Interface - The Journal of Wheel/Rail Interaction

REDUCING DERAILMENTS

Reducing Broken Rail Derailments in Dark Territory (continued)

On the former BC Rail, the “Derailment Task Force” consisted of the union presidents, chief engineer, chief mechanical officer, general manager – operations, and chief inspection engineer of the government regulator. Discussions and the exchange of information about the issues were cornerstones of the improvement program. Nobody played “gotcha;” bargaining issues didn’t come to the table. Railway officers’ annual performance measures on derailments were based on company results not individual department cause codes. (Share the gain or share the pain.) Consultants can also provide assistance for railways that do not have the internal experience to organize a Risk Management process.

The First Steps
Changes in Railway management over the past 30 years have complicated the task of gathering and using data. Complicating factors include:

• Territory lengths continue to increase. Available track time continues to decrease. Supervisors spend less time on any one section of track.

• Staff transfer, turnover and retirements have reduced the organizational knowledge on territories. Because there wasn’t much professional hiring in the ‘90s, there is now a shortage of Engineering “bench-strength.”

• The ownership of inspection, testing, capital replacement and maintenance is split in Engineering Departments.

The first step in any risk-management process is reviewing/gathering data. To quote Gary Wolf, President of Rail Sciences, Inc., “In God we trust, all others bring data.” Without gathering data and being able to access it, railway personnel can't make the best decisions later on. This is a simple concept, but doing it well is difficult. Integrating the data requires discipline in recording and communication.

It’s important to make the best use of available technologies. Are track inspection issues entered into a database or are inspection records buried in stacks of paper or hanging on a wall available for Regulatory review? A stack of paper has low value. The real value of track inspection reports goes beyond the immediate benefit of identifying defects to what can be derived from the data for predictive maintenance. Is there a record of each pull-apart, broken rail, broken weld, broken joint bar, broken compromise bar, etc.? The technology has changed over the past dozen years. Has your railway kept up?

All assets have service lives; some don’t meet expectations. When a compromise joint bar fails, does your database tell you how much tonnage it saw, how many similar other bars have failed over the past five years, which company made them, the tie support conditions, the amount of rail mismatch, welding or slotting damage, etc.? A comprehensive database and trend reporting can keep you ahead of “the curve” and prevent a derailment. In assessing track inspections, it is much more important to review the quality of the track inspection than the pieces of paper verifying its performance. What is missed or omitted from inspection reports can be as important as what's entered. Field personnel will not take the time to enter all relevant information unless they perceive the process to be of value and use. When performing track inspections with them, review their reports, ask about and respond to the concerns they’ve identified, identify areas that should be in the reports but aren’t.

Rail Testing
A rail inspection contractor can help with essential rail database data fields such as rail weight, location, manufacturer, defect size and type, dates, etc. This information can be integrated with curvature and grade data. Accumulated tonnage, grinding history, rail wear, rate of rail wear, service failures with all details, rails removed from track, weld failures, bar failures and renewals/repairs should also be included in the available information and reports. This effort isn’t a major IT initiative; an Excel workbook will do. The challenge is keeping the office data current and ensuring that the field gathers the data and reports.

Managers must examine the data to forecast testing frequency. This is essential to improved performance. Focus on the hot spots. All railways have areas with “issues” that need to be tested more often. Check for the seasonality of defects. Parts of Canada have very dry, hot summers and extremely cold winters. There are typically more problems in the late fall and winter.

In order to identify trends, railways should monitor defect size compared to tonnage. If the defects are larger (the size of the TDs, the length of the vertical split heads, the length of the bolt hole cracks, etc.) than the last time an area was tested, you're moving out on the curve. Programs are available to help forecast testing frequency and defect growth; rail testing contractors also have begun to provide support.

On BC Rail, the most important KPI was the number of service failures (all rail, weld and joint failures identified in the field, or as a BRO (Broken) in testing). BC Rail went from more than 100 service failures per year to around 20 per year. It went from more than three wrecks related to rail per year to less than one per year. The key is to treat the cause of every service failure in dark territory as a potential derailment, even though not every one ends up that way. The BC Rail metric started at about 25-1 service failures per rail related derailment and moved up to 40-1 over eight years. The ratio increase was attributed to improved and more comprehensive field data.

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