The owner of Britain’s rail infrastructure is putting passenger safety and train reliability at risk by failing to clear a backlog of inspections of bridges, tunnels and other structures, the industry regulator has warned.
The Office of Rail and Road urged on Monday Railway network to address its “limited progress” in tackling the problem and released data showing tens of thousands of pending inspections of facilities across the network.
In a letter to the state-owned company, ORR chief executive John Larkinson said failure to monitor the state of facilities as required meant faults could go undetected or be detected but not adequately assessed.
“In some cases this could lead to a security incident,” Larkinson wrote. “It could also involve introducing speed limits to mitigate the safety risk by making it more difficult to run trains on time.”
The UK’s latest rail crash killing passengers – near Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire in August 2020 – came after a train hit a landslide due to a collapsed section of cutting.
Rail services on the normally busy route between Oxford and Didcot have been severely disrupted since April after Network Rail engineers identified a sudden deterioration in the state of a bridge over the River Thames at Nuneham, Oxfordshire.
The watchdog in its letter did not specify the number of inspections not carried out in time. But one attachment included charts detailing the total amount of work missed, which showed inspections of some 23,000 facilities had either not been completed on time or had been undertaken but not submitted. The network has a total of about 70,000 structures.
It has long been feared that the more extreme weather resulting from global warming is growing the effort on the railway infrastructure. Some embankments suffered structural problems in extremely hot and dry weather conditions, while bridges often suffered damage from underwater erosion caused by torrential downpours in rivers.
The regulator has given Network Rail until 30 June to submit an initial plan to address the backlog and has urged it to make greater use of new technologies, such as drones, in its inspections.
Martin Frobisher, director of safety and engineering at Network Rail, said the company had taken “catching up” to update inspections since ORR first raised concerns in 2021, but said it must go beyond.
“Between February and April 2023 there was a 9% improvement in exam non-compliance,” he said, adding: “We are working closely with the ORR to get us back on track. A plan will be presented . . . by the end on June”.
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