After the Potters Bar Rail Crash, all rail maintenance was brought in house to Network Rail because of apparent poor maintenance by the outside contractors – and yet five years on, and the interim report into the Cumbria Crash again blames poorly maintained points, with again the same catalogue of missing parts causing the points to fail, and yet Network Rail had already said that there were no outstanding problems with the points recorded in their system, and that the track was checked on schedule. It just beggars belief that after the Potters Bar Rail Crash anybody working on track maintenance could think it is acceptable to either fail to properly check the track, or leave fundamental faults with the equipment on a high-speed line.
Category Archives: Transport
Are the Railways Safe?
So this morning, after the derailment of a high-speed express train heading from London to Glasgow, we are getting the inevitable comments from people that they aren’t going to travel by train because it’s unsafe – but is it.
To be honest, the first feelings I had when I saw the pictures, which thanks to the rural area in which the accident occurred didn’t start appearing until first light, were ones of amazement at both how in tact the train was, and also how few serious injuries there were. The train had been travelling at almost 100mph when it left the track – possibly after crossing a set of points, but the enquiry has yet to determine this as the cause. The train then came off the track bed, plunging down the side of the embankment. The momentum of the train means that the front few carriages of the train were spun around, and ultimately leaving only the last few carriages of the train upright. (The BBC has a good annotated picture showing the crash site.) However 90% of the 180 passengers walked away from the scene. Of the twenty or so passengers who needed hospital treatment five were seriously hurt, and one woman died. Comparing the scenes of crumpled carriages often seen after major crashes such as this, all of the carriages of the train from last night are in tact, even those that plunged off the embankment. This is surely a testament to the safety of modern train rolling stock compared to the older stock elsewhere that for example in the Ufton Nervet crash in 2004 crumpled in the impact.
It’s also worth remembering that the reason there is so much attention for this crash is that it is relatively rare – this is the first serious train crash in five years. Although when you see a list of rail crashes since 1950, as the BBC has helpfully published today, the total number killed in that entire period is less than the thousands killed on our roads every year. Just consider what would happen to a car on a motorway if it left the road and went down an embankment at nearly 100mph…
So whilst it is shocking to see pictures of the wreckage of the train, and of course we need a thorough investigation of the cause, we have to remember that rail travel is still probably the safest way to travel in the UK.
Metro-Land on DVD
There are a number of programmes that I remember fondly from growing up, but that I never really expected to see on DVD – and “Metro-Landâ€? is one of them. However at the end of last month, it was finally released to buy on DVD. Up to now the only time I’ve seen the programme is on an ageing video recording from one of the times it has been repeated. (Incidentally, it will also be shown on 28th August as part of the BBC Betjeman retrospective.)
So what’s it all about? My parents house in Rickmansworth is built on land that used to belong to the Metropolitan Railway company. Prior to the formation of London Underground in 1933, when the railway company was absorbed and the line became the Metropolitan Line, the company had grand plans. Unlike the other lines that went to form London Underground the Metropolitan Railway was running express services, and a goods service, far out into the depths of Buckinghamshire to Aylesbury and beyond. Ultimately reaching Verney Junction and the village of Brill near Oxford.
In the 1920’s, the marketing department of the railway coined the term Metroland in an effort to encourage passengers onto the line. The company even went so far as to help along the building of new houses in the suburbs – hence why the land on which my parents house is built belonged to the railway.
The “Metro-Land� DVD is a programme made by John Betjeman in 1973 where he explores some of the history of the railway, but more than that takes a snapshot of life in “Metro-Land� fifty years after the term was coined.
The programme starts at Baker Street, exploring the former hotel that the company built over the top of the station. From there the programme moves along the line through familiar places, eventually reaching the area where I grew up. There are a number of points in the programme that attract local interest – for example there are segments filmed in Croxley Green, and Moor Park – there is even a segment where John Betjeman visits a house just round the corner from my parents that I used to walk past almost every day. Finally the programme ends up out at the far reaches of the railway, where the houses were never built, and the track has long since been lifted, out where in Betjeman’s words the dream died.
