Remembering the Sandilands tram crash

Today we remember the fatal tram crash on 9th November 2016 in which 7 people died and 62 were injured.

Dane Chinnery, 19, Philip Logan, 52, Philip Seary, 57, Dorota Rynkiewicz, 35, and Robert Huxley, 63, all from New Addington, and Mark Smith, 35, and Donald Collett, 62, both from Croydon, were all killed in the crash. Sixty-two other people were injured, almost everyone else in the tram that morning, some very seriously.

I was in Croydon town centre that morning. I can still remember the numbing mood as news filtered through first of the crash and gradually of how serious it was. After such a terrible event there is a rush to say “never again”, but making that phrase reality means calmly confronting what went wrong and taking real action to prevent it. I have ridden that section many times, and the more I’ve dug into the background of what happened on that terrible morning, the more concerned I am.

Safety reports hidden from the official investigation and from TfL’s board. Reports of serious faults watered down to appease the operator. These are not the steps of an organisation committed to “never again”.

As Croydon’s representative on the London Assembly, I will be determined to get to the bottom of it, out of respect to the memory of the seven people who tragically died, and to make sure the deeper problems are sorted not ignored.

The official report by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) concluded that the most likely cause was the driver briefly falling asleep so he didn’t slow down in time for the tight bend on the approach to Sandilands, and that the signage approaching the bend was not clear enough - trams go from a long, straight section at 50mph into a tight bend at 12mph. Investigators found that trams had approached this corner too fast several times before, including less than 2 weeks before the fatal crash: on 31st October 2016 another tram came within 2mph of tipping over in the same place. The attitude of managers and the drivers’ fear of being blamed meant these incidents were not reported.

We’ve since learnt that this cover-up culture seems to be widespread.

Two years before the crash, an independent audit of Croydon Tramlink highlighted concerns about driver fatigue. This March 2014 report identified seven weaknesses including that the Croydon Tramlink didn’t meet the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) expectations for “fatigue management”. At the same time there was also a confidential whistleblower complaint about driver fatigue due to the way Croydon Tramlink arranged drivers’ shifts.

This audit and the whistleblower report are directly relevant to a fatal crash where driver fatigue was the suspected cause, but they weren’t mentioned in the official RAIB report and did not come to light until years later in 2019. Why not?

Then in 2016 just before the crash, TfL had ordered a safety audit of the Croydon Tramlink, including driver fatigue. This suspended investigation (IA 16767) was quietly shelved and kept secret even from TfL’s own Safety Panel. Its existence was revealed only in October 2020 nearly 4 years after the fatal accident and only after a dogged volunteer campaigner extracted the information from TfL by forcing a response to a Mayor's Question (2019/17340) that remained unanswered for over a year. This audit does not even mention the Sandilands crash because it was quietly abandoned before the fieldwork was scheduled to be completed in mid-November. Who ordered IA 16767 to be abandoned? And who ordered the evidence collected for it be kept from Crash Investigators, the Police, and TfL's own safety panel? The cover of the report has a conclusion of "Adequately Controlled". Since this audit was suspended before the fieldwork was completed and the Sandilands crash, I find that conclusion to be pre-mature, to say the least.

In 2017 with fatigue problems on Croydon Tramlink still happening, TfL ordered another fatigue management audit. A member of the public had filmed a tram driver asleep at the controls. The draft report stated the safety system “requires improvement” and highlighted safety problems marked as “priorities”. But in the final report published in March 2018 the watered-down conclusions spoke instead of “opportunities for improvement”. Private emails later revealed that Tramlink bosses demanded these changes because they’d been given verbal assurances that the report would be generally positive. So TfL backed down - whose interests do they represent?

But even this watered-down report was withheld from the crash investigation. It was clearly relevant and should have been part of the investigation, but it was kept back. Only after repeated pressure from Conservative London Assembly Member Keith Prince, nearly two years after the crash and a year after the RAIB investigation was published, RAIB quietly published an addendum to their report referencing this 2017 TfL report. No one has ever explained why this report was not sent straight to RAIB, and Labour’s Deputy Mayor refused to investigate what happened. Why? Furthermore, no one has convincingly explained why, to this day, the Tramlink operator First Group has still not approved even TfL's watered down 2017 audit.

As things stand, the RAIB report has been updated three times and still doesn’t mention the 2014 and 2016 audits about driver fatigue. Labour politicians both in City Hall and Croydon Town Hall seem more interested in quietly moving on than pressing for answers to these questions.

My feeling is that the culture of make-do and cover-up which caused this sorry tale is still at large. A culture of saving blushes not lives, of protecting reputations not passengers. If everyone moves on then these failings that led to 7 people’s tragic deaths in 2016 will not be solved.

The inquest into the crash is now due to start in spring 2021, delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, I will be watching closely in the hope that it will answer some of the questions. But the main change needed is to the culture at Croydon Tramlink, Transport for London, and City Hall to put passenger safety above reputation management - none of which needs to wait for the Coroner.

Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge the kind help and dogged efforts of Michael Liebreich, former TfL Board Member and Chair of the Safety Panel during the crash investigation who was very generous with his time, and Conservative London Assembly Members Keith Prince and Steve O’Connell and London Businessman and volunteer Safety Campaigner Tom Kearney whose relentless posting of FOIs and Mayor's Questions has produced most of the evidence mentioned in this article. Tom also has a blog about transport safety.