To guard a railway line in the middle of England has required four-wheel drive vehicles and night vision gear. The contract guarding company doing the work for Network Rail describes its work to Mark Rowe.
Guarding contractors, seeking to weather the recession like anyone else, may look to a niche sector. The public or semi-public sector has its attractions. Universities, for example, will keep going. So will transport. Big, years-long infrastructure projects have to keep going ahead, if UK transport is even to tick over. Crossrail will when complete link Maidenhead to the west of London to Shenfield in Essex and Abbey Wood. It will include a 21km tunnel under the centre of London. Imagine the station rebuilds, the traffic, the building materials. it will be the largest civil engineering project in Europe and it all will need securing. The main work is due to begin in 2010. Recently finished is the Trent Valley Four Tracking Project (TV4) on the West Coast Main Line around Lichfield. <br><br>TV4 in brief<br><br>Briefly, Network Rail upgraded the line from two to four lines. Work included reconstructing 35 bridges, and taking out redundant equipment. It’s meant disruption to the district, and Network Rail as the body in charge of the upkeep of the track has had to give as much forewarning as possible of upcoming work. Thieves, however, don’t need telling of all the old and new cable and other metals, all desirable to steal, given the high world prices for metals such as copper. Railways around the country, besides utilities, have been hit by such thefts. The TV4 project though in the middle of England included miles of farmland, with only temporary trackside roads that could turn muddy. Senator Security the guarding contractor used four-wheel drive vehicles, to patrol, and to move the portable cabin gatehouses that acted as checkpoints. Senator talked through the TV4 work at their offices in south-east London. For instance, Network Rail felt that the contract guards would carry more clout if Senator’s officers re-branded, with the rail body’s standard ID cards. The idea was that contractors working on TV4 would stop more readily for ‘Network Rail Security’ than for a security firm they had not heard of. Security officers in the four-wheel drives got involved in other work: traffic management and the setting up of traffic lights; and pressure-cleaning of equipment and signs. <br><br>Trackside<br><br>Railways have, for health and safety reasons, strict rules on trackside. You are not allowed even on the track unless you have passed two-day Personal Trackside Safety (PTS) training and have your ‘ticket’. Even so, someone with PTS is under the control of whoever is in charge of that section of track – whether Network Rail, or the third party contractor doing work on the track, whether an engineering firm such as Amey, Balfour Beatty or whoever. If the person in charge says you cannot move, you can’t. As for the details of the PTS: you learn more than to look both ways before you cross a railway line, because trains can move quickly (although such awareness is part of the training). You have to pass a medical check-up – trackside is no place for staff with slow reaction speeds. You have to be available for random drug and alcohol testing; and wear the right PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). You have to book on as a Sentinel identity card holder; that’s a Network Rail scheme for making sure that the people who work on or by the track (because they could come from a sub-contractor or agency) are competent and medically fit. This way, Network Rail can enforce – and Andy Grice, operations director of Senator stresses that it is enforced rigidly – working hours. You cannot work more than an eight-hour shift and there are set breaks. <br><br>Achilles<br><br>Senator has become approved by the accreditation network Achilles (www.achilles.com). Briefly, the Oxfordshire-based company authorises and monitors suppliers, and brings them together with buyers: not only in transport, but in oil and gas, construction, utilities and other sectors. In a word, it’s a portal. Link-up is the name of its UK rail industry supplier qualification scheme, providing a single common registration, qualification and audit process for suppliers to sell to the UK rail industry, whether it’s toilet paper or security. <br><br>Niche<br><br>Senator is among other things also SIA-approved, so why go to the extra trouble for a specialist sector like rail – separate even from London Underground, which requires it own certificates because it has its own particular live lines? "We think of it as a niche market," says director Sean McGranaghan. "If you think of the money that’s going into the rail industry over the next few years; we don’t feel it’s going to suffer from the current climate." He gives an example of Network Rail installing high-value copper cable to overhead gantries on the track. A specialised train which holds the copper moves along the line, fitting the cable, day or night. Otherwise, the train is, in effect, left alone; then it was for Senator to protect it. The engineering firms carrying out work for Network Rail have their own equipment, that may require guarding when not in use. Because you can hardly take every piece of heavy equipment to a fenced depot after every shift, or erect a secure compound around every asset; nor can a security officer necessarily guard machinery from a hut maybe half a mile away. <br><br>Exhibition<br><br>It was noticeable that so far the talk had been of human guards, rather than electronic security. Now Senator does offer remote monitoring, and key-holding for site contractors. Nor are the guarding company putting all their eggs into the one niche basket, though they are exhibiting at an annual rail services exhibition, Railtex (www.railtex.co.uk), in London in mid-March. The sheer length of the railways means that Network Rail cannot afford to put a guard on every point – such as a level crossing, where, despite advertising campaigns, trespass even when a train is coming remains a safety concern. Not that safety is a concern for the thieves ripping out and stealing cable, from live tracks, maybe hundreds of metres at a time. Hence issue of night-vision aids to officers in patrol vehicles in remote areas far from street-lights. Strictly speaking, the products used are monocular (one lens). What to the human eye is utterly dark becomes green and black. Such kit has enabled patrollers to spot cable thieves, whether trying to take the metal away, or hiding it to take away in daylight.
