Story Contracting

How Story Contracting used Tended’s geofencing technology to enhance trackside safety

Company background

Highly respected nationally for providing rail, plant and construction solutions, Story Contracting is one of only four plant providers in the UK awarded ‘Gold’ by Network Rail for reliability and continuous improvement. They have also earned a reputation for outstanding health and safety practices, recognised with the prestigious RoSPA ‘Gold’ Award for 7 consecutive years.

Challenges

Story Contracting was looking for innovative technology to increase safety standards across their projects. Guided by their commitment to health and safety excellence, they wanted to implement a solution that would support their workforce in delivering projects to the highest safety standards.

Solution

Key examples of where Tended’s system has been applied

As part of a £4.6m Network Rail accessibility upgrade project in Scotland. Tended’s Wearables were used by teams at Port Glasgow station to help keep workers a safe distance away from adjacent open lines when working on the upgrades, which remained open for the duration of the project.
Tended’s solution was also implemented by Story Contracting to support the correct placement of WSMBs. By attaching devices to the equipment, their teams could see a live view of the WSMBs on the Dashboard and compare this to the planned locations.

Results

Tended’s technology has helped enhance safety and efficiency by:

Providing real-time alerts if workers stepped outside of safe working limits, helping them regain situational awareness if they unintentionally strayed toward open lines.
Helping to prevent potential accidents and near misses for teams working on this essential upgrade project.
Giving an accurate live view of the worksite and live versus planned locations of their WSMBs.
Helping to eliminate marker board irregularities by supporting both planners and workers in ensuring their correct placement.

The pilot achieved its objectives of reducing the risk of workers straying outside of safe working limits, providing an additional level of protection for track workers and improving asset visibility. Based on the pilot’s success, Story Contracting is rolling out Tended’s technology across further projects.

Darren Pennycuick, Senior Construction Manager at Story Scotland said:

“I can see this system being very useful for us when we’re setting out our marker boards. It gives us good data on the back end of how accurately we’re placing these boards out when we’re out onsite.“It’s a very good system. The guys have been really, really impressed with it over the time that it’s been in use here and it’s certainly something that we’ll be looking to develop going forward.”