2012 Q1 Two Methods of commissioning new equipment

[PJW]

Greetings!

Any comments on this, my first attempt at a Mod1 Question?

Happy New Year; I think this must be the earliest in a year that anyone has ever submitted an attempt.  We are having the first proper meeting of the Chippenham (mod 2 and one other TBA) group this week but it'll be some while before attempting actual exam paper questions! 
The examiners are still struggling their way through the 2015 papers I believe; I guess they will be trying to get results before the next Council meeting (March) and distributed thereafter, still a fair time to wait- hence I agree that students would be unwise to use them as the trigger to start the wor for 2016!
I'll look at when I get a moment over the next few days but at first glance it looks a good attempt.

Sorry for the time taken to return to this....

Not a bad answer, but some things I would challenge you on:

1a)
An extended closure potentially permits work to be planned in such a way that the various disciplines actually do not need to work in so close proximity to another- there can be a phased handover of portions of the site from one to another and therefore this may actually reduce the risks than if working in a whole series of short possessions for which it is almost inevitable that everyone would try to be in the same place at the same time; this is the opposite to what your answer implied.  I also think that you should have given an explicit example of the safety risk.

Similarly I would argue that within a long duration extended area closure of the railway that there is more rather than less opportunity to re-plan to recover from problems encountered.  I think the thing to identify is that if there is a COMMON MODE (which could be the weather, or it becomes evident that an assumption previously made is found the hard way not to be valid on the shift) then instead of the effect being relatively limited, there can be a BIG problem which outstrips the ability to recover, because of the "multiplication factor".

To manage a big scale commissioning does need a lot of people and that almost inevitably means more chance of things going astray in mis-communication, many of the people involved will not have the detailed familiarity of the site and the project than  a small core team, plodding through piecemeal week-by-week would have acquired.  
Similarly anything that is "high profile" does nowadays tend to attract the attention of senior managers and that is only right and proper given the commercial and reputational considerations of any overrun; all to often tough when things start going awry their involvement tends to create a major distraction to those whose focus really needs to be on the safe and effective re-planning and negotiation of a fall-back position for minimum commissioning- the more people and the more senior (away from "coal face railway") they are the less effective communication there tends to be than those who are typically dealing with such a situation at 04:00 on the typical Monday morning!

I do agree that reducing the need to perform stagework is a good safety benefit (as well as having other advantages also).

It is not completely clear that repeated stageworks would entail more working close to adjacent open lines, but  I agree that it probably means more likely at begin and end of the possession.  Certainly it would be fair to assume that the percentage of time being worked in the dark and with the pressure of an imminent sign-back time is greater in aggregate for the series of separate stages than one combined long closure and yes overall there would be less work to be done in less overall time so from that viewpoint alone it should be safer as less duration exposed to risk.

Your answer should have explicitly considered SYSTEM SAFETY RISK and PERSONNEL SAFETY RISK- something that it vaguely implied but didn't explicitly state or make very obvious by quoting specific example hazards and risks.  Overall I think you probably considered "other factors" a little too much compared with "safety risk".

1b
A good answer but perhaps you should have mentioned condition survey and correlation as being particularly significant for the multiple stageworks option; needs to happen before most of the design can start.

Also the implications for the series of staged designs when (and it will be when rather than if) some of the earlier ones do not happen as originally intended for whatever reason (lose possession, other department not ready etc.).  When stages are in close succession and there is a need to issue for NR approval and then to the installers to make and the testers to pre-test weeks ahead, the management process needed to recognise that in the interim another stage didn't actually make the change originally intended within the base design for the later work (either didn't happen at all or some need to modify from it's original design.  So version control/ change control should have been explicitly discussed here.

1c
Good.
In such a job, new datalinks to new locs from new central interlocking would be what would really assist; a new TFM is certainly better than opening up an existing plugcoupler on the night to add new input or output but from the scale of the job it is clear that would not want to be mucking around making datalink alterations if it could be avoided.
Any re-use of anything tends on paper to save money but is rarely worth it overall; do need to think carefully where the interfaces between new/ existing will occur.  Clearly there will always be some, but minimising is the key, and where they can't a good means of being able to do some form of "over and back".

Overall pretty good Pass I think; just be careful to focus in this paper upon SAFETY, use terms such as hazard, risk, mitigation, life-cycle.  It is difficult in such a question not to get dragged down into the technical detail, but do try to remain high level and consider how much can be worded to reflect the MANAGEMENT of people and processes