Clearing up Waste material after Maintenance and Renewals

[Nicholas Lewis]

In which case why can’t the contract include removing surplus materials and leaving the site tidy, with suitable sanctions if they fail to comply.

Track renewals contracts specify recovery of all scrap material and that includes all rail offcuts. The rub though is its only over the section of the renewal. Also we would have to pay them extra to get any residual scrap in the cess or the four foot removed if maintenance couldn't do it.

 

[Farang]

Not crash barrier, and not a motorway, but on three occasions in the last three years utility contractors have left signage and road closure kit on my road after completing their jobs. The first two times I found a number to call for them to retrieve it. The third time I just took it all to the tip.

They left some in our garden!

 

[Lighteight123]

Preventing engineering handback will obviously delay the entire possession handback live for the operational railway.

I was referring to the handback of the project under PACE. I could have wrote that better to be fair.

Upon completion of the work, a representative of the maintenance organisation will inspect the work for any snags or defects. This will include scrap. These inspections are often completed a later date. Under the AMP process and PACE, the site still remains the responsibility of the contractor until the maintainer agrees there are no snags or defects.

I think there has historically been a bad attitude to scrap removal, especially of ‘smalls’ like clips and pads. In a lot of areas now, the maintainer will not sign they are happy with the work until all scrap is removed.

There are many ways to allow for scrap removal which aren’t within the posession. Including a further ‘scrapping out’ shift or positioning scrap where it can be collected without going on track, like at access points.

 

[mmh]

Those ballast bags are new ballast for use in maintenance. They will have been there for years, but they will get used at some point.

Codswallop. They'll remain there until the ballast they're sat on needs to be moved.

 

[Bald Rick]

Codswallop. They'll remain there until the ballast they're sat on needs to be moved.

We’ll see!

 

[Straus]

Absolutely, of having proper standards and ensuring they're adhered to.

I still don't accept that it's simply pragmatism led by cost and time considerations. There'll be next to no examples of it elsewhere in the civil engineering world, but it's the accepted status quo in the railway world. I expect it has been for decades, so I'm not saying this with any rose tinted specs.

When was the last time anyone saw discarded bits of crash barrier on a motorway verge after roadworks because it was quicker / cheaper than removing them? Motorway closures are also timed and overruns cause trouble - the railway is in no way unique on this.

Last week, M6 southbound near tebay

 

[Wawanesa]

Somewhere along the line, the railways seem to have lost the ethos of a tidy work place when it comes to trackside maintenance. I worked in industry and, like thousands of other companies, we worked to the ISO 9001 quality standard. If we had left stuff lying around like you see on the railways, our external auditors would have gone berserk. Of course it takes time and effort to clear up after a job but you have to factor that in when working out costings and timings beforehand.

 

[Straus]

Somewhere along the line, the railways seem to have lost the ethos of a tidy work place when it comes to trackside maintenance. I worked in industry and, like thousands of other companies, we worked to the ISO 9001 quality standard. If we had left stuff lying around like you see on the railways, our external auditors would have gone berserk. Of course it takes time and effort to clear up after a job but you have to factor that in when working out costings and timings beforehand.

Which industry? I've never worked in one as problematic for access as the railway.

With all the best planning in the world you can be scuppered by a late running train, a late isolation, mechanical issues with plant or other unforseen circumstances.

At that point, the priority is safety and then performance - removal of waste is lower down the pecking order unfortunately.

It's good to hear there's some correction of this through the amp process - in my opinion the amp process needs an overhaul to be more effective

 

[AM9]

Somewhere along the line, the railways seem to have lost the ethos of a tidy work place when it comes to trackside maintenance. I worked in industry and, like thousands of other companies, we worked to the ISO 9001 quality standard. If we had left stuff lying around like you see on the railways, our external auditors would have gone berserk. Of course it takes time and effort to clear up after a job but you have to factor that in when working out costings and timings beforehand.

Surely ISO 9001 is a quality standard that requires an organisation to operate according to its own set and approved procedures. Unless there are defined in-house standards about the stowage of materials lineside, there isn't any case to answer - providing the practice doesn't represent a safety hazard.

 

[Wawanesa]

Yes, that's very much how ISO 9001 was in the past however things have changed in more recent years to encompass a much broader range of criteria.

 

[GuyGibsonVC]

It is expensive to move and the access isn't there to do it.

You have identified £10,000 worth of scrap rail.

By the time you have paid for the staff to man the possession, paid for the possession, paid for the isolation, paid for the RRV, paid for the Machine Controller, paid for the Machine Operator to move it, paid for the haulage of the RRV, paid for the site visit to scope the job, paid for the possible road closure to on track the RRV and then paid for the haulage to take the scrap away, you may make a couple of hundred quid.

This is a nice to do task with Maintenance already cut to the bone.

 

[AM9]

Yes, that's very much how ISO 9001 was in the past however things have changed in more recent years to encompass a much broader range of criteria.

ISO9001 does not specify any operations that are outside an organisation's specified scope. Its purpose is to ensure that there are management structures that monitor and ensure the product/service is as claimed.
Unless the railway has specified what and how the removal of unused materials is done, the ISO9001 process doesn't impinge on what is actually done.

 

[Deepgreen]

Sadly, today's regime means that tidiness for its own sake is not valued. This applies to the wider world, not just the railway. For the railway, unless a messy site can be positively identified as a hazard or a likely potential hazard, there is no business case to tidy it. Ballast bags are everywhere - some may be used at some point or may become so contaminated by weather, etc., after a decade or more as to be considered unusable. Rails and other metal items may be left on site because they are replacements for future easy use, and they too may rust to the point where they are useless. Of course smaller items are easy targets for vandals, but large rails, switches, etc., are not, but they can gently rust away over many years and the point of leaving replacement rail on site as a quick job is completely negated.

The tidiness of the railway estate used to be a point of pride but it was also enabled by far, far less stringent work/safety procedures for p. way work, cheaper labour, etc. Those days are gone.

The same lack of tidiness is also now embedded into the railway's public spaces - stations are cluttered to the point that many signs obscure each other, equipment cables are drooping everywhere and a general feeling of messiness abounds.

The travelling public are now so used to a messy environment, on and off the railway, that there is almost certainly no case for changing the regime, unless a real safety problem exists.