By Andy McCue, 31 January 2005 16:00
NEWS The UK rail industry is to develop a central web database of all safety incidents that will act as an early warning system for defects that could potentially cause a serious accident.
The project is being run by the Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), which was set up in 2003 following Lord Cullens public inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove train crash.
The system will be used to collect and share nationally any urgent safety-related defects known as national incident reports (NIRs).
The NIRs are used by the UK rail industry to notify all interested parties that a defect has been discovered on rail vehicles, plant and machinery that are used on Network Rail controlled infrastructure which may have potentially serious consequences on other or similar pieces of equipment.
Currently these incidents are reported to Network Rail's national control centre by fax and then distributed to relevant parties.
Under the new system a fault or defect discovered on any piece of equipment, track or train will be fed into the web-based database locally. This will send an email alert to the national control centre who will then notify other rail parties nationally that particular defect is relevant to for checking.
A variety of rail bodies and workers will have access to the system, including Network Rail, the train operating companies, maintenance contractors and the equipment manufacturers.
A spokeswoman for the RSSB told silicon.com that modernising the system will speed up the process of reporting defects and make it easier to share the information nationally. The system will also allow for much higher resolution photographs, figures and images of the defects to be transmitted.
The RSSB is currently looking for a supplier and aims to have the system complete by the middle of this year.
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