Following on from the awful tradegy this weekend, it is about time something was done to the railway infrastructure in the UK, over the poast few years some of the most serious crashes have been caused by defects in the track or signalling. 

I think its about time the railway system was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st centuary.  What would be good is a high speed service linking the big centres of the country, this could be acheived using a maglev type system with limited stops. (say following the lines of the major motorways)  the track could be elevated.  The current track could then be utilised to connect the larger centres to the localities.   

Maybe wishful thinking but I was aware that something like that was planned for the GWR and if the rail companies, te government and private industry got together, who knows?

Network Rail have achieved an awful lot in the past few years with regard to getting a grip on the infrastructure. Have you ever seen the New Measurement Train? http://www.iroyoungprofessionals.org.uk/events/2006_june.shtml They must be doing something right as foreign railways have visited us to see it. See also http://www.serco.co.uk/markets/transport/railoperations.asp for details of some of the the other test trains. 


Maglev isn't immune from accidents either: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5370564.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/5372818.stm

The media reporting of Friday's accident has been truly dire. As usual. In fact I've had to stop watching it for fear of throwing something heavy at the TV! I think the problem lies in the fact that the vast majority of people, journalists included, know nothing about the technical side of how railways work. Hence the inane questions that they've been asking over the past few days. Even after 20 years interest in railways I know that my understanding has only just scratched the surface so what chance has a non-interested person got? We've had 3 days of solid coverage of this accident now. I wonder how many people have died on the roads during that time?

In order to inject a few facts into the debate here are the number of rail accidents that caused fatalities to staff or passengers over the past 30 years broken down into 5 year periods.

1967-1971 - 28 fatal accidents
1972-1976 - 16
1977-1981 - 11
1982-1986 - 12
1987-1991 - 10
1992-1996 - 6
1997-2001 - 4 (one of which was caused by a car driver)
2002-2006 - 2 (one of which was caused by a car driver).

I think these facts speak for themselves. Notice how privatisation in the mid-90's doesn't appear to have interrupted the long term downward trend.  If today's media is in a frenzy about Friday's accident what would they have made of 1967 or 1969 when there were SIX and SEVEN fatal accidents respectively?  We need to accept that there will always be accidents and we need to be able to deal with them rationally without descending into hysteria and knee-jerk reactions. We need to consider the transport system as a whole - it's no good spending billions to achieve 99.9999% safety on the railways if it prices the railway out of the market and causes everyone to use their cars instead.
I also feel really sorry for Network Rail boss John Armitt, a man with an engineering background (rather than purely financial) who's done a lot to turn the railway infrastructure around since the dark days of the Railtrack era. He didn't deserve this.