Friday night’s derailment at Grayrigg seems to have brought out the worst in some sections of the media. We have banner headlines in the tabloids about ‘Train Crash Carnage’, a lot of ill-informed rubbish spouted by self-appointed ‘experts’, and that appalling ambulance-chaser Louise Christian baying for blood. Not that the 70s dinosaur Bob Crow is any better.
What’s noticeable is the remarkable way the Pendolino coaches stood up to a high speed derailment. Compare this with the last serious crash, the derailment at Ufton Nervet in Berkshire, where an HST set derailed at the same speed, and came to a halt in roughly the same distance. In that crash one coach ended up folded in half, and six people died. At Grayrigg all nine coaches remained substantially intact with not as much as a broken window. The relatively low number of serious casualties resulted from people being thrown around inside.
Saying that, the fact that it’s caused by a catastrophic failure of a set of facing points is worrying, especially as it appears very similar to the Potter’s Bar accident in 2002. But passenger deaths on the railways are declining year-on-year, so all the talk about ‘profits before safety’ is just bollocks.
While any death is tragic, we need to keep a sense of proportion. Potter’s Bar was five years ago. In that time, Fifteen Thousand people have died on Britain’s roads. And a good proportion of those were the result of criminal recklessness an order of magnitude worse than the maintenance failures that cause Friday’s derailment.
A few weeks ago, a National Express coach overturned on the slip road connecting the M4 to the M25. The casualties were worse than Grayrigg. Many people suffered horrific injuries; there was an entire family all of whom lost limbs. The story lasted one news cycle in the media. The coach was towed away and the road reopened within 24 hours; no suggestion that the whole area be sealed off as a crime scene for days before any work started clearing the wreckage.
It’s impossible for anything to be 100% safe. It’s quite likely that we’ve reached the point where any attempt to eliminate the last 0.0001% risk might actually endanger lives, either by raising costs or reducing network capacity and forcing people onto the far more dangerous road network. I bet there are dozens of badly designed road junctions more deadly than any set of facing points on the national rail network.
I was wondering what the figures were for road deaths during that time – I’ve spent a lot of the week shouting “but what about road traffic accidents!!!!” at the radio, but without actually bothering to get hold of any facts.
It’s typical of the ‘media’ – as far as they’re concerned, ‘roads rule’. Then again, what can we expect after the insanity when richard hammond crashed?