Great Western Coffee Shop

With the recent scares about diesel car pollution, and the governments commitment to remove all full diesel trains from 2040 is it safe for staff to work in covered|enclosed stations, and passengers?

The government believes that it is OK for Bristol TM, and other stations, to continue to handle Diesel trains, yet the EU and government say diesel is bad for asthmatics and other sufferers of breathing conditions.

 

I personally would risk assess before applying for a position at any station you describe if I were asthmatic

I'm afraid I'm going to get out my red pencil now. For a start, what "governments commitment"? Jo Johnson announced an aspiration, or even a goal, but nothing more concrete, and that didn't apply to bi-modes. In any case, a government can't bind its successors in that way.

And "is it safe"? No, nothing is safe in that absolute sense; "absolute safety" is an unapproachable ideal, not a viable target let alone a sensible threshold. "How safe is it" is worth asking, and of course the answer comes for varying levels of risk and provides you with priorities.

I would guess (but someone ought to know) that closed train sheds and old diesels are a problem, and should be removed as soon as possible. That should be the case for Paddington, within a couple of years, with even the (relatively clean) 800s not running their diesels there. Open stations are so draughty it seems unlikely they are a problem, though I guess calm weather might make them one.

I can't recall seeing any kind of extractor or chimney provided for diesel exhausts in stations, though I have a hazy recollection of seeing something of the kind in workshops and for steam engines in stations. Or have I imagined them?

Temple meads and Paddington stations are quite well vented ,built that way to cope with steam engines.

Roads are well vented, but diesel cars are apparently affecting peoples breathing ailments.

On that basis, surely all diesel trains should be clean within enclosed stations

I seem to recall some sort of extract ducting above a few platforms at London Victoria, to remove exhaust fumes from ye olde Hampshire units when these were still in use.
Similar arrangements may have existed elsewhere, but were never common.

It used to be like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3FDJ4KfpMg).  Search YouTube for clag.

When Birmingham New Street was rebuilt in the 1960s it included extractor vents in the platform canopies to remove diesel fumes. Worked well for years 'till the oily deposits inside the trunking caught fire because nobody had cleaned them...

AIUI the system was never used again.

Three points.

What is 'clean' under these circumstances? According to DfT figures the levels of noxious combustion products (NOx, CO, etc) in the air has reduced over the years. The only types of pollutant which have bucked the trend are the very small particulates.

Very few railway stations on the national network are 'enclosed'. Even if they have an overall roof, the ends are open. The only 'enclosed' stations I have come across are underground stations - and they all have electric trains.

I experienced the last great smog http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/6/newsid_3251000/3251001.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/6/newsid_3251000/3251001.stm) in London in the winter of 1962. You could not see more than a couple of yards, it was dark at midday and it smelt as if the doors to Hell had been opened with the levels of sulphur present. What occurs now is merely apprentice muck! (Which does not mean to say that efforts should not continue to be made to reduce the levels).

Smog? We didn't have smog - as the contemporary report on that BBC page makes clear, we called it fog. Fog was the dark dirty stuff, and anything white was called mist no matter how thick, at least in London.

There are more than a few stations below ground level that have the feel of being enclosed. Birmingham New St, Edinburgh Waverley and Sunderland come to mind. All served by diesel trains. Air quality in these stations, and others that are less enclosed, has been proven to be below 'safe' levels set by the EU and other international bodies. UK stations don't have to meet any air quality criteria though.

http://pure-oai.bham.ac.uk/ws/files/27847822/ICE_paper_accepted_version.pdf

https://www.airqualitynews.com/2015/09/11/paddington-station-air-more-polluted-than-marylebone-rd/

Of course, Paddington should slowly improve, as it becomes a station served almost exclusively by electric trains.

Why should rail stations be outside the law?

To be a bit more scientific about that, searching through the British Newspaper Archive found this as the earliest usage in London, in October 1952: ' "smog," as the Americans call it' (from Britannia and Eve, a very 1950s kind of ladies' magazine). There were no occurrences in 1951, and in 1950 just one - but there it was seen as specific to California.

From 1953 it starts to appear, rarely at first, in official material. I think the idea was to persuade people that this was something quite specifically nasty and not just weather, to prepare them for the cost and trouble that smoke-free zones would entail. To start with it still merited quotation marks in the general press, and as I recall it took a while longer to get into most people's vocabulary. I'm not aware of any on-line search that would confirm that, though.

Of course the Clean Air Act of 1956 was what made 1962 the last serious fog/smog, in the sense of that yellowy-brown stuff that meant you could go outside your own house onto the pavement and see nothing at all to tell you where you were. So I guess that by the time the word was well-known enough to be widely used, there wasn't any smog in London to use it for - it's gone back to being something foreign, but now more likely Chinese.

They aren't - there is no law for them to be outside. Put another way, nowhere else has to meet a limit for these diesel emissions either.

Since staff are there a lot longer, their exposure is greater than the public's so it is logical for control to be applied via HSE and the COSHH regulations. In fact it already is, but there is no limit defined for these substances, so it is up to each employer to do a risk assessment. Employers are not expected to do their own medical research or epidemiology, and the guidance HSE provides in HSG187 (http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/hsg187.pdf) is pretty primitive:
Table 2 Assessment of the level of exposure to DEEEs

Low	Medium	High
No visible haze in the workplace	Occasional white, blue or black smoke	Permanent white, blue or black smoke
No visible soot deposits	Visible soot deposits in certain    areas	Heavy soot deposits especially near emission points
No complaints of irritancy	Some complaints of irritancy	All exposed workers complain of irritancy
CO2 levels much lower than 1000 ppm  8–hour TWA*	CO2 levels about 1000 ppm 8–hour TWA	CO2 levels greater than 1000 ppm 8–hour TWA
Controls likely to be adequate	Check adequacy of controls	Controls not adequate; decide on control strategy

* TWA: time–weighted average.

HSE have known for at least five years that there ought to be COSHH limits for DEEEs, or at least for a single proxy measurement that can be done with suitably cheap instruments. The previous advice was to use CO₂, which is now accepted to be not good enough. (There's a presentation on this that was grabbed by Unite here (https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&ved=0ahUKEwjEh_Sky7XZAhVFYsAKHabwDAcQFghXMAY&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unitetheunion.org%2Fuploaded%2Fdocuments%2FControl%2520of%2520diesel%2520emissions%2520update11-17290.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1cPCvlnLso08e4d4QVp4gt).) But these things take time, and HSE were expecting a limit to be defined for them as a European regulation - which of course takes even longer. But presumably one or other of those will happen. To my mind they ought to just rush out something, to get employers used to doing something, and with a fairly lax limit, accompanied by a warning it will be made stricter as soon as there is some consensus on the right numbers.

And now we know that the roof at Paddington has a lot of provision for air to get in and out, while stopping rain getting in. But wind can carry snow in, and that's how we know.