a short stretch of plain track
2,500 metres or so of complete track replacement is not “a short stretch”.
No roads shut for 10 miles around the crash site then!
Neither were there at Wickford. Why are you making things up?
Too many people paid vast sums today to actually do nothing,with an army of nobodies under them with lanyards round their necks,diversity and equality brochures in their hands complete with the mandatory tick box forms of course, fumbling around doing nothing constructive,and whenever we have a minor incident on the railway they are clueless as to what to do because nobody has actually taught them anything useful.What hope have we got if it takes them 12 months to plan a response?
Gosh you really are an angry person aren’t you. Where has the 12 months come from?
What follows now is from my experience of attending collision sites in a professional capacity (as opposed to ‘have a look’) and also my experience of renewing infrastructure, including the recovery of incident sites, over the past 30 years+
For the record, from the official accident report, at Colwich the damage was 3 overhead line structures destroyed plus two damaged, which in turn brought down 3 miles of OLE (as in 3 track miles in total between the WCML proper and the branch). The switch diamonds were completely destroyed, but being a head on collision the wreckage (and thus track damage) was contained to a relatively small area in the vicinity of the junction itself. The report confirms 180 yards (approx 160 metres) of “plain CWR” had to be replaced; the report does not indicate if this was the rails only or all of the track, but even if it was all the track, ie rail, sleepers and ballast, that is about 6-7% of the track damage at Wickford. A couple of points machines needed replacement and some other signaling cables and a small stretch of troughing route.
In terms of reinstatement, the breakdown cranes had the vehicles off about 27 hours after the collision occurred. Some were cut up in situ as they were so badly damaged, those that could be recovered were craned off to the field beside the line; easy to do as all the OLE was already out the way. Absolutely commendable, although of course back then there were lots more derailments and collisions to deal with, with more kit and people around to deal with them. And for Colwich there hadn’t been a major derailment the previous day that had already taken many of the specialist resources. Unlike Wickford. Finally there was no ‘site sterilisation’ by the police or RAIB, as we have today, back then.
From that point, it took
three days to replace the 160 metres of track, put back up 3 miles of OLE, plain line the switch diamond and repair the signalling cables. I would happily back the infrastructure teams today to do that work in that time. It then took another
13 days to replace the switch diamond and restore the full infrastructure, enabling the normal timetables service to resume.
Now compare to Wickford.
The site was under RAIB jurisdiction for about 24 hours (remarkably quick, but I guess there wasn’t much to investigate at the site itself). Cranes could not be used to rerail - with remarkable misfortune the derailed vehicle came to a stand right under a footbridge, and the OLE was still up, and in any event the cranes were down at Lewes. So the recovery team had to temporarily fix the train in situ (it being badly damaged underneath), rerail it, by jacking, then drag it very very carefully (to avoid further derailment and damage) to a place it could be more easily recovered. During the rerailing operation the train sustained further damage (no fault of the recovery team), and more temporary repairs had to be made to make the train sufficiently fit to move. This was all done with commendable speed, and with teams working round the clock, presumably with lots of gaffer tape and cable ties it took two days. Of course they could have cut the thing up in situ, but that seems rather a waste of a serviceable £7m unit.
And then the repairs to the infrastructure could begin, around a mile and a half of track, overhead line masts, lots of signalling cables including fibre optics, TPWS and AWS kit, cable route and bonding.
Unlike at Colwich where the track repairs on the slow line were the sort of job where all the materials and kit needed could be comfortably brought in on one train, Wickford was a massive job. It needed delivery of 24 x 216m rails. 2 or 3 trains of flat beds just to take the old track away. Another couple to deliver nearly 3,500 sleepers. Then the small matter of about 8,000 tonnes of fresh ballast in and a similar amount of spoil out. That’s another 8-10 trains in my experience of doing these jobs.
This amount of material isn’t on the shelf waiting at ‘Tracks “R” Us‘; the trains have to be found, loaded, resourced (drivers, shunters, etc., most of whom are working commercial freight trains in the week), and planned and got to site through the normal timetable, in the correct sequence, loaded the correct way, with all the right plant there. They come from Whitemoor in north Cambridgeshire. The first train was the rail delivery train, and that arrived with the 5000metres plus of rail the day after the incident train was removed. The other trains arrived in the correct sequence shortly afterwards as per the schedule worked up by the infrastructure recovery team.
The mile and a half of track track was fully replaced within 7 days of having access to the infrastructure, (6 days of starting work), including all welding and stressing done, concurrently with replacing the OLE masts, replacing numerous signalling cables, AWS and TPWS kit, cable troughing, full testing, and proving. I have delivered jobs of a similar scale before in that sort of time - having had them planned a year or more out with detailed work schedules built and tested months in advance. The recovery team here had 72 hours notice. There is no way the recovery would have been any quicker had this happened in 1986, save for the 1 day of RAIB site supremacy.
Now, you might want to have a good think about the facts presented above, and reconsider what you’ve said about the people who work in these teams.
Alternatively you might not. In which case you could pop down to Romford Depot and give your views to some of the people involved, and see what they say back. Personally I give you one chance in three of making it out with a full complement of teeth and functioning limbs.
