TEBAY-NEVER AGAIN

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january 2016 :: RMTnews 19 Tom Angus says that at the time of the Tebay tragedy on February 15 2004, which killed four RMT members, track workers were at the top of the league table for industrial injures in the country. “In the previous four years there had been 15 deaths among track workers with 12 of those struck by trains. “We were also critically short of staff and this was even before the attacks on 2B/C reduced staffing levels even further,” he says. Then Tebay happened. The accident occurred after a wagon laden with lengths of steel rail ran away from a maintenance area at Scout Green because it did not have properly working brakes. Flimsy blocks of wood had been placed in front of the wagon to stop it moving because the faulty hydraulics brakes had been disconnected instead of being repaired or replaced. Finally the wooden blocks gave way and the wagon began to move downhill gathering momentum on the 1 in 75 gradient from Shap summit. Running almost silently in darkness, the 16-tonne steel wagon rolled down the West Coast Main Line reaching speeds of up to 40 miles per hour and, without any warning, it fatally struck four railway workers Colin Buckley, Darren Burgess, Chris Waters and Gary Tindall. The wagon continued to travel for a further four miles. Mark Connolly the boss of the private rail maintenance company, MAC Machinery Services, and crane operator, Roy Kennett, were found guilty on charges of manslaughter caused by gross negligence, Connolly was sentenced to nine years and Kennett for two years. PRIVATISATION One of the causes of the Tebay disaster began ten years earlier when the Tories privatised and broke up the rail network, plunging the industry into turmoil. The fatal accidents at Southall in 1997and Ladbroke Grove in 1999 exposed the effect that the fragmentation of the rail network had had on both safety and maintenance procedures. But it was the Hatfield crash in October 2000 that proved to be the defining moment in Railtrack's collapse, a private company which had overseen years of rampant profiteering at the expense of safety. By 2003 Network Rail, a 'not for dividend' company, came into being as infrastructure manager for most of the rail network but contractors continued to operate in the industry that had developed a profit-led culture which directly led to the tragedy at Tebay. “Our employer at the time, Carillion talked about safety a lot but didn’t actually apply it much in the workplace. “The night before the guys were killed we’d been called out at 6pm on the Saturday night to find a horse reportedly running about on the track, we found and captured the horse and also found were other contractors had removed the fence that allowed the horse on the track in the first place. “We got back to the yard at 22:30 to be told we were required back on the track at 04:00, if we’d told managers we were to fatigued to work our four mates would still be alive,” Tom said. He said that in 2013 a confidential source revealed a prior runaway had ocurred in the Tebay area which the bosses had covered up. “If we’d know about it we might have been more aware of the risks and then after Tebay the runaway just didn’t stop until we had a list of dozens of incidents all of which could have had the same outcome as at Tebay – multiple deaths,” he said. RMT’s Lancaster branch began to discuss the problem at the funeral of Darren Burgess after his mother Christine approached Tom and said “All I hope that comes out of this is that it never happens again”. That was when the branch realised that it had to push very hard to get something real on to the track that would give workers one last chance to get out of the way. “All Network Rail had given us was paperwork and changes to machine breaks but no-one was ever able to tell us how a trolley could be stopped once it had started to runaway. “The branch worked hard, getting support for a resolution to the AGM, we talked to the families and got support from our local MP and the local press and media. “Now we’ve got what we aimed to achieve, a system that gives workers one last chance to get out of the way,” Tom said. So now there is a form of secondary protection, is the branch satisfied or does the company need to do more? “Well we want to see the secondary protection improved and even better protection rolled out to give workers even better safety,” said Tom in a quiet but very determined way. RMT News talks to retired rail worker Tom Angus about the Tebay disaster and the new secondary protection his branch fought so hard for NEVER AGAIN