Olga Barannikova

Said the following about Vicki Beadle:

“Vicki has worked on the railway for an extraordinary 32 years, since the days of British Rail. In that time, she has worked in a wide variety of roles – from a press officer to family liaison to her current role as operations risk advisor for level crossings.

Vicki has exceptional emotional strength, shown in how she became an ambassador working with families of those who had lost their lives on the railway. She worked with these families to help them cope with their loss, develop memorials and more. In her time in this role, she helped people affected by the Potters Bar derailment and the Hatfield, Paddington, Southall and Great Heck train crashes. She is still in touch with many of those she helped and receives birthday and Christmas cards from them.

After an incident at Hipperholme, where a young girl lost her life at a level crossing, Vicki went above and beyond in helping the family with their grief. She visited the memorial and collected all dead flowers, shredded them, and then spread them over the railway with the family, so the family felt that all those flowers would stay with the daughter that they had lost.

Vicki also volunteers her time, getting involved with schools to carry out mock interviews for jobs, which gives her the opportunity to promote Network Rail as a thriving business to be in and help young women to see that the railway is for everyone.

Her current role is about leading the Level Crossing and Community Safety team in the delivery of compliance inspections, operational risk assessments, monitoring of public interfaces and maintenance of the systems developed to monitor Route safety performance. Early on in role she identified that the information in the National Risk Assessments was very vague, so she took it upon herself to organise a workshop for the level crossing teams to heighten their knowledge and support them in their role.

She also introduced optioneering meetings, which are now attended by the Heads of departments and has become the place where decisions are now made with regards mitigation measures identified in their Risk assessments. Vicki was responsible for writing the terms and conditions, which have now been used as best practice on other routes. She is an excellent communicator and can engage with stakeholders at all levels.“