As someone who has worked night shifts in a multitude of different jobs then I have complete and utter sympathy for how hard it must be for train drivers to stay awake at night on their own in a cozy cab. I felt so sorry for the driver in that report above as he was clearly a very competent and experienced guy and he must have been distraught over what happened. It's impossible for anyone who has never worked nights to understand the toll it takes on you. In my busy life I've done night shifts as a baker, in the navy, the army and on a production line! In each of those varied roles I found night shifts to be a terrible battle against tiredness. The only time I fell asleep however was on those occasions where I was on my own. The first time I ever fell asleep on duty was in the navy where I was the on-watch engineer in the control room of a minesweeper. I'd been working night shifts for years on big ships as part of an engineering team where it was impossible for you to sleep as you were always with at least 3 other duty personnel at the same time or you were out on rounds in the various machinery spaces and engine rooms. On a small ship like a minesweeper however, there was only one engineer on-watch. Similar to a train driver in some respects you basically sat at a control console monitoring all the ships systems to make sure they were running correctly. Watches were 4 hours long with the worst being midnight - 4am. It was practically impossible to stay awake on your own through this period with the hum of machinery and the rolling of the ship.yyyyamst wrote:Driver Fatigue is certainly taken very seriously within all TOCs. We have various safeguards built in. However Passenger Drivers don't face the same type of fatigue as Feight Train Drivers. The environment is totally different. Also remember Train Drivers don't have nice flight computers with programmed routes and procedures all at Hand. Next time you are flying along on the West or East Coast in thick Fog remember the Driver is working entirely from memory, Route Knowledge!
I found it slightly amusing that the RAIB completely avoids the only and obvious solution. The report includes dozens of complicated mathematical models, analysis of fatigue, scientific reports etc etc but completely avoids the obvious answer - double manning! That's a dirty, old-fashioned word in this modern world of lean efficiency, technology and automation. However the fact that all the high-tech and complex automated systems failed to stop the train in this scenario shows that the only way this situation could have been averted was by having a good old fashioned secondman!
