Why SPAD risk is still as relevant as ever

Featured story06 February 2023

In the ongoing battle against SPADs there are many tools at your disposal. But navigating them all can be tough. Here we provide support to help you tackle this critical issue.

You can’t have enough spanners. The railway has developed several tools to help tackle SPADs and SPAD risk over the years. From Automatic Train Control on the Great Western in the Edwardian era, to the Automatic Warning System of the 1950s, to the Train Protection and Warning System, and today’s European Rail Traffic Management System. The important thing to remember, though, is that all have played their part in helping us cut SPADs to a level that could once have only been dreamed about.

For more information
Read about these systems in our Train Protection Digest.

View digest

Yet SPADs still come readily to mind when we think of the principal causes of train accidents – even though there has not been a fatal accident resulting from a SPAD since Ladbroke Grove in 1999. Yet it was that accident – and the devastation it caused, the lives it ruined – that led to much mitigation effort to try to stop it happening again. And that – in an industry like ours, in which staff retire, move on, or move in from other industries – is something we can’t afford to let slide.

You only have to look at RAIB’s report on the incident at Sileby, where a rail grinder passed a signal at danger and was involved in a near miss to know that today’s near miss could be tomorrow’s collision.

With this kind of thinking in mind, in 2020, Network Rail commissioned a comprehensive review of SPADs in the Southern region, led by Mike Carr of RSRSL, an industry expert on SPAD management. The data was analysed to understand the most likely precursors of SPAD and how drivers could help prevent them. It revealed some interesting facts about SPADs in the Southern region. For example, 91% of the SPADs identified in the review were linked to driver error. Common causes included ‘failure to check signal aspect’ and ‘reading the wrong signal’. Similarly, more than half of the incidents took place within the first 5 and final 5 miles of the journey.

What all this work did was – in effect – give us a load of new spanners to put in our SPAD toolbox.

The aim of the SPAD toolbox is to share these findings to a wider audience to increase a driver’s understanding and awareness of some of these trends and causes of SPADs, and to signpost some resources to help drivers to develop their own strategies to help manage SPAD risk.

The toolbox is organised into sections with different themes so that drivers can understand the risks and ways to help manage them for each theme. We also signpost you to further resources that can help you. The themes covered are:

the first and final five miles of each journey
cognitive underload
the influence of the time of day
empty coaching stock (ECS) trains
precursors to SPADs and the importance of reporting events
expectation bias
focus on freight

For more information
Learn more about the SPAD Toolbox.

View page

We hope you and your colleagues find this useful, but to maximise the use of the SPAD toolbox, we need greater collaboration across the industry regarding the input of quality SMIS data.

You can also read more about SPAD causes in our deep dive report, which looked at the causes of the SPAD spike seen in Periods 5 and 6 2022/23.

Haven’t found what you’re looking for?

Get in touch with our expert for more information.

Customer Portal

https://customer-portal.rssb.co.uk