Our Company senior management team also have multiple years of experience throughout CP4 and CP5 from both an Earthworks Examining Engineer (EWE2) and Earthworks Manager (EWE1) level working on the Civil Engineering Framework Agreement contract.

We have recentlty appointed a new Operations Director, who is the former Amey earthworks national CRE (Contractors Responsible Engineer) who brings with him more than 10 years of experience in the successful delivery of over 300,000 earthwork examinations for Network Rail. This role also included being part of the EWE1 (Earthworks Manager) assessment team, the national technical/operational lead, and the former Earthworks Examining Engineer for multiple routes including Wales.

The safety of our staff and others around us is always at the forefront of what we do. On receipt of a new work bank we bring all associated staff together for a pre-season start up meeting. We use this opportunity to re-brief the operational risks and control measures associated with navigating steep slopes and working at height.

Our examiners will work to their individual task lists throughout the season, generally working as IWA (Individual Working Alone) utilising our internal ‘lone worker app’ where we keep regular updates of their locations and wellbeing.

Our programme uses the work bank and compliance dates to ensure zero non-compliance, with our resource utilised to maximise productivity based on each worker’s geographic location and their anticipated output. We always build in contingency to our programme for any seasonal bad weather or unforeseen circumstances.

The examiner will upload their work to the Network Rail database daily, ready for synchronisation. On a weekly basis we will update the client representative with planned versus actual and show any reforecasting where needed before delivering a monthly/period report showing progress against the baseline plan.

Earthwork examinations in the rail environment is a highly specialised skill and every one of our earthwork examiners has between 5 to 10 years’ experience in earthwork inspections. We review their EWE3 competency annually in accordance with ‘NR SP CTM 017 Competence & Training in Civil Engineering’.

We continually monitor our examiners for quality and accuracy and provide further training and/or mentoring where required. 

Earthworks failures generally occur during periods of inclement weather, so we make sure the safety of the responding examiner is paramount by providing them with as much information about the incident, track layout, line speeds and site contact numbers. We also ensure appropriate lighting is made available should the incident occur at night.

If during a shift one of our examiners comes across something that requires immediate attention, then we will raise this with the client representative within the required timescales as an ‘urgent defect’ and give as much information as possible together with photographs of the issue.

This could be an earthworks related issue identified during an inspection but could also be anything we feel could compromise the safe running of the railway.

Our examiners will also use the Close Call system and upload any unsafe conditions or acts to a relevant safety reporting portal.