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Safety Management System (SMS)

The Middleton Railway’s Safety Management System

This is the home page for the Safety Management System (SMS for short) for the Middleton Railway. As such the purpose of this page is to do two things.

  • Briefly explain what an SMS is; and
  • Provide access to the documents that define the Middleton Railway’s SMS.

The Purpose of an SMS

Safety in any organisation (such as the Middleton Railway) does not just happen, and so it needs to be managed, which involves four things.

  • The organisation must make plans for who will do what, when and how, in order to ensure that things happen safely. In practice this means that there must be people within the organisation who are responsible for doing this, and in the case of the Middleton Railway these people are the Council and the officers (such as the railway’s senior engineers) that they appoint.
  • These plans must be documented and distributed, so that everybody in the organisation knows what they are supposed to do to make things happen safely. In the case of the Middleton Railway there is a significant number of documents that contain various parts of these plans, of which the ones that are most widely known are the company rule book, the general regulations and the train operating regulations, because these are distributed to many of the working members of the railway.
  • The organisation (again meaning the appropriate people in it) must check that things are actually happening as safely as they are supposed to.
  • If something unsafe occurs, then it must be investigated, and if necessary the plans amended to ensure that such unsafe situations can not occur again. In the Middleton Railway this is primarily the responsibility of the Council’s Rules & Disciplinary Sub-Committee, usually known as the R&DSC;  also some responsibility for this is carried by the Council's Safety & Operations Committee.  (Aside:  there are historical reasons why one is called a sub-committee and the other a committee, but if you want to know what they are then ask one of the more senior members of either!)

In terms of static structures, therefore, an SMS is the set of arrangements that are made to ensure that these things happen: that is, the procedures that have been defined for doing them and the documents that describe these procedures. But, the significance of describing it as a system is that it is more than just a set of structures, procedures or documents: it also consists of the people who have to operate these procedures, using the documents as their guide.

In practice, there are usually two groups of people who are involved in an SMS, and they will have rather different views of it. One group consists of those who work in the organisation – in the case of the Middleton Railway, the working members. They will mainly see just the parts of the SMS that are distributed to them to provide them with their instructions, such as the rules and regulations, and also the traffic and engineering notices. The other group consists of those who have particular roles in the SMS, together with those from outside the organisation who may need to inspect it. They will need to see the system as a whole, in order to understand how the various parts of it fit together and operate.

This page is therefore intended to cater for both groups of people, to provide the information that they will need.

The Working Member’s View of the SMS

As has already been said, from the perspective of a working member of the Middleton Railway its SMS used to consist primarily of two documents, namely the company rules and the train operating regulations.  Following the 2017 revision this increased to three main documents, with the introduction of a set of general regulations. Also some of the details which had previously been in the train operating regulations was moved into separate sets of work instructions.

A separate page provides details of these, and also of other documents (such as handbooks, forms and syllabuses) that form part of the SMS and that are relevant to any working members who are involved with train operations.

Another important part of the SMS that affects all working members is concerned with ensuring that staff are actually familiar with those documents that are relevant to them.  The starting point for this is the induction procedures for new staff, and the various documents relating to this.  Copies of these should normally be available in the induction file which is kept in the office in the Engine House, but they can also be accessed from the index page for documents in the SMS, as described below.

The Overall View of the SMS

The more general view of the SMS is that it consists of two main components, and the following links provide access to these.

  • A master document, which describes the system as a whole, in a format that is intended to meet the requirements of the Railways and Other Guided Transport Systems (Safety) Regulations 2006 (usually referred to as “ROGS”). Click here to access this master document.
  • The whole set of documentation that then forms the SMS itself, together with an index that identifies the various documents referred to in the master, and the current versions of each. This index exists as a single document but it also forms a separate page in this site, and from it the documents themselves (which include the other documents relating to induction procedures) can be accessed.  Click here to access the separate page containing this index, or here to access the index as a single document.