2008 Q7 RISK ASSESSMENT OF SINGLE LINE WORKING

[PJW]

I've attempted this question

Please give some feedback
Mark

The question is worded re "modifying the railway"; hence I assume that there is must be some physical change. Indeed I'd interpret as some form of SIMBIDS or reduced capcity wrong direction signalling; I have difficulty with your interpretation that suggests purely procedural wrong line working. I suppose you are saying that the modification is the installation of the crossovers and so I'll go with it but perhaps am a little dubious and not really what I was expecting so your answer must win me over.

I don't think there is value in quoting so many names ans numbers; I'd be briefer and just state an NR environment; certainly don't tell me the standards that are not applicable (and always better to give their nomenclature than a reference number). Also I think you'll find that the Rule Book is a Railway Group Standard and so "owned" by all the members of that group, RSSB merely being the agency that is the "custodian".

I do like the tabular presentation which is both clear and demonstrates that you are familiar with the way risk assessments are often presented.
You have chosen to go further than was asked in categoriing severity, liklihood and risk but that is no bad thing and again demonstrates knowledge and experience. I don't think though that I'd have put numbers in; High / Medium / low would have been as far as I went. You also haven't explained what those numbers are and have left the examiner to assume / guess. Further it appears that you have ADDED severity to likelihood to get risk; to me you'd be losing some of the credit that you may otherwise have gained. You'd have been better rating the risk as Intolerable / Tolerable / Broadly Acceptable.

However rather than just launch into it, a short paragraph introducing it, defining terms and explaining how it addressed the question would have been more valuable than most of your initial one-liners.

You probably ought to have explained a bit more about your two sets of columns; it didn't help that the figures with the additional controls are sometimes not reduced from those with the existing control.

Look down your first column headed "hazard". A hazard is strictly "any situation that could contribute to an accident" and some of the entries seem to be the accident itself. Others are factors that may prevent the effectiveness of what could otherwise be a partial mitigation after the accident has happened.

It does seem very odd that a railway would bear the costs of these crossovers and yet really implement "only give authrity for use as last resort"- it surely must intend to use it on a reasoable number of occasions. If it really was to be quite rare then surely the existing crossover at A and just one at B would suffice- yes there is a further time penalty and additional riskl by needing to reverse a train between runnuing lines, but if it is hardly ever going to be used anyway.......

You have certainly considered both staff safety and operational safety as you were requested to do; so good.

I don't feel that your format gave you room for enough emphasis on the "describe any systems which may be provided" part of the question.

Certainly more here than you could do in 30 minutes.

Overall impression is certainly someone familiar with railways and the sort of things that are normally put in as risk assessments in various NR documents to keep the "safety parking wardens" happy. Not so convinced that it was a good answer to the actual question; it'd be a Pass I think as so much better than so much else that the examiner would see but you wouldn't do as well as I think you might have expected.

It'd be interesting to see if others concur with my view or think differently