Insight from Chris Morgan, Owner and Director at JMC Safety Risk
As Mick Jagger once sang, “please allow me to introduce myself…” I’m Chris Morgan, a safety and risk specialist who genuinely wants the rail industry to be better, both on and off the tracks.
For me, safety isn’t just a desk job or a box-ticking exercise; it’s a personal mission to ensure everyone gets home safe to their families at the end of every single shift or journey.
Right now, though, I’m genuinely worried about where we’re heading and I don’t think I’m alone.
In rail, we love to talk about our world-class safety record. However, if we metaphorically ‘lift the bonnet’, it seems that there’s deeply unsettling pattern that is staring us in the face.
Look at the recent run of red-alert warnings: two recent trains becoming de-railed, persistent signals passed at danger (SPADs), frontline track worker close calls and recurring infrastructure and drainage failures. Individually, our industry loves to write these off as isolated anomalies, investigating them in silos and moving on. But put them together, and it’s a glaring pattern of systemic fatigue, stretched resources, and creeping complacency.
I am respectful and in admiration of the ORR and the RSSB. I’m not pointing any fingers in their direction, moreover they need our help and I want to stir up some robust discussion to help.
I believe that we need ask ourselves some searching questions. How much longer can we carry on in this vein, treating near-misses as business-as-usual and crossing our fingers, before our luck finally runs out and something truly catastrophic happens?
We can’t coast on past glories. Real safety demands brutal honesty about our current trajectory and proper, frontline-led leadership. In my upcoming columns, I want to create debate and together we’ll dive into how we break this cycle and fix the disconnect between paperwork policies and operational reality.
