|
 It’s three in the morning and I can see the Forth Rail Bridge towering above me. It’s shrouded in mist and the moonlight reflects off the icy smooth railway lines.
I am here to meet a railway track inspector who has agreed to show me just how unsafe and dilapidated Britain’s railways have become. If his bosses knew he was meeting me, he would be sacked on the spot.
We walk across the Forth Bridge and within seconds I’m shocked to the core. What was once the icon of Britain’s railways, and a symbol of the nation’s engineering prowess, has become a ramshackle shadow of its former glory.
As soon as I see the state of the rails my heart sinks further. The track on the bridge is held in place by small wooden wedges and rusting steel clamps. Amazingly, some of the wooden wedges can be knocked out of place with a single flick of a finger, and the steel clamps are loose and heavily corroded. Thoughts of a fully-laden passenger train plunging 150 feet into the icy waters of the Firth of Forth fill my mind. If such an accident occurred, few would survive.
“To my trained eye it looks dangerous,” says the track inspector, who wishes to remain anonymous. He’s clearly sick and tired of seeing passengers lives put at what he considers unnecessary risk.
“I try not to travel on trains,” he says. “I don’t think we have a safe railway in this country.
The track inspector is just one of dozens of decent railway workers who helped me during a six month undercover documentary shown BBC1. During that time, I spent almost two months working as a track labourer for Network Rail.
My investigation discovered:
∑ Network Rail safety officers blithely ignoring perilous stretches of track.
∑ Track workers routinely working for only two or three hours a day – but getting paid for eight.
∑ Vital computer safety records ‘disappeared’ shortly after an accident.
∑ A Network Rail safety official peddling lost or stolen credit cards.
∑ A rail worker drunk on duty.
∑ Crass incompetence on an epic scale.
∑ Colossal wastage of taxpayers money.
Since privatisation the taxpayer has shovelled billions into the rail industry. The Government has pledged a further £22.5 billion over the next five years. Despite these colossal sums, only 85 per cent of trains manage to arrive on time. In practice, this means almost one train in six is late – costing the country hundreds of millions of pounds in lost productivity.
The industry is constantly pledging to improve punctuality but the outcome is pitiful to say the least. Over the past year, the improvement amounted to only 0.2 per cent.
In the wake of the Ladbroke Grove, Paddington and Potters Bar disasters, I decided to find out just why so many passengers were dying on our railways. I also wanted to discover what is happening to all of the billions being pumped into the industry – and why it seems to be having such a tiny positive effect.
My investigation began when I applied for a job working as a labourer at Network Rail’s Guildford depot. My two BBC colleagues Dave James and Pervez Khan began working for the rail contractor Ganymede at the same time.
Labouring on the railways may sound like a simple job, if physically demanding, but you are, in fact, on the front line of passenger safety. It is your job to maintain the tracks and ensure that they are always in tip-top condition. You are also expected to keep an eye out for deteriorating stretches of track. If you fail, then passengers could lose their lives. To reflect their importance, a typical trackman’s wage is around £14,000 per year.
With these concerns in mind, I studied hard during Network Rail’s three week training course. Then I was let loose on Britain’s railways – well, sort of. Because of a bureaucratic mix-up, I hadn’t received the necessary paperwork to allow me out on track. So I spent my first two days ‘working’ for Network Rail by sitting around, drinking endless cups of tea, and reading newspapers in the trackman’s mess.
I soon learnt that it was quite normal for new recruits to spend their first days, weeks – or even months - just sitting around doing nothing.
“Don’t worry,” said one of the managers on my second day of lazing around in the trackman’s mess. “You’ll never have to work more than about three hours a day.”
At the time I thought he was joking, but I was soon to learn that many of Network Rail’s trackmen seldom do even three hours work a day.
When I was finally allowed to work, it began with a two hour tea-break. Then we did an hour’s work before beginning yet another tea break. Shortly after, of course, it was time for lunch.
After a few days it dawned on me that Network Rail trackmen really do have a working life consisting largely of leisurely tea breaks – interspersed with the occasional spot of labour. I quickly learnt that it was wise not to rock the boat. Suggestions by me that we should perhaps re-paint some of the local country stations were met with incredulous stares and stony silences.
The trackmen sometimes went to bizarre lengths to avoid work. The most common tactic was to ‘forget’ a vital piece of equipment, such as a shovel. Work would then be cancelled or at least delayed for an hour or two.
One trackman, who clearly just wanted to get on and do the job, confided: “There’s always a cock up. It might only be a small cock up, it can be a big cock up, but there’s always a cock up. Every week, it’s the same.
“We came here one week and never even got out of the van!”
One day, when my colleagues were dozing in the summer sunshine, I suggested to my foreman that perhaps we should go back to the depot early.
“You can’t go back to the depot,” he said. “You never go back early.
“I suppose the boss might shoot me,” I joked.
“He won’t shoot you mate. He’s gone home.” He was being serious.
There seems to be an unspoken agreement between managers and workers in the rail industry. The managers can maintain an easy life for themselves by not forcing the workers to do a solid day’s labour. The workers know that if they do a couple of hours work a day – and keep out of sight the rest of the time – then they can have an easy life too.
It reminded me of the old Russian communist saying: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
After a week on the tracks, I discovered another reason why some managers didn’t want to rock the boat. They seemed to have profitable sidelines of their own – such as peddling lost or stolen credit cards.
