Following the tragic railway accident occurred on Denmark’s Great Belt Bridge, ERA has announced that the Joint Network Secretariat (JNS) has issued the European Action Plan containing short-term risk mitigation measures on the use of pocket wagons. All the railway players across Europe are committed to maintaining rail as the safest land transport mode.
These measures aim at ensuring an appropriate maintenance of the hitch and in particular of the mechanism to lock the kingpin, a correct positioning of semi-trailers on the pocket wagon for the entire duration of the trip and the vertical locking of the semi-trailers’ kingpin.
The interim findings from the Danish National Investigation Body (NIB) show that semi-trailers may not be sufficiently secured against movement when transported on pocket wagons. In particular, the mechanism that ensures the locking of the kingpin in the hitch (type FW6170) of the pocket wagons was found to be unlocked on several occasions.
The Danish National Safety Authority (NSA) notified a request to launch a Joint Network Secretariat (JNS) Urgent Procedure. The JNS Panel, representing the entire railway sector, agreed and established a task force which was organised and chaired by the European Union Agency for Railways.
The task force, composed of experts from the concerned sector organisations, has defined an action plan containing short-term mitigation measures, which will be distributed to all actors involved in the transport of semi-trailers on pocket wagons.
Here you can find more details.
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