A human factors review of the rail operation at the Port of Felixstowe

The Port of Felixstowe (PoF) is the United Kingdom’s busiest container shipping port. It has three rail terminals providing freight links from Felixstowe to the rest of Great Britain. The freight services are operated by... [ view full abstract ]

The Port of Felixstowe (PoF) is the United Kingdom’s busiest container shipping port. It has three rail terminals providing freight links from Felixstowe to the rest of Great Britain. The freight services are operated by freight operating companies (FOCs) which run trains on PoF infrastructure. Collaboration between the PoF and FOC staff is required as, for example, FOC trains are moved on and off PoF terminals and containers are loaded on and off of the rail wagons by the PoF crane operators.

The scope and scale of the rail operation at the Port has been changing and expanding over the years. In 2013 the new North Rail Terminal was opened, significantly increasing the rail capacity at the Port. To understand if and how this translated to an increased risk of rail incidents, RSSB was asked by the Port to carry out an independent human factors review of the management of incident risk at the Port’s rail terminals.

The aim of this review was to understand and identify the types of incidents that could occur, the human errors that contribute to these and the system issues that would make human errors more likely. To conduct the review, a range of data collection activities were employed including:
•the creation of swim lane diagrams to map out procedures and test how well they were written;
•observations of rail movements and activities at each terminal (from the Panel room, trackside and on trains);
•interviews and workshops with the frontline staff and managers. Both groups had high levels of input into the data collection activities. This provided a wealth of knowledge and enabled clarification of misconceptions held by both the research team and the frontline staff;
•a review of incident investigation reports was conducted to understand the key areas of risk at the Port and to determine whether in the event of an incident, the identification of incident precursors, root causes and recommendations was in line with human factors good practice.

The methods used when conducting the human factors review proved successful at eliciting useful information from both the frontline staff and managers at the Port. Staff participating in the frontline workshops were given the opportunity to suggest improvements that would improve their daily work life. The majority of participants were focussed on resolving genuine safety issues at the port with few staff being motivated by money or items that would lead to personal gains, further supporting the usefulness of data collected during this review.

Data gathered was analysed and recommendations were made to PoF and the FOCs designed to mitigate the likelihood of hazards happening and to improve the performance and safety of their rail operations. Responses from PoF and the FOCs have indicated that the human factors review and provision of recommendations has been beneficial with a number of the recommendations being successfully actioned and new measures/solutions being implemented. Positive changes continue to be made at the Port with a plan for short and long-term actions being followed.