Thursday, January 08, 2009

Falling down around our ears

Anyone with a modicum of interest in public transport in the UK cannot have failed to have noticed the string of problems that have affected the West Coast Main Line over the last few days.

Problems have included:

Now, the first of these incidents was obviously a tragic accident, but the rest do seem to call into question the nature of engineering work and/ or maintenance of the West Coast Main Line infrastructure.

According to reports, Network Rail have set up a major enquiry into the events of this week. That is good to note - in my line of work a Post Incident Review would be instigated for events that would have a far smaller operational or financial cost.

I do not know what staff turnover is like within either Network Rail or its subcontractors, but I do wonder whether the person who has trained people how to tie up the power cables actually knows how to do it?

1 comment:

James (UK) said...

Indeed... bit like "the blind leading the blind"...

Doesn't it make you wonder that we are supposed to be a so-called "1st World country" and yet somewhere like India, deemed a "third World" country seems able to move millions of people around by train every day with little porblem...?

Do you think it's all the "red tape" we have now with regard to people actually "doing" anything? A has to ask B, who has to clear it through C, but only after D has had a meeting with E and F about it etc etc etc.