Railways Blog

Add Stockport station to the list of places not to go when you’ve got a camera. I was taking some photographs at the north end of platform 1/2 while waiting for a delayed connection to Doncaster.

Suddenly I was yelled at in an extremely aggressive and threatening manner by one of the ubiquitous security goons telling me to leave the far end of the platform.

Turned out there was a sign saying “Passengers must not cross the line”, which I had assumed appies to railway tracks themselves (such signs appear at the end of most platforms). No, it seems this line refers to a painted line across the platform about 100 feet from the end of the platform. As to why the last 100 feet of the platform is out of bounds, all the security goon could come up with was some undefined “Safety” reason. (Probably some stupid and fatuous rule dreamed up by the Health and Safety Executive)

While photography isn’t actually banned there yet, the combination of vaguely-worded signage and aggressive jobsworths make it an inhospitable place to practice the hobby.

Makes me wonder if it’s time to hang up my camera except for the occasional foreign trip.

Update: Their other victim has this to say on Usenet. Remember Usenet? It was what people used in the days before egroups and blogs.

People rant about British train operating companies, including on occasions me. But no failures, cockups or mismanagement by the likes of Virgin or Connex approaches the scale of the chaos that’s engulfed British Airways at Heathrow the fast four days, when the checkout staff and baggage handlers walked out in a dispute over working practices. 100,000 passengers were left stranded, some for more than four days. Fights broke out in the departure lounges.

Patrick Crozier writes in a comment on Transport Blog that it’s all because of a small change of the law making it harder for companies to sack strikers. But it takes two to make an industrial dispute; I suspect much more of the blame lies at the feet of heavy-handed management.

In the end, it’s the customer who suffers. How many of those 100,000 will never fly BA again? The whole think makes me wonder if British Airways are going the way of Pan Am (Remember them?)

This month’s Model Rail has a review of CJM’s new n-gauge version of an EWS class 67 diesel, and what an incredible model it is. I saw a couple of pre-production samples at the Alexandra Palace show in March. The bodyshell is a highly-detailed resin casting, with etched brass detailing parts, running on Chris Marchant’s own flywheel-drive mechanism, the whole thing professionally sprayed and hand-finished.

However, at a price tag of £400 per loco, I fear I may have to rethink my provisional order for two of the things I made back at the N gauge 35th anniversary show last September, before I knew the price, even though a pair of them on a china clay train would have looked nice.

How have I managed never to have heard about the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland? It’s an amazing futuristic boat lift linking two canals in Scotland, opened last year. It looks like something that’s escaped from a science-fiction novel set on an alien planet, using quite simple technology on a grand scale. (Link from Ken MacLoed)

From BBC News. A Freightliner train has come off the track on the Trent Valley line between Tamworth and Lichfield, carrying, among other things, Guinness. Fortunately no injuries, and it’s on a stretch of line that’s got an alternative route, so disruptions to services aren’t as bas as the could have been.

Yesterday, seven people died when a minibus carrying fourteen holidaymakers to Manchester Airport crashed on the M56, half-way through it’s three-mile journey. As many people died at the train crash at Southall, and three less than the crash at Hatfield that all but brought Britain’s railways to a complete standstill.

Those rail crashes were all over the news for weeks. Yesterday’s M56 accident wasn’t even the lead item on Channel 4 news. All of which highlights the totally different attitudes towards accidents between the two modes of transport.

On Transport Blog, Brian Micklethwaite writes this rather silly post.

The big difference between road safety and train safety is that road safety is in your hands. If you drive carefully you can pretty much guarantee not to get killed in your car, or to kill anyone else.

That may be a popular opinion, especially by those people who think they’re immortal, and don’t drive safely. But it’s completely false. It’s the comfortable lie motorists tell themselves because the truth, that they are responsible not just for their own safety, but for safety of every else sharing the same road as themselves, and vice versa, is too much for them to handle.

He goes on to describe his father, who sounds like a very safe and careful driver, who insisted that a properly aware driver will never always be able to avoid any accident, even he meets some idiot driving on the wrong side the road on a blind bend at twice the safe speed limit.

Millions agree with my dad that all deaths on the roads are the fault of the drivers involved, all of the drivers involved. If any one of the drivers involved had been driving like my dad did instead of how they actually did, there’d have been fewer deaths and maybe none at all. It’s tough on passengers who die on the roads. But they could have created a culture of safety instead of nagging dad to go faster, so they too deserved to die, if they did.

Take the argument in the final sentence to it’s logical conclusion, then anyone killed at Southall, Ladbrooke Grove and Hatfield that voted Conservative in the 1992 general election deserved to die as well, for they voted in the government that fragmented the railway and compromised safety.

Road deaths? They’re up to us. This is what everyone thinks, and everyone is right.

Millions of people might believe that. But millions of people believe in horoscopes. Millions of people think the most pressing question in Britain is who’s going to be the next person kicked out of Big Brother. Millions believe everything they read in the Daily Mirror. But that doesn’t make them correct.

BBC NEWS | UK | £7bn scheme to tackle congestion

So New Labour have done a traditional Labour U-turn, and decided to embark on an orgy of road-building. Well, not quite.

I suppose I should be grateful that they’re just widening existing roads rather than building a whole lot of completely new ones, and some of the more feared proposals (like the 12-lane M4 past my parent’s house in Slough) aren’t back on the agenda. From my perspective as a non-driver, new roads make my life worse. Why? Because as soon as somebody builds a new road, out-of-town ‘business parks’ and ‘retail parks’ inevitably spring up alongside them, sucking economic activity out of town and city centres and moving them to places that are a pig to get to by public transport. Just try commuting round the M25 by public transport and you’ll see what I mean.

We’ll get a lot of environmental protests, especially some of the controversial sections of the road along the south coast. I wonder how much the environmentally-insensitive routing by the dessicated accountants at the Department of Transport have to do with this. The reason so many new roads plough though local beauty spots is because their philistine calculations assign a zero value to such things as ancient woodland or downland, while they assign a much higher value to flat, unscenic farmland to which they’ll have to pay higher compensation to the landowners.

BBC NEWS | England | Hereford/Worcs | Safety rule ignored before train crash

Safety procedures were not followed at the scene of a crash between a train and a mini-bus in which three people died on Monday, say investigators.

This is being reported (quite wrongly, in my opinion) as “Three dead in rail collision”. A more accurate headline might be “three dead in road accident”.

The accident didn’t happen on a public road; it’s a crossing between the railway and a farm track on private land. The minibus was carrying farm workers.

What worries me is that some HSE bureacrats will use this tragedy to impose yet more cumbersome safety rules and costs on the railway, which will be borne by rail passengers in higher fares. Why should rail users have to pay to protect vehicle drivers from their own stupidity? If people from the shallow end of the gene pool want to gamble with their lives and those of their passengers to save 30 seconds, there’s not much railway can do about it.

Network Rail said the crossing, its telephone and the warning and instruction signs were all in perfect working condition.

The company said it wrote to the farmer on 17 January 2002, to remind him of the requirement to use the crossing correctly and warned that misuse could lead to prosecution.

If the van driver survived the crash, I hope they throw the book at him. He should be doing jail time for manslaughter.

Reminds me of the accident in Essex a few months back. A tractor driver opened the gate one one side, drove it onto the tracks, then stopped right across the tracks to climb out in order to open the gate on the other side. Then the train cut his tractor in half.

Update: Channel 4 news is reporting that it’s likely the driver was a migrant worker who could not read English. So perhaps part of the blame should fall on the farmer employing these workers for not explaining the crossing rules to them.

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.