Introducing EDDY to help us manage trespass

Dear Richard,

As you will all know, dealing with trespassers can feel like a race against the clock to respond to the incident, ensure the individual is safely away from our infrastructure and restore normal running for our passengers.

Sometimes, through no one’s fault, the information we receive in initial reports can be a bit vague in terms of location, description of the trespasser and their behaviour. This in turn makes it harder to locate the individual and resolve the situation which leads to delays for our customers.  

Together with South Western Railway (SWR), we have been looking ways we can reduce the impact of trespass and how best to support you all in dealing with incidents as efficiently as possible.

After lots of discussions across our partnership, I am thrilled to be introducing EDDY, our new trespass initiative to help standardise the way we report trespass.

EDDY helps us to capture the vital information anyone dealing with trespass needs to know in one catchy acronym. It stands for:

E – Exact location 

Is the individual near any landmarks, stations, or bridges for our incident controllers to pinpoint where they are? Are they on the track where they are a danger to trains or an embankment?

D – Direction of travel 

Where do they seem to be heading i.e. towards the track or towards a boundary fence? Are they going in a direction towards London (Up side) or away from London (Down side)? If these details are available, this can greatly narrow down our search.

D – Description of the individual 

What are they wearing and what colour/length of hair do they have? If you only get a glance, try and note the colours of their clothes as a key way to identify the trespasser.

Y – Youth? 

Does the trespasser appear to be a child, teenager, or an adult as this can help inform how our responders approach the situation.

The idea behind introducing EDDY is that no matter who may be reporting a trespass incident, they can use this acronym to capture the key details to pass on to the signaller or incident controller. This will make it much more efficient to log the information and send out a response team which benefits the route, our passengers and the welfare of the trespassers.

Over the coming weeks, you will start to see more about EDDY around our locations, but I want to encourage you all to start putting this into practice, especially as we are well and truly at the start of the festive season when trespass can increase. Please feel free to print this message off for any of our colleagues who do not have access to email and I’d encourage you to talk about this with your teams too.

By having EDDY as an easy to remember point of reference, we can all help make a positive difference to the way we report and deal with trespass and look to embed this in our day to day working so it becomes second nature.

Thank you all for your support.

Clyde

Interim operations director