Where Worlds Collide

I’ve always been concerned that the rail industry is being strangled by excessive HSE ‘safely’ rules, dramatically increasing costs while trying to eliminate the lasty .0001% risk of an accident. At the same time we accept the carnage of 3000 deaths a year on the roads without a murmur.

One suggestion I came up with to ‘level the playing field’ was to fit all cars with black box recorders (just like trains and planes), which will record exactly your speed (and state of inebriation) when you had that prang.

Now it seems it’s already happening. One US driver is now starting a 20 year jail sentence after killing two girls while driving at 114 mph in a 30mph zone while drunk. And the black box installed as part of his airbag helped nail him.

Data recorders in air bags can record a car’s speed and deceleration and other data such as the pressure on a brake pedal at the time of a crash.

An estimated 10 million vehicles in the US are fitted with such recorders, which vehicle manufacturers began putting in vehicles in the 1990s to test air bag performance.

In recent year court prosecutors have begun using information from these data recorders, the existence of which most drivers will be unaware of, in criminal prosecutions.

What next? Absolute block working? Fronts of all cars to be painted yellow? (Thanks to Henry Cobb for the link)

BBC NEWS | England | North Yorkshire | Rail back in the Dales

Is this the first British example of a Swiss-style private railway?

Regular train services are returning to Wensleydale in the Yorkshire Dales for the first time in almost half a century.

Friday sees the opening of a new stretch of track, with full scheduled services starting on Saturday.

The railway could eventually link the east coast main line with the Settle-to-Carlisle Pennines route 40 miles away.

It is being operated by the Wensleydale Railway Company which has raised £1.2m to provide a commercial service in an area where busy country roads are the only alternative means of transport.

There are many privately-owned preserved lines, most of them run from nowhere to nowhere else, and don’t attempt to run a regular local passenger service. Although the Wensleydale line plans to operate steam trains in the high summer, they are also going to run a regular service using refurbished ex-BR class 108 diesel railcars.

This deserves to succeed, and might be a pointer for rural railways in general. I can see routes like the Liskeard to Looe line, or some of the self-contained Thames Valley branches operating as independant lines, perhaps with a small fleet consisting of modern railcar or two operating day-to-day services and a refurbished older ‘historic’ vehicle as a backup.

Some context. At the end of the 1990s, Britain’s previously state-owned railway network was splintered into a thousand parts, with many different companies owning the trains, operating them, owning, and maintaining the tracks. And it’s all gone pear-shaped.

French-owned Connex, one of the least-loved train operating companies, has been stripped of it’s franchise. They’d already lost one franchise, South-Central, and now their South-East operation, including many of London’s busiest commuter lines, has gone the same way. Cynics will suggest that Connex were no worse than a lot of other operators, but they had the misfortune to serve an area heavily populated by powerful and influential people, who are better at complaining and live much closer to the political centres of power than the users of someone like Arriva Trains Northern.

Another stunning example of the triumph of privofragmentisation, in which we end up paying more and more (in both taxes and fares) for a service that’s getting worse and worse.

Will Hutton lays into the whole broken system of fragmentation and short-term franchises.

The truth is that if we want a great rail system, we have to have great organisations running it, organisations that are passionate about delivering a great service to their customers and passionate about being railwaymen and women. In the entire debate about the rights and wrongs of rail privatisation, this obvious point is all too rarely made.

The Conservative government under John Major created the current monstrosity because it genuinely believed that just the magic wand of being private and pursuing the profit motive would build dynamic rail organisations. New Labour has been paralysed in devising an alternative system because it genuflects to the same totemic set of beliefs.

If either government – and senior officials – had any understanding of business, they would know that successful businesses are, above all, successful organisations made dynamic by an over-riding sense of purpose at their core. The question that should be asked is whether the current structure of the rail system fosters the growth of great rail companies with such a passionate commitment and sense of purpose. The answer is an emphatic ‘No’.

You cannot build a great rail company if you know that your licence to operate is temporary and if one of the key aspects of your success – the infrastructure of railways, stations and signalling – is outside your control. You are condemned to be a franchisee with a franchisee culture.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum, on Patrick Crozier has this to say:

All this is yet one more block section on the branch line to railway Gotterdamerung. At some point, someone is going to say “enough is enough”. And then what? Railway closures, higher fares, an end to upgrades or maybe a quiet acceptance of a worse service at a greater cost? Or will the real culprit ie fragmentation ie the wheel/rail split be identified? And if it is will anyone have the gumption to stand up to the EU and demand its removal?

Meanwhile, Notwork Rail goes from worse to worse. BBC News has this classic quote:

“The administrators are accountants, they didn’t know very much about running the railway.”

If only the tabloid press had found out about John Major and Edwina Currie in the mid-90s.

But… It’s now six years since that hopeless adminstration was flushed down the toilet of history by the Great British Public. Tony Blair’s New Labour have had six years to sort out the mess, and so far have failed to bite the bullet and reform a fundementally broken structure. Not that we should really have expected anything different

Update: Brian Micklethwait has some ideas.

Collected a parcel from John Brightwell today, containing two N-gauge BLS Re465s, 465.001 in plain blue, and 465.004 in “Wallis Tourism” advertising livery, along with some FS and SNCB coaches and a couple of intermodal flats.

It’s time I got a bigger layout….

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops recalls getting on the wrong train at Swindon and ending up in Kemble rather than Reading. Easily done, especially since HSTs look the same at both ends, so you can’t tell which way a stationary one is supposed to be going.

I’ve ended up on the wrong train a couple of times. Ironically, one time was when I was going to Swindon, and boarded a late-running South Wales train instead of the Bristol-bound train I should have caught. I only realised this when the train didn’t start slowing down on the approach to Swindon, and then sailed through the station without stopping.

I eventually had a 90 minute wait at Bristol Temple Meads waiting for a train back to Swindon. I suppose there are worse places to be than Temple Meads on a summer Saturday in 1974!