In the UK, the role of the site warden is to oversee the safety of their team working on or near the railway track and in particular, warn anyone who strays beyond the safe working limits.
Working on the railway can be for very long hours and in all conditions, so the role of a site warden is one that comes with many challenges. Humans are not well adapted to remain stationary, monitoring and alert for long periods. Factors such as fatigue, monotony, unpredictability, adverse weather, poor visibility and high-stress situations can all contribute to susceptibility to distractions and risk of human error. Unfortunately, all of these factors can be very present when working in rail environments.
While site wardens can help to manage the risks that come with working trackside, systems that rely entirely on people are highly subject to human error, particularly when the role heavily depends on a person being alert at all times. And the fact that track maintenance is often completed at night adds to the complexity of the task, as well as the possibility of delayed trains causing unforeseen situations and unpredictability for site wardens.
Adding an extra layer of protection
Imagine being able to provide teams with a fail-safe for scenarios whereby site wardens have a lapse in vigilance. For example, a site warden is distracted by something and doesn’t notice a team member straying onto an open line. Or perhaps, one who is fatigued towards the end of their nightshift has a delayed reaction time to an oncoming train.
In situations such as these, teams are heavily exposed to the risk of being struck by trains and so, as is the focus of Network Rail’s Safety Task Force, track workers must be provided with extra layers of protection in order to improve safety on the railway. That’s where geofencing technology comes in.
A geofence is a virtual perimeter defined by digital coordinates and its purpose is to provide a digital representation of a physical boundary. Geofences can be used to trigger an event when a user enters, exits or changes distance from a boundary, such as issuing an alert or sending out a notification.
By using this positioning technology to create safe working zones, geofences can provide an extra layer of protection for workers, helping organisations decrease reliance solely on human factors. For example, Tended’s device works by giving off an alert when workers stray out of a safe zone, giving trackside workers a timely ‘tap on the shoulder’ and providing additional support to site wardens.
Tended is currently working with AmcoGiffen to deploy this first-of-its-kind wearable safety solution on the railway to support site wardens and add an extra layer of protection for trackside teams.
Providing support to site wardens
Backed by behavioural science, Tended’s system is designed to allow workers to self-correct unsafe behaviours within seconds - much quicker than the time it takes to receive a site warden’s alert and subsequently react.
Not only does this enable workers to protect themselves the moment they are in danger, but it has been proven with Nudge Theory that self-correction in the workplace has the potential to create lasting behavioural change, improving safety performance long-term. This is because not only does self-correction help to better instil safe behaviours, but also minimises the risk of resistance and confrontation as, after all, nobody likes being told what to do.
Jobs such as a site warden that require high levels of vigilance have long been recognised as difficult to sustain, at a constant level of performance, over a period of time and so providing an extra layer of protection during such tasks is essential for the safety of the workforce.
Geofencing allows us to provide virtual safety barriers and Tended is harnessing this technology to provide track workers with their own personal safety assistant and a “sixth sense” to the dangers around them, supporting the challenging work of site wardens on the railway.
Learn more about how we are transforming the future of track worker safety here.
