Incident, Balnamore AHBC, 31 May 2013 - RAIB Report out now

[John Webb]

The RAIB have reported on the above incident:

At approximately 03:10 hrs on Friday, 31 May 2013, a car driver was forced to take action in order to avoid colliding with an engineering train that was traversing Balnamore automatic half barrier level crossing, which is located between Coleraine and Ballymoney stations on Northern Ireland Railways’ Belfast to Londonderry/Derry line. The car subsequently struck metal fencing forming part of the crossing, causing minor injuries to its two occupants and damage to the car. The crew of the engineering train spoke with the car driver and then continued work without reporting the accident.
At the time of the accident, the engineering train was undertaking weed-spraying operations within a possession of the line, which meant that operation of passenger trains on the line had been suspended. Because the line was under possession, Balnamore level crossing, which is normally automatically operated by approaching trains, was being operated manually via its local controls. However, as the train passed over the crossing, its half barriers had not been lowered and its road traffic signals were not operating, even though this was required by the railway rules relating to this type of level crossing. This meant that the car driver did not have enough warning to stop his car before the level crossing became occupied by the train.

Full report can be seen at http://www.raib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/140512_R102014_Balnamore.pdf

[AN106]

Interesting to note that NIR and IE have a joint rule book.

[AndyB]

Yes. CIE inherited the standard UK rule books from GSWR, DSER and MGWR via GSR, and later the GNR, and adopted the 1972 BR rule book in 1984 - I'm not sure when NIR introduced it, but in 1973 NIR still used the old generation of rule books.

Irish Rail diverged from the BR text with substantial revisions in 1992, including rearranging some paragraphs into other equally or more logical sections of the book, but the present rulebook, which is now about ten years old, was a deliberate effort on the part of the two companies to reconverge the rule book, still in the 1972 layout, but with modern text about responsibilities. There are no modular rulebooks, and differences in practice (such as position light signals - NIR has standard UK signals including double red for stop, IE has route indicating shunt signals using a third white light to show left, straight or right, and still uses red + white for stop - also subsidiary signals are always lit rather than being blank (red and white when no subsidiary route has been set) are dealt with in the company-specific Appendices- to the Rule Book in the case of NIR, not the Working Timetable.