4400km compared to 8200km), it contributes almost eight times more (in terms of fatalities and weighted injuries per year) to overall risks on the railway. See FWI comparative data for OLE / conductor rail / non-electrified: Network Rail Electrical Power Asset Policy December 2012 (Table 2.1, page 52).

I cannot find the "Network Rail Electrical Power Asset Policy" document this refers to

 

[Dr Hoo]

How many would you consider an acceptable sacrifice?

As I have done before from time to time, can I assure people that attending the Coroner’s Inquest on a nine-year-old schoolboy who got onto a third rail line through a hole in the fence made by rail staff to create a shortcut to a depot is an awful experience. There is NO ‘acceptable sacrifice’ in my view.
Seeing an experienced colleague electrocuted right next to me was not acceptable either.

 

[WAO]

The risk analysis is fundamentally flawed in my opinion.

Third rail lines are in more populous areas, often in high crime areas where trespassing would be expected, unlike the long, rural ac intercity lines.

Secondly, the railway is intrinsically hazardous because of its high energy levels; mostly these are kinetic but some are electrical. The video on-line of an Indian express hitting a sheep (don't watch it!) shows how much greater danger kinetic or movement energy is than electrical energy, as many electrocution incidents are injurious rather than fatal. Indeed the argument can be made that 750Vdc causes fewer fatalities per contact than 25kVac.

Thirdly, electrical safety regulation previously specifically exempted the railway from general H&S rules. The current inclusion is particularly reprehensible in that it simply adopts European standards for no UK scientific reason (because BR/NR couldn't show where its previous standards came from.)

That is not to say that Headbolt Lane's batteries are a bad idea. A successful trial will open the way to Merseyrail (and others) being able to operate out of area along lines that would not see electrification however slack the rules. What is disgraceful is the concrete block and the misaligned, differing levels - there are actually two terminal stations; HBL HL and HBL LL, that are unlikely ever to be joined economically.

The optimum approach for dc lines in my view would be to convert Merseyrail to ac, with batteries in confined spots such as the tunnels and to allow completion of the few internal SR dc electrifications, with conversion of the SW main line beyond Pirbright Jn to ac. There should also be improved fencing/protection etc. This would be a better, safer railway but it will not come to pass.

WAO

 

[Wolfie]

Apologies if this has been asked before but I put the subject into the and a thread on this subject did not come up !

I was reading article on the new class 777s in both the current Railway Magazine and the current Milepost (the journal of the Railway Performance Society) and they both stated that the recent extension to the new Headbolt Lane station could not be electrified because of "safety considerations". In fact it was even questioned whether any more third rail electrification would be permitted for the same reason !
It was also speculated that this extreme H&S approach was due to the fact that, unlike BR, the safety authorities have no direct responsibility for income and expenditure, (i.e. the practicalities - and costs - of said safety edicts are of no interest to them).

Can this really be true ?
Or was it simply a case of it was cheaper not to electrify that short section of line (as long as one forgets about the cost of the battery installations on the trains as well as restricted flexibility....)

Exactly the same issue which has blocked infill of third-rail islands down South.

 

[TheGrew]

I am generally of the opinion that whilst not electrifying 1300m of 3rd rail seems odd the longer-term view for the line should surely be OHLE as far as Wigan with a changeover occurring at Kirkby. Then as the 3rd rail equipment gets life expires moving the changeover further towards Sandhills or even through the tunnel if there is enough clearance (I know there isn't on the Wirral line but not sure on the Northern).

 

[jfowkes]

Third rail lines are in more populous areas, often in high crime areas where trespassing would be expected, unlike the long, rural ac intercity lines.

This is a valid part of the risk profile though. If there is something that is a danger to people, the probability of injuries and death scales with the number of at-risk people.

Secondly, the railway is intrinsically hazardous because of its high energy levels; mostly these are kinetic but some are electrical. The video on-line of an Indian express hitting a sheep (don't watch it!) shows how much greater danger kinetic or movement energy is than electrical energy, as many electrocution incidents are injurious rather than fatal.

True, but irrelevant. You don't stop considering one safety aspect because another part of the system is inherently dangerous.

Indeed the argument can be made that 750Vdc causes fewer fatalities per contact than 25kVac.

But the number of third-rail contacts is much higher. Risk analysis has to consider likelihood of occurrence as well as severity.

I think we can argue about whether the de-facto ban on third-rail is appropriate all certain circumstances, but the basic underlying methodology seems sounds to me.

 

[takno]

This is a valid part of the risk profile though. If there is something that is a danger to people, the probability of injuries and death scales with the number of at-risk people.

I think the point is that the UK's existing third rail lines are on average in much more populous areas than the UK's existing overhead lines. There will therefore be more people at risk, as you correctly note. This means that a direct numerical comparison of the number of incidents on third rail lines and overhead lines, or even a per km comparison, is unfair to the detriment of 3rd rail.

