Makes me wonder how a contractor can cause so much disruption to a major transport interchange like Birmingham New Street by making what would seem like a very basic error. Surely a survey was done to identify cabling? I hope there are no gas mains nearby
IT should be easy but then again it is not made easy, if that makes sense.
Firstly there are (were) cable route diagrams and details of the various surface and buried services.
Unfortunately Railtrack / Network Rail have reorganised that many times that a lot of records have been lost during transfers from one office to another, from one Zone/Territory to another. There is no will within NR to recreate these records.
The quiet policy adopted by NR of removing former BR people from their ranks has also resulted in an incredible loss of Corporate Memory, and the new burger bar managers and spotty faced Graduates have neither the knowledge nor the understanding of what they are dealing with, being simply concerned with playing around with virtual money. :roll:
A Competent Contractor will request details of all known services drawings and records, and when these are reported as lost will undertake site surveys to establish where these are. There are ways and means.
Unfortunately this does cost money, and usually NR refuse to pay for the necessary work that has to be done to establish where these services are, so the costs come out of our Contingency money.
A Contractor who is bidding a job cheap in order to win it, and Network Rail ALWAYS award to the cheapest bidder, will not have much if any contigency and these sorts of searches will have to come straight out of the bottom line if they are done. Generally the bottom line is thin anyway.
Network Rail Procedures as well as H&S Law require that before any ground is broken or any surface is pierced, it is scanned for the presence of cables and other services. Any live cables will thus be identified if this is done.
As an example in the differences in how the major Contractors operate, even on plain line renewals we still check for surface and buried services during the planning processs and run a CAT scan before the bucket breaks the ballast, even when this is out in the sticks.
Properly controlled and planned, no live cable should ever be struck, and in my Company to do so is an immediate disciplinary for those involved as they will not have complied with procedures.
One has to accept that NR have appropriate processes in place to take safety performance into account, however the continuing challenge we face is that of being undercut by others who maybe adopt shall we say, a less stringent, approach to safety processes than the major Infrastructure Contractors.
Good safety comes at a price, that is an inevitable fact of life. You cannot bid cheap unless you are cutting something somewhere, be it training, safety, salaries, PPE quality, or good quality staff.
As major Infrastructure Contractors we refuse to change our approach to safety and this will inevitably mean we will come in at a higher price. The quid pro quo is that we don't often create the massive losses that cable strikes can bring in terms of train performance. Sadly this counts for nothing at the tender stage.
Every single one of the major Infrastructure Contractors can give you an example of where they have lost a Contract on price, yet the final cost has been much greater and the quality of the work much worse than had the major Infrastructure Contractor been awarded the Contract in the first place.
Accountants however do not look at this, simply at whats on the table in front of them.
No trains at all out on the Leicester line. XC did themselves no favours taking ages to decide to run a Leicester - Nuneaton shuttle and then only running hourly.
. The Glasgow-Preston section seems to have fared particularly badly last week with lengthy delays. Let's hope my VT journey this morning fares better.
