BURNING QUESTIONS: Curious to uncover more about ensuring safety for rail passengers

摘要

ONE OF my favourite occasional sitcom characters in recent years is Phoebe's half-brother Frank in Friends - a pyromaniac who, if memory serves, listed "melting stuff as chief among his hobbies on his CV. Yet this disturbing behaviour could well have counted as valuable experience had he applied for a job with warringtonfire, one of the worlds leading fire safety organisations. Headquartered in the UK, with years of experience across many industries, its testing research, certification and consultancy services are increasingly in demand in these days of stringent legislation - particularly regarding rolling stock. A major part of this work - in layman's terms - involves setting fire to stuff, but there is a lot more to it, as I discovered while being guided around its testing labs by Paul Lythgoe, testing manager. Our first port of call was the fire resistance lab, where complete end sections of railway carnages can be placed in furnaces for monitoring of their ability to separate or contain a fire. "If a manufacturer is in the design stage or modifying a product, we can do an indicative, smaller-scale test instead for a fraction of the cost, reproducing the same time/temperature curve in vertical or horizontal orientation," says Lythgoe.