If you were going to apply a risk model to variously-proposed extensions, Kirby to Headbolt Lane isn't a particularly populous area, and the North Downs and Uxbridge routes are positively rural, so in all cases you should probably measure the risk as low and just plow on. Instead we appear to be making a blanket assessment based on what happens on the many miles of railway in urban and suburban south London.

 

[Snow1964]

As I have done before from time to time, can I assure people that attending the Coroner’s Inquest on a nine-year-old schoolboy who got onto a third rail line through a hole in the fence made by rail staff to create a shortcut to a depot is an awful experience.

But basing a risk assessment on someone deliberately removing or tampering with a safety scheme is also bad practice. It undermines principle that things should be made as safe as practical, but not stopped.

When I worked at BP, although I was office based (and nowhere near a rig, or refinery) still had to watch the safety videos, and sign that tampering or interfering with anything that was safety related would be instant dismissal. And had to redo the safety videos every year.

Clearly the rail staff you refer to have sabotaged short electric extensions by their actions. So you are basically saying rail staff have caused the ban

 

[mikeb42]

As I have done before from time to time, can I assure people that attending the Coroner’s Inquest on a nine-year-old schoolboy who got onto a third rail line through a hole in the fence made by rail staff to create a shortcut to a depot is an awful experience. There is NO ‘acceptable sacrifice’ in my view.
Seeing an experienced colleague electrocuted right next to me was not acceptable either.

I'm sure it was - and no snide tone or anything like that is intended in case it reads that way. The details of what happens when someone gets a few 10s of kV at 50Hz across their body in a live substation is my tangential familiarity with this sort of thing...

Everything to do with safety always boils down to (hopefully correctly) choosing the least-worst option, in the round, right? There will always be residual risk, even if we were to bankrupt the nation trying to eradicate just one problem, let alone all of them.

Someone has the professional obligation to draw a line somewhere and make these decisions for the greater good. It absolutely does involve putting a price on a life - thereby implicitly determining a residual casualty rate, uncomfortable truth though that may be. It is their professional duty to do exactly that. When they do it correctly, overall they reduce the sum of human misery in the real imperfect resource-constrained world. Declining to label the residual risk as "acceptable sacrifice" is just adjusting semantics to make ourselves feel better about the implacable nature of reality.

 

[Dr Hoo]

But basing a risk assessment on someone deliberately removing or tampering with a safety scheme is also bad practice. It undermines principle that things should be made as safe as practical, but not stopped.

When I worked at BP, although I was office based (and nowhere near a rig, or refinery) still had to watch the safety videos, and sign that tampering or interfering with anything that was safety related would be instant dismissal. And had to redo the safety videos every year.

Clearly the rail staff you refer to have sabotaged short electric extensions by their actions. So you are basically saying rail staff have caused the ban

I’m not sure that I would simply endorse your final paragraph as it stands but it was certainly the case that the incidents that I experienced and describe happened on BR in the mid-1980s so would inevitably be in the minds of ‘safety regulators’ when the Electricity Regulations were being drafted. The 1989 legislation covered all workplaces, not just railways though.

 

[Justin Smith]

How many would you consider an acceptable sacrifice?

That's a tendentious question in the extreme.
This is essentially a philosophical question, let me answer it like this.
Every year about 650,000 people die, 2,000 odd just on the roads.
Bearing in mind that all the low hanging fruit (H&S wise) has long since been picked, so we are now on the top most branches (i.e. the most expensive ones, in money and/or restrictions on our freedoms), pretty much nothing that only saves one life a year is worth doing.
I suppose that might be different if we all could potentially live forever, but we can't, and don't.

 

[yorkie]

Road deaths are considered considerably more acceptable than railway deaths.

Thousands of deaths on the roads isn't considered by society to be as troubling as even a handful of deaths on the rails.

I'm not saying that is right, but that is the reality, at least here in the UK. It may be different elsewhere.

Unfortunately I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this thread; we got off to a bad start, as there was no proper citation provided and the hyperbolic nature of some posts means we're getting sidetracked. There's also been a bit of speculation thrown in too

 

[Mordac]

Zero people have died due to the old standard clearances for 25kv wire, and yet that didn't stop the ORR from waving through those changes. Safetiyist bureocrats who have no incentive to consider anything but security and cover their own arses. They'll be rewarded for this with a string of gongs.

 

[Taunton]

The turning point for third rail really came with the Electricity at Work legislation in 1989, which came into effect in the very early 1990s. Essentially any conductor carrying lethal voltages has to be either insulated or out of reach. Conventional third rail on open line (I.e. not tunnel or inaccessible viaduct) clearly fails spectacularly at both tests.
Even BR realised that would effectively be no new third rail extensions. The bits for the Channel Tunnel related links and Merseyrail extensions to Chester and Ellesmere Port were already in hand and were allowed to continue but they were the last, over 30 years ago.

No, there was the Jubilee Line Extension in 1999, that was built and opened when this was supposedly in effect. Partly open air, and you can just hop down from the platforms. Not that anybody does, of course.

