Background
During the summer of 2005, the railway had major concerns about safety standards across its national rail system.
Touchstone Renard’s Role
Initial Commission
The initial commission was for Touchstone Renard to carry out a wide ranging review, having regard to international safety standards, including:
- The existing safety organisation structure and responsibilities.
- Any safety management systems.
- Safety and technical standards.
The railway subsequently adopted Touchstone Renard’s recommended programme of safety improvements.
Subsequent Commission
Our client then asked us to implement the programme that we had recommended. This was put in place by means of a comprehensive safety management programme, broken into discrete packages, including:
- New safety organisation with defined roles and responsibilities.
- Developing safety policies and annual safety plans.
- Carrying out a range of safety culture and risk management workshops.
- Devising an innovative safety risk register.
- Creating key safety management processes.
- Advising on improvements to track safety affecting staff and contractors to bring the railway to international ways of working.
- Investigating train automatic alarm systems.
- Producing a management system for contractor application.
- Recommending a range of safety KPIs.
- Devising safety regulations on behalf of the country’s Ministry of Transport.
- Review and comparison of international safety standards.
Touchstone Renard worked throughout in close cooperation with the railway’s managers and staff. Controls and checkpoints were embedded at key points to provide confidence in the outcome as well as a substantive audit trail.
Touchstone Renard’s demonstrably capable and expert teams worked to close deadlines to complete the work to our client’s satisfaction.