Author: Alex Conacher
Partner: Trojan Services Ltd
In 2019/20 an estimated 693,000 workers in Great Britain sustained a non-fatal injury at work. The figure, which comes from the Office of National Statistics Labour Force Survey, represents 2,160 injuries per 100,000 workers. The rate had been steadily decreasing for decades. This self-reported rate passed just below 4,000 per 100,000 in 2000/01 but then it stopped reducing and it a plateau. Rates have sat at this present level for a decade.
Around a quarter of these injuries resulted in a seven day or more absence from work, with a total of 6.3 million days taken off due to workplace injury. This is equivalent to 1.45 working days lost per worker over the year. So improvements to the rate of injury are not just important on a human level, they make economic sense too. This has been the focus of numerous pieces of legislation over the years, with one landmark example being the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974.
New Act, new approach
With safety improvements flatlining, industry needs to look to new innovations to further advance worker safety. It needs to look in unexpected places and the answers could be hiding in plain sight.
Until recently Rob Mole was a programme manager for Network Rail working on Phase One of the £1 billion East West Rail project, which plans to connect East Anglia with central, southern and western England. He says that a particular project that he has encountered is related to manual handling of concrete troughs. Rob explains: “You’ll see a U-shaped trough with a concrete lid on the top. Generally, because they move, you can’t walk on them because they crack, and break and you fall through and injure yourself,” he says. “And they’re just very heavy as you can imagine, a hollow concrete box is not light… because they’re reinforced as well. But they generally get chips on the outside and once the reinforcements exposed, you need to replace them because they start breaking down.”
Surprisingly the troughsdeteriorate quite quickly in the ground and Rob says there are problems putting them in. “We always seem to have lots of manual handling incidents, you know, people cutting hands, injuring backs. It’s always been a problem product.”
Although with the modern lightweight troughs installation is a one-person job, with the concrete troughs, installation is trickier. How arduous depends on the size of the concrete trough in question.
“If it’s smaller concrete unit, it’d be one or two men lifting it into place. So levelling the ground, digging it in to the right depth and install it, and backfilling to each side. If it’s the larger units, you get like a frame that carries it and you have one man on each corner so the coffin type troughing you have to have four people to lift them in.”
Lifting hazards
The larger troughs can be well over 100kg, hence the hazard and people have a tendency to walk on them even when there is a path alongside the track.But this is not the only issue once they are installed. Rob gives a list of issues from his experience. “They move because people walk on top of them when they shouldn’t, we get machines at access points driving over them, so they should be adequately protected but aren’t always.”
Rob says that after Covid is done with, he will be moving on to the Crewe Hub Project, an upgrade scheme that will improve capacity and also prepare the city for High Speed 2 trains. His intention there is to use lightweight troughing and ditch concrete and he expects other projects to follow.
“I think that once word gets about how much more benefit we get from the lightweight products, we will see the old concrete phased out.”
Rob says that if you are doing a smaller job, inertia kicks in, but with larger jobs, there is the opportunity to step back and think about a better solution. Better solutions like the TroTred from Trojan Services Limited. “The use of concrete heavy product had all kinds of implications, not just the CO2 and the environment, but particularly health and safety. So having recognised that, I then saw an opportunity in the rail industry that we are using large amounts of concrete for track side cable protection,” says Stewart Wellens, CEO of Trojan. Using his 28 years of experience in the chemical industry he decided to produce a recycled polymer cable trough.
Versatile products
A polymer in very simple terms is a chain of monomers. Monomers are molecules that can be linked together in a chain to form a structure, which has properties dependent on the constituent molecules. “The polymer is very, very versatile and you have a whole range of polymers basically coming from thermoplastics. So a thermoplastic starts life off as an oil derivative,” he says. “Basically, the two main products coming from the polyolefin industry are polypropylene, which most people have heard of, and polyethylene and the versions we use are high density polypropylene and high-density polyethylene.”
Both of which are nowadays manufactured in large scale plants by specialised companies. “Usually, a typical plant would produce 500,000 tonnes per annum of that polymer, and it will go into a variety of applications from oil pipes through to domestic plastic bottles. So very versatile products. And those polymers are the basis for the recycling industry.”
The beauty of thermoplastic polymers is that they can be recycled any number of times. Stewart’sbig break came on the Thameslink Programme, a £6 billion project to upgrade and expand the Thameslink rail network which is a north-south rail route through London. “I’d spent six years from the initial design, getting it through its testing and then getting through its trial installation period which was 12 months. So it took six years to get a product approval by Network Rail. But that was then followed by a major order from Thameslink.”
Breakthrough project
At the time Thameslink were undertaking a power supply upgrade for the southeast and at the start of the Thameslink project, they were using concrete troughing. “Speaking with the project director, he had enough of concrete because of the number of breakages and rejects at the point of installation, with reported at 30% rejects.” The director decided to replace the concrete with a polymer. There were no rejects or breakages.
Thereare two variants in Stewart’s latest generation of products – TroTred and TroPath. TroTred was developed first, for Network Rail to answer a particular request from the maintenance director in Scotland who wanted a 700-millimetre-wide walkway, which is the Network Rail official width minimum width for a walkway. “They wanted as much cable capacity underneath that walkway as possible,” says Stewart “And that is because the routes up in Scotland were full of cable so the cables were over spilling into the ballast. So basically, we made an extremely large or deep trough so that they could get obviously high volumes of cables in.”
It was one meter long and varies in width from300mm to 700mm matching the Network Rail walkway requirements. The depth of them varies from 150mm deep to 350mm. This is also the product that Rob used for East West Rail phase 1. But for phase 2, Stewart developed TroPath.
This was in reaction to the Cable Troughing Innovation Challenge, which was put out by East West Rail.
“The innovation challenge was to reduce the depth of that trough to 200 millimetres. Because the East-West Rail project are not using the kind of volume of cables that the Scottish maintenance director wanted. And basically what we’ve done if you take the comparison between tread and trough tread comprised of five parts, five individual parts, a metre long, but basically: two sidewalls, a centrepiece and two half lids, whereas TroPath, it is basically three parts. It is a complete base, and two half lids. So Tred had to be assembled on site. As it arrived, it had to be assembled, the base had to be assembled, whereas TroPath doesn’t require any assembly on site.”
These were improvements made along with the redesign for the new specification such as reducing the need for assembly on site. The fewer processes involved in installation, the less likely any issues would emerge. Stewart also introduced a new method of production. Structural foam moulding rather than high pressure injection moulding. “This has enabled us to be able to make or supply a one-piece base rather than a three-piece base. We are used to hearing about the imperative to use environmentally friendly, and although the weight reduction and associated injury prevention was the primary concern on East West Rail, the removal of carbon and the fact that you need 5x fewer trucks on the road to deliver the units has to be mentioned,” he says noting that carbon reduction is a major priority for government at the moment.
Getting approval for this product took six years, so what does Rob think about the industry’s approach to innovation? “You generally don’t want to be the person to be to be trialling a product that’s on your critical path. Because if it doesn’t work, you’ve just lost your programme,” he examaples. “My view is perhaps slightly different is I think we need to push the boundaries. And it’s absolutely the new projects. You know, it’s got to be in our remit to push the boundaries and do new stuff. The safe option is definitely to go with what’s always been done, but you never learn and advance by doing that.”