On top of the original programme, the DVD includes some extra footage including pictures from the 1930’s of the opening of the branch to Stanmore – now operated as part of the Jubilee Line. It also includes the centenary parade in 1963 to celebrate 100 years since the Metropolitan Railway started, the last steam working on the line in 1971, and the more recent Steam on the Met events.
Not surprisingly I’ve ordered a copy of the DVD already, can’t wait to see it in it’s remastered glory!
Flickr Coincidence
One of the fun side effects of having your pictures on Flickr is when total strangers find something they like and comment on one of your pictures.
I’ve had one such comment recently on this picture that I took of the Devon Belle observation car, which runs on the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway that we rode on last week. The comment was from obcar13, a railway enthusiast who lives in Insch in the north of Scotland – about as far away from Devon as you could get, saying that coincidentally he’d just finished uploading a picture of a model of the very same car (pictured here) and how great it was to see the same car still running years later.
The car was originally built to form part of the Pullman Devon Belle express that ran from Waterloo to Ilfracombe between 1947 and 1954. However looking at further pictures in obcar13‘s photoset it seems the car then spent part of the remaining time before it went into preservation, running in Scotland!
I’m guessing that he hasn’t ever been down to the Paignton and Dartmouth Railway however from his comment he certainly seems to get a kick out of the fact that the car that he remembers riding in on a family outing back in the sixties was still giving good service down in Devon.
Heathrow Fun and Games
So this morning we took Beth’s parents up to Heathrow to catch their plane back to Canada. We’d experienced the crazy design of the new Terminal 3 Short Stay car park picking up Beth’s parents last week, but even at the fairly early hour of the morning we were there today, with most of the traffic apparently heading for the other terminals, we still hit problems.
If you haven’t experienced it as yet, it really is crazy. The old short stay car park has been closed, and they have build a new multi-storey car park directly behind the old car park, with a new bridge across to terminal 3. However unlike the previous car park, the new car park has the entrance and exit ramps at the back, on the opposite side of the car park from the terminal access. Coupled with the layout of the parking spaces the new car park forces all the pick-up and drop-off traffic to have to go all the way across the car park and back to do get to the pick-up point, more than that, for the majority of parking spaces, all the traffic also has to go past the pick-up and drop-off point both on the way in and the way out. As a result, most of the time there is a queue of stopped cars around the parking level, tailing back from the pick-up and drop-off point. In the old car park the pick-up and drop-off point was not only much larger, but also didn’t block the flow of traffic around the car park because it was positioned near to the entry and exit ramps. Fundamentally I think that whoever designed the car park really hasn’t thought about the way people use the car park. As to how to solve it, since moving the ramps really isn’t an option, the best choice seems to be to reverse the direction of the middle aisle of the level, which then gives much more access to people who want to park, but don’t want to go over to the pick up point.
Anyway, after the joy of the car park, this morning we also had fun and games with the Air Canada check in. Like many airlines they are actively encouraging passengers to make use of the web and self-service check-ins, which Beth’s parents did. In theory, what should happen is that they turn up at the airport, drop off their checked baggage, and head off for departures. According to the Air Canada web site, baggage can be dropped off up to four hours before departure – however it seems not at Heathrow for an early morning flight. We thought we’d get up promptly and have breakfast at the airport, however when we arrived, although the normal check-in desks were open (and with a massive queue), and the self-service check-in desks were active, there was nobody on any of the baggage drop off desks. A chat to the check-in representative on the first class desk revealed that the baggage drop-off desks didn’t actually open until 6am (bear in mind that it was ten-past six already at this point), and by the time someone actually appeared and opened the desks it was nearly 6:30am, and the queue of people waiting to drop off their baggage was getting decidedly long. The other amusing twist is that even though Beth’s parents had used the online check-in, and printed out boarding passes, the person on the desk printed out new boarding cards for them – and did this for everybody else – because apparently they have had trouble with reading the bar code that is printed on the web check-in boarding cards. It really makes me wonder what the advantage of the web check-in is if they still have to print boarding cards, and you still have to queue drop off the baggage…