One Network Rail safety official quite openly peddles lost or stolen credit cards. One day when I was chatting to him, he casually called over one of his workmates and handed him a bundle of credit cards.
“I picked a wallet up this afternoon,” he said to his colleague. “Do you know how much was in that wallet? One fucking pound!”
A little later he showed me how to clean up the credit cards so that they appeared fresh and new. This would make it easier to con hapless shop keepers. He then offered to sell them to me for £20 each. Obviously I refused.
A couple of days later another Network Rail employee offered to sell me some credit cards. This time they were £5 a time. He had earlier boasted about using the cards in a small village shop.
Crime is soaring on the railways – up by over ten per cent in the past year alone. Now, after working on the railways, I know where at least part of the problem lies.
But crime and laziness are not the only problems that plague Network Rail. For some employees, passenger safety appears to be very much a secondary concern.
John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, proudly proclaims that safety is “priority number one, priority number two and priority number three”.
Sadly, that message has failed to reach some of those I met.
One day I was helping to renovate a stretch of track just outside Guildford in Surrey. I noticed that a small section was not clipped onto the sleepers correctly. I pointed this out to the foreman in charge of safety. He thought my worries were hilarious and then mercilessly cracked jokes about my concerns for passenger safety.
I was so concerned that I later returned to the section of track to gather evidence I could take to SIRAS, a railway safety body. It was far worse than I’d imagined and massively exceeded rail industry guidelines. I decided to contact an expert who confirmed my worst fears. Because he still works in the industry he wants to remain anonymous.
“If the management know about the state of the track, and there’s an accident with fatalities, then to my mind that would be unforgivable.”
I couldn’t let the matter rest, even if it meant blowing my cover as a BBC journalist. In my mind, throughout all of this time, were pictures of torn and broken trains with bodies scattered around like confetti.
Weeks passed as I tried to convince Network Rail, the Health and Safety Executive and the rail industry’s confidential safety reporting service SIRAS, that there was an urgent problem that needed to be addressed.
After exhausting all avenues – and pushing far harder than any track labourer ever would – what was the result? Virtually nothing. Network Rail had sent some engineers along to repair the track – but they had carried out a shoddy piece of work - so it is little better than before. Passengers are still hammering over those rails at 70mph and there is nothing more I can do about it.
Sadly, that stretch of track is not the only one that poses a risk to passengers. One of our whistle blowers took me to another that was even worse. I can’t identify where this is because it would reveal the identity of our whistleblower.
Graham, a track inspector who wishes to remain anonymous, took me to a track which grossly exceeds the safety limits. The top of the rail had literally been ground down by the passage of train wheels. It needed urgent replacement but Graham’s bosses appeared not to be listening.
He told me: “It’s very risky. It could derail. If that happens you’d definitely have fatalities.
“There should be a speed restriction on this bit of track. But there isn’t. The management’s attitude is ‘keep the trains running. Don’t slow ’em down. Any train delays will cost money.”
Just such a derailment happened to a coal train late last year near Edinburgh. Thankfully nobody was killed. But something strange happened to the computer maintenance records – an entry disappeared. This covered the section of track along which the derailment happened and stated quite clearly that it needed to be renovated.
Crucially, it disappeared just as the Health and Safety Executive began an investigation. I have no way of knowing whether this was an isolated incident.
Just as some tracks sink deeper into decrepitude, Network Rail is spending a fortune on selected projects such as the upgrading of the west coast mainline. This was originally budgeted to cost around £3 billion but is now likely to cost over £10 billion.
This line is a crucial part of the nation’s infrastructure and is the main transport route from Britian’s industrial heartland to Europe. But I was left asking the question: should we be spending this collossal amount when so many less glamorous lines are crumbling?
I have become convinced that incompetence and poor organisation is costing the tax payer billions and this prevents us from having a twenty first century railway. A good example can be found just outside Tring in Hertfordshire.
In June this year track and signalling was being laid to allow 140mph trains to whiz from London to Glasgow in record time. The engineers were clearly very proud of their work, until, that is, they came to connect up the track and signalling. They were ten feet out of alignment. Victorian engineers would have been mortified if they were more than a quarter of an inch out. When I learned of this crass mistake I wish I could say that I was surprised. But I wasn’t.
This kind of bungling, of course, is hardly unique. Further north, in Stockport, just outside Manchester, engineers have had to abandon a new multimillion pound signalling system and fall back on manual Victorian signal boxes. But of course, Network Rail no longer has the skills to manage even this most basic of tasks. They are having to bring over Indian engineers because they are the only ones with the ability to renovate the signalling.
Network Rail has denied all of the BBC’s allegations and maintains that the railways are still the safest form of transport. It says that the Forth Rail Bridge has only recently come under its control and the company is planning a major refurbishment of the bridge’s structure.
In addition, the spokeswoman said: “We cannot conclude that there has been a compromise or breach of public safety. All the instances highlighted to Network Rail so far, demonstrate extremely well the challenges of keeping a busy and complex, ageing railway, moving millions of people safely every day.”
“The company has a five year plan in place to seek to make the improvements necessary.”
With that kind of attitude I was left with only one choice. I no longer felt I could trust my life to Network Rail so I enrolled at a driving school. As a life-long committed environmentalist, it pains me to admit that I now have a driving licence and intend to buy a car.
|
