LONDON UNDERGROUND
British Transport Police’s Chief Inspector Christopher Horton and London Underground’s Operations Director Nigel Holness speak to RTM about an innovative new scheme to improve emergency response on the Underground.
A
collaborative new trial has cut emergency response times by more than half, and is
now set to be rolled out to other London sites. Coordinating staff, vehicles and expertise, the TfL and British Transport Police (BTP) partnership could prove a model for improved safety and performance throughout the rail network.
RTM spoke to BTP Chief Inspector Christopher Horton and LU’s Operations Director Nigel Holness to fi nd out more.
Although London Underground (LU) and Tube Lines have had an Emergency Response Unit (ERU) in place for many years, it has historically been diffi cult for TfL to respond quickly to incidents due to legal limitations and criteria for using the emergency blue light.
Holness explained: “One of the perennial problems it’s faced is getting to incidents quickly. Because they’re quite large, heavy vehicles and carry lots of equipment that helps us deal with incidents, the diffi culty has always been getting to site.”
The impetus for the new scheme was the criticism of response times on the part of TfL, particularly after the 7/7 London bombings,
as legal issues limited the use of a blue light response. A lack of critical understanding and equipment from the BTP meant that the speed and resources to provide an effi cient response were divided.
“All of this came about after 7/7 and us thinking about how we can respond to incidents faster, and recover the service more quickly,” Holness said.
Horton added: “We were looking to improve the work that we do in response to serious, critical incidents with the industry – looking at key managers, how we get them to site quickly and manage incidents more effectively.
“One of the key frustrations is that quite often we would turn up on the site as emergency services for things like a person under the train, but the critical equipment needed would be a non-emergency response with railway engineers, which wasn’t good for us responding to the incident but also there’s issue of services being disrupted, restoring services as soon as possible, getting the railway back to normality.
“We thought ‘actually, maybe we need to look a bit closer at what joint response we can provide to these serious railway incidents’ – especially where it was likely that it would be life-
threatening and involve serious disruption.” Joint response
LU and BTP thus developed a partnership that incorporated a BTP offi cer working with a team of maintenance engineers from the rail industry in a Tube Lines ERU. This was offi cially designated as a police vehicle and could operate using its blue light under certain criteria – when there is a threat to life or customer safety.
As both parties were previously sending responses to a single incident, Horton said: “There’s no sense for us to send off to an incident and so do Tube Lines and ERU, why don’t we combine the response? It makes it a lot slicker.”
He cited the whole aim of the initiative – “getting the right people with the right equipment to the right place, quickly and effi ciently”.
The faster response means specialist knowledge and kit can be in place in less time, helping police, service recovery and passengers.
“We’re there on site with the right kit and the right people,” Holness agreed.
rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 12 | 41
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