Neil Grabham has been named Managing Director of Merseyrail with effect from mid-August. He is currently Customer Services Director at East Midlands Railway, and has held leadership roles for Greater Anglia, Signet Jewellers and Lidl. Grabham is the permanent successor to Andy Heath, and replaces Jane English who has been Acting Managing Director for the last 10 months.
The Great British Railways Transition Team’s lead director, Anit Chandarana, is to join the Department for Transport in August on secondment as Interim Director General for the Rail Infrastructure Group.
Spencer Group has installed FirstClass Safety & Control’s Depot Protection System at c2c’s East Ham depot, replacing and expanding legacy equipment more than 15 years old.
The first of the battery-equipped variant of the Stadler Class 777 EMUs for Merseryrail has begun final testing and driver training between Kirkby and the £80m station at Headbolt Lane which is scheduled to open later this year. Longer term proposals envisage the use of battery trains to expand Merseyrail services to destinations at Rainhill, Widnes, Wrexham, Warrington and Runcorn.
The Cycle-Rail Working Group has launched the Cycle-Rail Toolkit 3. This was commissioned from Systra to offer station owners, train operators, local authorities and other project promoters guidance on making cycle journeys to and from stations easier, and advising on how best to provide cycle space at stations and on trains.
The Met Office has launched a Climate Data Portal built using geospatial technology from Esri UK to help transport and government organisations to combine open-sourced climate data with their own to assess the future impact on their operations of extreme conditions including heatwaves, floods and droughts.
Alstom has published a 2023 Economic Impact Report commissioned from EY. This says Alstom supported a contribution of nearly £1bn to UK and Ireland GDP in 2022-23 financial year. It has 6 280 employees in the two countries, and spent £818m with 1 144 suppliers and supported more than 17 000 jobs.
West Midlands Railway has launched On The Rails, its first podcast, via Spotify and Apple Music. ‘We are always looking for new ways to communicate with our customers and with the popularity of podcasts continuing to increase, I am looking forward to hearing what people think’, said Customer Experience Director Jonny Wiseman. ‘We’ll be answering some of our passengers’ most-asked questions, explaining a bit more about how the railway works and enjoying plenty of quirky stories.’
TransPennine Express has added 13 languages to its information touch screens, in addition to the existing English and British Sign Language: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu were selected using data from the Office for National Statistics on the most common languages used by people along the TPE network.
Northern Trains has set up a working group and policy to support neurodiverse employees with conditions such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia and Tourette’s syndrome.
The Institution of Civil Engineers has published a policy statement calling for a national transport strategy for England, similar to those for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. ICE makes five key recommendations for such a strategy: it should set out an overarching vision of a sustainable transport network; it needs to establish a set of principles enabling prioritisation of transport projects; it should clarify the roles and responsibilities required of key stakeholders; it has to be a long-term process which is agile and manages uncertainty; a future review should assess whether a UK-wide strategy is needed.
Network Rail and British Transport Police have worked with Walters & Jones Productions to produce an one-off episode of YouTube children’s series Badger’s Wood to promote railway safety. Inspector Badger and Sergeant Squirrel stop rabbits from trespassing on the railway after they lose their football.
RAIB makes two recommendations in its report into a London Overground train colliding with a buffer stop at Enfield Town station in October 2021. The first is addressed to Arrival Rail London and relates to encouraging staff to report fatigue. The second, addressed to Network Rail in conjunction with RSSB, seeks to improve the risk assessment process at terminal platforms. Learning points remind Network Rail and train companies that engineered safeguards do not protect against all events, and remind train staff of the importance of reporting fatigue and of the need to comply with drug and alcohol policies. The driver’s urine sample showed a presence of cocaine which most likely entered his system in the 24 h before the incident. He was dismissed, and on July 7 sentenced to 16 weeks in prison after pleading guilty to endangering the safety of the railway.
