In <mauried.452.38139E08@commslab.gov.au> mauried@commslab.gov.au (Maurie Daly) writes:
>Without making any comment about the particular incident , until a full report
>is available, it does however raise one interesting issue in relation to
>horizontal integration of railways in that who are the rail police.?
>In the road scenerio , road users can be ordered off the roads for having
>unroadworthy vehicles .
Well, I presume this now falls into the lap of RAC (Rail Access Corp), who
seem to be acting on their own, but I doubt they do anything at all about
enforcing the safety requirements of the Rail Safety Act.
For that NRC train to derail at Douglas Park means one of two things
possiblyj occured:
- the train was travelling too fast for that section of track (through the
platform and over the emergency crossover, which is where the
already-derailed vehicle finally disengaged itself from the track
alignment) and something broke as a result, or
- the derailed vehicle was *not* correctly inspected and assessed prior to
being allocated to the train it was on and suffered a failure of some
sort in the course of normal transit.
The vehicle which caused the accident apparently had a green repair ticket,
and apparently had the brakes cut out (not that this fact makes any
difference to the results of the incident).
>Who performs this function in the rail scene , ie how do we know that there
>arnt un- railworthy vehicles, either locos or rolling stock travelling round.
> Given the recent de-railment at Lara in Vic and this one , it would seem that
>there is a requirement for some sort of inspection mechanism for rolling stock
>undertaken by someone other than the rail operator.
I completely agree. For a few months before, and also when NR first started
up, we no longer had to perform brake and loading inspections of
high-wheelers that we (Freightrail) worked on behalf of NR (this was before
they set up their own crew depot at Chullora). I *insisted* on walking
around the train because on numerous occasions I'd found that the people who
were supposed to check the train did a sloppy job, and I delayed 3175 on
quite a few evenings because I was not satisfied.
As the second person, it was my responsibility to ensure the loading, etc.
was correct *before* departure. High wheeler or not, there is nothing worse
that a train coming unstuck en-route when you did not get the chance to
inspect the train yourself prior to departure...
>It would also seem prudent along the same lines to have rail weighbridges or
>random rail weighings carried out , to make sure that vehicles arnt being
>overloaded.
>Since most rail operators pay a access fee , based on a GTK basis , if there
>arnt weighbridges in use , how does the track owner know exactly how much a
>train weighs , for fee purposes.?
The don't, at least not with any reliable degree of certainty. It's a case
of going on information in consignment notes and train consist records which
would normally contain data about vehicle loadings, etc.
However, there is no (to my knowledge) co-ordination about ensuring this
information is as correct as possible. It's well-known that coal trains are
very often overloaded and this shows up at unloading time when the train is
weighed. When taking the train consist, the only info about loading comes
from the ticket, and often the net load is guessed, since there's no
weighing facility at a lot of locations, although showing correct loading
details is the responsibility of the shipper in most cases.
Regards,
Craig.
--
Craig Ian Dewick | Stand clear - jaws closing
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