Report 07/2026: Near miss with track workers at Bookham Tunnel

Near miss with track workers at Bookham Tunnel, Surrey, 29 April 2025.

At around 11:42 on 29 April 2025, a passenger train was involved in a near miss with a team of three track workers walking through Bookham Tunnel, on the approach to Bookham station in Surrey. The train was travelling at 33 mph (53 km/h) as it passed the team. The track workers either moved to refuges inside the tunnel or stood against the tunnel wall as the train passed them.

RAIB’s investigation found that the track workers were walking in a different location to that which had been blocked to trains and that neither the track workers, nor the signaller who had granted the line blockage, had realised this. This happened because the safe work pack, which formally detailed the safety arrangements for the task, incorrectly contained line blockage arrangements for the nearby Mickleham Tunnel, and not the tunnel around which the team was working. The error in the safe work pack had been introduced during the planning stage for the work and went unnoticed, despite the pack being checked multiple times during various stages of the safe work process.

RAIB identified two underlying factors. The first was that Network Rail’s lack of a specific process for managing the transfer of information between its asset management systems and the system it uses for producing safe work packs allowed the introduction of the error into the safe work pack. The second was that steps in Network Rail’s process for producing safe work packs were either not routinely carried out or were not carried out effectively.