> Seriously, who works on a railway until 6 in the morning?

A great many rail crews the world over .. night time being the best time for rolling maintainance and bed upgrades on largely daytime passenger lines.

The question that was asked during the investigation was more along the lines of "who does major work every night on rail lines and doesn't integrate end of shift safety checks (looking for still in place gear, unfinished work, etc)" ?

From what I saw they had those, but were in too much of a hurry to do it properly because they waited until 10m before line start to do them?

I read it that way also, a failure to proritise what should be mandated safety checks prior to delaring the line open for use, caused by a cascading chain of jamming too much work into too short a shift.

My father had many stints on many mine sites as a leading foreman in charge of shift workers and yard crews .. it's been Occ Health and Safety protocol since the 1970s (in Australia at least) to post game events that result in death, injury, or even a near miss in order to adapt procedures to minimise similar things happening again.

As I read it, at the time of this accident they hadn't gotten to the stage of mandated safety checks and trial runs prior to live runs.

Incidents like these are why many workplaces have check lists and strict protocols.

The working at night part is largely irrelevant to the actual accident, in this part of the world we run the longest heaviest trains in the world 24/7/365 largely fatal accident free and have dedicated safety officers looking out around the clock.

My company tracks near misses with that same progams. That is any situation where someone could have got hurt but by luck either nobody was there when the accident hapyened or someone noticed something that is wasn't procedure to look for.

Pretty much all major railway maintenance (at least for major lines which can't reasonably be closed) is done overnight, to avoid closing the railway during operating hours.