The new westbound Central Line platform at Stratford opened on the positive rail side. It's just a couple of feet from the platform edge.

 

[Bevan Price]

I was being very pessimistic on the costs of the batteries. It will have paid for itself in 1 year or so based on a £1.5m electrification cost and battery costs being the same.

It's likely the electrification cost may have been higher as it's £1-£1.5m per track KM.

It is not that simple. There is a finite limit to the number of times that batteries can be recharged before they need to be replaced. We will have to wait awhile until we know how the 777s batteries perform - but it will add "something" to the costs of battery operation.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

It is not that simple. There is a finite limit to the number of times that batteries can be recharged before they need to be replaced. We will have to wait awhile until we know how the 777s batteries perform - but it will add "something" to the costs of battery operation.

Most rail traction applications are using Lithium Titanate chemistry which is much more tolerant to repeated discharge-recharge cycles (c30k quoted) compared to Lithium Ion which mobile phones and laptop use. The downside is energy density is a third that of Lithium Ion so a big weight penalty but very capable at being fast charged often upto 10x rated output. Its also far more resilient to thermal runaway which needs to be a serious consideration in public transport given the almost unfightable conditions some of these lithium batteries have exhibited in buses.

 

[eldomtom2]

I have to agree that risk assessment of third rail installation is flawed in that it essentially considers anything that happens off railway property to be someone else's business, regardless of the status quo's impact on this. This is perhaps not a wise attitude to take in the age of global warming. That said, even if other factors were taken into account it could well be that third rail comes up short - but so far such factors have not been taken into account as far as I can tell.

Also, r.e. "acceptable sacrifices" - while this obviously sounds rather callous when put like that, it is frankly how the railways are run, and indeed how they must be run - for unless you completely eliminate the possibility of fatal accidents (an impossibility) you are inherently saying that a few deaths are acceptable sacrifices.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Zero people have died due to the old standard clearances for 25kv wire, and yet that didn't stop the ORR from waving through those changes. Safetiyist bureocrats who have no incentive to consider anything but security and cover their own arses. They'll be rewarded for this with a string of gongs.

(Noting that this is rather veering off third rails at Headbolt Lane.)

This is completely untrue. Quite a few people have been electrocuted after climbing over or dangling items over the 'old' bridge parapet standards. These have been raised for new work. Relatively recently there have been two significant incidents around Stevenage with persons 'getting into difficulties' on bridges over then ECML with the old height of parapet.

One of my first jobs in BR was helping out with the Midland Suburban Electrification from Moorgate/St Pancras to Bedford. It was a cause of sadness when, not long after energisation, a passenger who had just purchased a new carbon fibre fishing rod in Luton couldn't resist giving it a practice 'cast' from the platform with, I believe, fatal results. There may not have been so many people toting golfing umbrellas, selfie sticks and metallic helium balloons in those days but electricity will always take the most direct path.

Even on my own account, I well remember an occasion when I'd purchased two eight-foot lengths of rough sawn timber in Stechford (as you do) and carried it to the station in torrential rain and the catenary was 'buzzing' with the leakage. A Class 304 pulled in and the guard insisted that I put the timber in the brake van - just under the un-protected pantograph. In the nick of time we realised that it might not be advisable to jab the sodden articles against the pantograph frame!

I know that I've asked this before, without a clear answer, but I'm still in the dark as to what formal/legal process requires the ORR to 'approve'/wave through every standard produced by the independent RSSB's groups of cross-industry safety professionals.

 

[WAO]

True, but irrelevant. You don't stop considering one safety aspect because another part of the system is inherently dangerous.

True but risks should be treated similarly.

No new railways (or even small extensions) would ever now be built if equal risk aversion were applied.

It isn't.

WAO

 

[dosxuk]

That hasn't actually answered the question though, how many people a year are killed because of the third rail system ?

In which year? And how has this changed since H&S rules came into being?

It's all very well saying "we don't need any rules about xyz because nobody died this year" when the only reason nobody died is because of the existence of those rules.

Nobody has died because of door panels popping out of Boeing aircraft mid-flight in the last 10 years - doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules about making sure those door panels are securely fastened.

 

[Justin Smith]

In which year? And how has this changed since H&S rules came into being?

It's all very well saying "we don't need any rules about xyz because nobody died this year" when the only reason nobody died is because of the existence of those rules.

Nobody has died because of door panels popping out of Boeing aircraft mid-flight in the last 10 years - doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules about making sure those door panels are securely fastened.

That argument is not relevant because we have have third rail electrification for around 100 years, so what are the stats for, say, the last 10 years. Or in fact the 10 years before that ?

 

[Wolfie]

That argument is not relevant because we have have third rail electrification for around 100 years, so what are the stats for, say, the last 10 years. Or in fact the 10 years before that ?

We made massive use of asbestos in the past. Then we realised the risks, came up with safer alternatives and phased out its use.....

Just because something has been around a long time does not mean that it meets current standards. If it wasn't for the cost and disruption l'm sure that third rail would have been completely replaced.