(31-05-2016, 10:54 AM)dorothy.pipet Wrote: An attempt for comments please.
This was done timed but with notes available.
Pre-amble
As soon as I saw this question on the exam paper, I knew that it had been inspired by the Stockley points incident, which actually was at that time the most recent (and could potentially have resulted in the worst accident) such issue to have emerged. More recently a somewhat similar case has come to light, but instead of emerging very shortly after commissioning only manifested itself after some 20 years of operation.
To answer the question does not require knowledge of either of the details of either of these occurrences since it is generic and such undesireable situations have always been known to be possible, but certainly if one has experience of some real instance, then it certainly focusses the mind when producing an answer- just one example why it is useful for IRSE exam candidates to keep abreast of the current concerns of the industry to achieve "situational awareness".
In the case of Stockley, this was the catalyst for escalation across the industry (the Railway Industry Association / IRSE Recommendations in the UK which led to NR increasing the rigour and prominence of Project Stagegates) and indeed shared with the international audience via articles in IRSE News.
Answer
The first part of the question first asked "what documentation would you check?" then "how would you investigate the allegation".
In that context your answer appeared to get of on the wrong foot when it started: "Ask that the points be locked in place"......
I think that it would have been wiser to have responded in the order requested by starting with the documentation; the first bullet point was also rather more detailed than it needed to be for this question, good though it was.
It was sensible to put something "up front", but I think the way I'd have done it would be.
Assumption: Railway has been made safe and some form of temporary working method established by others in the front line and that my investigation is to establish first whether the allegation has substance, secondly whether it was due t interlocking data fault, thirdly (if applicable) how it was that the interlocking was in an unsatisfactory state"
and then get straight into listing the relevant documentation before expanding into the acquisition of other evidence when discussing how you'd undertake the investigation.
As an investigator, you do tend to need to have some background before talking to witnesses, in order to have at the back of your mind some idea of things that are likely to be of interest and have some questions up one's sleeve to ask- to avoid a completely unstructured interview which may take a long time and fail to give information that could have been extracted. The interviewee often won't know what the interviewer wants to know and in some cases may feel in some way guilty and therefore might try not to say things that they do believe would be of interest or even be deliberately distracting and evasive. Hence the interviewer needs to have several lines of questioning that seek to confirm / repudiate various potential theories and this itself requires a level of understanding about the technology, processes that should have been followed, project implementation, event timeline in order to have conjectured some possible scenarios. On the other hand the interviewer does need to get the interviewee to tell what they know and how things seemed to unfold to them from their own perspective at the time that they did / didn't do things without contaminating that evidence by pre-conceived notions. Whether or not the interviewee has any intention of misleading or being "economical with the truth", human memory is not like replaying a video recording and works by reconstructing a reality from a range of disparate sources and the very form and wording of an interview question will be providing the nucleus around which an answer will be constructed that seem to fit and thus construct a response that the interviewee hope will satisfy the interviewer (regardless of whether they are genuinely trying to give the pure unadulterated truth from their perspective).
Having a certain (too much!) experience of having to do such, it certainly is very difficult to do well.
The truth is that one does not know what documentation might be relevant until after one has spoken to all the witnesses, but one does need a certain amount initially to be able to try to assimilate the context and undertake a "first cut" of what amongst the mountain might be relevant to have some idea who you might wish to talk to and broadly about what; it is only once one has had that conversation that one discovers what further documentation should be scrutinised. Very often there is a need to re-interview some of the same witnesses later on in te investigation, in order to cast light on the inevitable discrepancies which emerge between various sources of testimony and other evidence. I think I could probably write a book on this, but in the exam there are 8 minutes to get down some bullets!
Looking at yours:
Whereas there was documentation inferred, it wasn't very evident. I think that I'd have presented as a list (or perhaps table) listing:
WHAT document
WHY relevant
HOW I'd use to further investigation
Since this first section was about investigating whether the allegation had substance, I think that you had some good content but not convinced re relevance of the 5th one. I think you probably meant that there may have been other potential causes for the event which the signaller alleged actually happening, but not reflecting upon the integrity of the interlocking itself but created by some other cause. This is certainly a very valuable point to make; however it wasn't explained like that- indeed had this been made the last on the list and introduced with a statement reflecting that even if the interlocking seemed fine given a level of recheck and retest failing to find anything that the allegation should not be dismissed without having investigated other possibilities, then it would have been transformed.
[respond to parts b & c when get the chance.......]
PJW