On October 17, 2000, a derailment occurred at Hatfield on the East Coast Main Line, about 20 miles north of London. The cause of the derailment was a broken rail, and the rail break was caused by a progressive type of fracture called gage corner cracking. Four people were killed in the unfortunate accident and the aftermath plunged Railtrack into a crisis from which it is still recovering.

Railtrack began an emergency inspection programme of its system immediately to find any other rails that exhibited gage corner cracking. This programme was followed immediately by an emergency replacement programme. When the defects were found they were classified according to new engineering standards issued by Railtrack, and “slow orders” were placed on the tracks. Hundreds of the defective rails were found and the resulting number of trains disrupted by the slow zones created havoc around the national rail network.

Railtrack managed the programme with its own staff until late November of that year, but found that the volume of work was overwhelming and required additional management resources. As a result, the National Recovery Programme was begun to manage the crisis and PB, Bechtel and Fluor Daniel, as Railtrack’s three principal programme management (PM) contractors, were asked to establish a PM office at Railtrack’s headquarters.

As background, there are seven geographical zones in Railtrack. Each zone is responsible for the operation of trains on its portion of the network and the normal maintenance of the assets through the use of infrastructure maintenance contractors. It is these contractors who were performing the inspections and replacing the defective rails.

Establishing the Programme Management Approach

The new PM team faced significant challenges. Railtrack was under intense pressure from the government, the press and the public to quickly return train service to normal. The effects on the overall economy and people’s lives were dramatic. Tom McCarthy of Bechtel was established as the programme manager and I was named deputy programme manager. Our team took the following actions to establish a centralized approach to the programme.

Defined Clear Roles and Responsibilities. The lines of responsibilities from the Railtrack Board through the central PM team and down to the zones were clarified.

Established a Programme Control Center. A national programme center was set up in London and was augmented by the National Logistics Unit in York. The center had responsibility for development and implementation of the national strategy, central collection of data and progress reports, coordination of supply chain issues, and other issues.

Began Centralized Reporting. With all the diverse requests for information both inside and outside Railtrack, it was necessary to establish one chain of command for reporting. Centralized reporting allowed the seven zones to report progress through the central office and enabled Railtrack to respond with a single voice to the government and press.

Established Central Database. Each of the zones had developed, of necessity, its own database to track the progress of its efforts. Without a centralized database with all relevant information on each of the gage corner cracking sites across the seven zones, system-wide coordination was not possible. Establishing this centralized database became the focus of the programme because, in addition to helping us to address other critical issues, it:

• Enabled the PM center to monitor the overall progress of the programme
• Enabled the shifting of resources to address imbalances
• Allowed proper coordination of supply chain issues for the entire network.

Summarized Supply Chain Requirements. The resources required for the NRP simply overwhelmed the normal Railtrack supply chain structure. It was necessary to coordinate a system-wide approach to supply rail, contractor personnel, and other critical resources in order to be successful. Supply chain issues are discussed in more detail in a section below, and, for WCRM, in a following article, “Supply Chain Management Approach—Post Privatisation” by Lynn Kemerer.

Coordinated Responses to Government. The Office of Rail Regulator required quick action by Railtrack to address what it felt was a national rail emergency. At one point, ORR used its powers to place an “enforcement order” on Railtrack that required Railtrack to develop a national plan for restoring rail service by a certain date. The pressure to produce the plan and deliver results was significant, and our success was possible only because of the actions mentioned above.

Overall Scope

New engineering standards were established quickly to safely manage the inspection and management of gage corner cracking defects. It involved a rating system based on the progressive nature of the defects, with the highest tiers requiring the imposition of slow orders for the trains.

The scope of the NRP was continually expanding for a number of reasons:

• The initial inspections progressed over many weeks, continually revealing more gage corner cracking sites.
• The initially small gage corner cracking defects progressed into increasingly larger cracks being revealed that required immediate action.
• The improvement of inspection techniques during the programme led to cracks being revealed that were not evident with older techniques.

In general, the rail being replaced fell into two categories—“plain line” (standard rail) and “switches and crossings.” “The number of defects varied significantly across the zones but in the end, there were approximately 800 km (500 miles) of plain line rail and 1500 pieces of switches and crossings replaced across the network, all in a time period of about six months. These numbers would be impressive if the work had been performed over a few major sites where one could expect productivity gains. When it is considered, however, that the NRP scope was performed over almost 2000 sites across the network, the accomplishment is even more significant.

Supply Chain Issues

The scale of the rail replacement efforts and the short time frames virtually assured that supply chain issues would present some of the largest challenges to the programme. Some of the major issues were related to delivery of rail strings, ordering the correct switches and crossings, and having an adequate labor pool.

Rail Strings. While the UK steel industry could supply the rail requirements, there were capacity problems with regard to the welding of rail “strings” and the delivery of those strings to the work sites. It was necessary for key routes to be established so that priorities could be set on the deliveries.

Switches and Crossings. By far the greatest supply chain issue in the initial stages of the programme was switches and crossings. Given the diversity of switch and crossing sets throughout the network, each of the approximately 1500 sets required separate measurements before it could be ordered, and rail suppliers needed to be matched to those types of switches and crossings that they could manufacture—a situation that further limited overall capacity. As with plain line rail, the orders then had to be prioritized according to the key routes and commitments made by Railtrack to the train operating companies.

Labor Pool. The overall rail contracting supplier network was strained by the volume of work and required management. For instance, in some zones where contractors in the past had replaced three or four switches annually, they were now being asked to replace 200 on very short time frames. Inevitably, shortages occurred in certain labor pools such as thermit welders, signal testers and others.

Epilogue

With completion of the NRP in May 2001, the immediate crisis was over and train operations were back to levels of reliability higher than those that existed before the derailment.

With many normal maintenance activities having been delayed during the gage corner cracking crisis, however, and with further inspections showing a significant backlog of long-term deferred maintenance, Railtrack began an Infrastructure Recovery Programme (IRP) to build on the momentum of the NRP. David O’Hagan of PB assisted the Railtrack Programme Manager, Richard Spoors, in setting up the IRP.

In summary, this was a challenging assignment for the programme management team. The scale and complexity of the mobilization effort, conducted under significant governmental and public scrutiny, was a considerable achievement.