2007 Q6 PLATFORM STARTER SPAD

[Peter]

Hi

I attempted this question. I felt my answer to i) had a bit of repetition since i could not think of many risks!

I remember this one being discussed at the exam review for the year in question, but I cannot find the notes from that meeting to see if there were any examiners comments published on that discussion. I do however recall that, consistent with your difficultly in listing items, the room was quite quiet when the discussion was started, so you are not alone!

You have majored on that fact that, given the described service pattern, most of the SPAD risk is with SAS SPADs because all trains are planning to stop there anyway. The question does not say one way or another whether this is the case and I think that you were therefore correct to put the bits about reading time and braking in section 2 because that is asking for things that are not apparent from the service pattern description.

One item that I think probably would better be included in part 1 is about the visibility of the signal at the normal stopping position (ie can the driver see it properly). You talked about it part 2 so you would probably get credit for it even if the examiner thinks it is in the wrong place - they are usually OK like that.

I think that you would have got reasonable marks on this, but not outstanding. You got the balance of amount of writing correct - the second was probably looking for less than half that of the first. Depending on how much detail that you put into the points from item 1, given the 18 marks, one would expect there to be 6 (3 marks each in a lot of detail) or 9 (two marks each with less detail). Assuming that all of the items are relevant, I think the way the examiner was talking at the review, you would have got somewhere near half the available marks. That said, I was struggling to come up with more items to add to the discussion.

One minor point. You mentioned AWS at one point. I'm no metro expert and hence not sure whether any metros use AWS in the form that the main line people would know about. Perhaps more consideration of ATP setup would be useful here.

Peter