The heritage railway sector has been encouraged to provide a mechanism for cross-industry safety management and standard-setting, which can hopefully only help all of us.
We believe that the best way to achieve this goal is by providing tools and services which become the obvious best solution for railways to use and voluntarily adopt.
We recognise that many (particularly small) railways are run by very hard working volunteer managers but who sometimes, by their own admission, don’t have the knowledge or experience to implement systems and policies from ‘standards’, and that such work would be unnecessarily duplicated on each railway. It is a situation that we hear (and hopefully helps with) very frequently: “We know we need a safety management system, we don’t need anyone else to tell us that, but we just don’t know where to start”, and unfortunately setting standards without the tools to implement them is likely to make the position for these railways harder rather than easier. We intend to go further than we ever have before in harnessing our network of railways to provide ‘answers’ rather than just ‘guidance’ to help all railways succeed in a safe and compliant manner.
The Heritage Railway Safety Service intends to provide the tools, systems and structures to railways to implement the best-practices, while still facilitating sufficient local variation to mitigate local risks. Hence the selection of the name ‘Service’ – the Service’s success will be gauged by the number of railways that choose to use the tools and systems because they recognise they are the best option, rather than simply an amount of content created.
The force behind the HRSS have been successfully delivering management systems to heritage railways through HOPS for 13 years, and in that time a huge amount of arbitrary local practices and ‘we’ve always done it our way’ have been overcome, to huge benefit to heritage railways. It’s time we did the same with safety management systems.
Who will be involved?
Every railway is invited to take part in the HRSS. A number of qualified subject-matter experts will be selected on key fields, such as track, signalling, rolling stock, steam and diesel locomotives, etc. The key focus will be on providing managed resources that railways can deploy and, hopefully, all improve safety maturity together.
How will it be funded?
The setting up is being funded by HOPS. The ongoing delivery of the tools and services will be funded by those that that use them. Unlike HOPS which has a ‘one subscription fee and you get everything, whether you want it or not’ model, the Safety Service will use a ‘pay what you use’ model. Some things will attract a small fee, such as the e-learning tools, and some things where the Service is saving railways more significant cost or mitigating more significant risk (such as SMS tools) will cost more.
As always, though, the model used by HOPS where all railways pay a much-smaller-than-market-rate amount for services will provide enough income to sustain the Service for everyone’s benefit.
What at the next steps?
You can register your railway’s HRSS rep and others who wish to be kept up to date. You can do this in HOPS via the Services menu on the left hand side, HRSS > HRSS Info. Permission 486 required.
Look out for news on the next stages of development. E-learning was brought forward in the programme to meet an immediate need, other services will now follow.
The above is a small introduction to the HRSS. It will develop in line with its users’ needs and input over the coming months. Your feedback is, as always, welcome and encouraged to enable us to progress in the way that will serve you best.