The Railway Safety Regulator (RSR) has lifted the prohibition directive issued to the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA), with conditions, after the parastatal submitted a corrective action plan to the regulator.
PRASA Rail relayed to the RSR how it intends dealing with the issues pertaining to manual authorisations of trains during degraded train operations, after being slapped with the prohibition after preliminary investigations indicated that human error was to blame for the train crash in Germiston last week.
The move effectively banned PRASA from operating trains under “abnormal conditions”, or manual authorisations.
The rear-end collision involving two Metrorail trains at the Geldenhuys station on Tuesday morning had been preliminarily deemed ‘human error’, as, at the time of the incident, trains had to be manually authorised by the train control officials, owing to the unavailability of the normal signalling system and issues with the signal cables.
“The RSR has taken a decision to lift the issued prohibition directive to PRASA with immediate effect and to invoke Section 45a of the National Railway Safety Regulator Act in instances where PRASA has contravened the directive,” the rail agency said in a statement on Monday.
The regulator imposed strict special conditions as it instructed PRASA to implement the corrective action plan with immediate effect.
The conditions relate to the improvement of PRASA’s telecommunication system, the strengthening of supervision, the development of verbal communication protocols and improved monitoring.
PRASA is expected to submit monthly progress reports and any default on the conditions will see RSR reinstitute the ban.