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Friday 28 Jan 2005

HUGE REDUCTION IN AUTUMN DELAYS

Region & Route:

Train delays caused by leaves on the line fell by a huge 63% in Merseyside and north Wales last autumn, according to figures released today. In autumn 2003 trains were held up for 22,790 minutes because of leaves but last year that figure dropped to just 8,507 minutes. Andrew Skidmore, Network Rail’s general manager for the area paid tribute to his leaf-fall teams; “We had four teams of three people and it was their task to proactively check known leaf-fall sites and also respond to incidents within problem areas. They did an excellent job, as the figures demonstrate. We also had four mobile operations managers directing their work, and a dedicated ‘autumn controller’ co-ordinating everyone’s efforts throughout the North West.” The main weapon used in the battle against leaves is a substance called Sandite. It looks like gritty wallpaper paste and it helps trains to get a better grip on the rails. Network Rail used special trains to blast leaf contamination off the tracks and then lay Sandite. It also has sixteen lineside machines in known trouble spots in the area that automatically squirt Sandite on the tracks as trains pass by. The leaf-fall teams have portable Sandite dispensers as well as machines that scrub the rails clean with steel brushes. Armed with this equipment they were able to liaise with train drivers reporting problem areas, and get to the root of the trouble before it had a major impact on train services. In fact, the whole rail industry worked together to get a grip on the problem. The end result is that not only was there a dramatic reduction in delays to trains but there were no signals passed at danger as a result of leaves, compared to two in 2003, and there were only four station overruns compared to 16 the previous year.