You would think that watching this happen night after night, we would become inured to it, but I wasn't expecting the emotional impact. I spend every working day maintaining railway earthworks to protect the travelling public. Part of my training is to read the detailed Rail Accident Investigation Branch reports which detail the consequences of not doing so (including the many minor incidents which could have been so much worse). So watching people scream for help amid the wreckage of a train (even one made of large wooden boxes) is literally my worst nightmare, and it frequently made me cry during the show. It probably didn't help that the news was full of sad stories from "7/7 ten years on" during the last week of the production.
On the other hand, at least railways are safer now than in George Hudson's day! When the railways were run by private companies, the profit motive came before public safety, with cuts to drivers' pay and inexperienced workers a key part in the high death toll. Regulation and nationalisation improved things, but the rail industry lost its way again in the years shortly after privatisation in 1993, when maintenance and inspections were outsourced and unreliably conducted.
In the run-up to "In Fog" I read the full report into the events surrounding Ladbroke Grove in 1999, the worst UK rail crash in recent history where one passenger train drove head-first into another, causing multiple deaths and a fireball. The root causes of this tragedy were found to be poor signal sighting: having rebuilt the track layout at Paddington Station such that you could go from any of the platforms onto any of the four approach tracks, it was then electrified, resulting in signals being covered up by bridges, gantries and portals).
Though this particular signal had been repeatedly passed at danger over several years (the railway equivalent of running a red light), no action had been taken to make the signals easier to see. Instead, a confusing and unusual "reverse-L" shape was adopted, which meant that the red light was next to the yellow rather than below it. This didn't help drivers reading the signals quickly. This situation underlines the importance of signal sighting committees (who inspect every new signal and check that it is visible at the correct distances) and the railway psychologists whose job is to predict driver and signaller behaviour.
On the fateful day, the signal was missed by a newly trained driver with little experience travelling into and out of Paddington and signallers who took no action until it was too late, because they had expected a driver who goes through a red light to notice and stop of his own accord. In their words, it was "just a SPAD" (= "Signal Pased at Danger"), not realising that the train which had gone through the red light was accelerating towards the mainline and another train travelling at high speed in the opposite direction.
This incident was one of many during the late 1990s and early years of 2000, leading to much soul-searching, the demise of Railtrack (becoming the publicly owned Network Rail) and the growth of collaboration across the fragmented industry. The lessons of these accidents were hard to learn, but were taken deeply to heart. It came as a surprise to me that many of the features of today's rail safety culture are relatively recent, for example, the RAIB only began in 2006, as investigations had previously been the responsibility of the HSE.
It is a mark of success, therefore, that we have just celebrated a decade in which only one passenger has been killed in a train accident, a remarkable and unprecedented record. However, there is no room for complacency. As Christian Wolmar puts it in an excellent 2012 article,
"This method of improvement [learning from failure] no longer works because all the obvious risks have largely been eliminated. With so many trains whizzing around a crowded network at speeds of up to 125mph, disaster is only one set of errors or bad luck away. And there is widespread concern within the industry that the background indicators, rather than the headline grabbing ones, are worryingly stable."At the Yorkshire Geotechnical Group's conference in York in May 2015, geotechnical engineers discussed the effects of the unprecented bad winter of 2013/14, where heavy rainfall caused more than 100 landslides across the rail network, but fortunately no derailments. The words of one rail engineer that day still ring in my ears: "we were lucky we didn't kill somebody".
So the screams for help on a Yorkshire stage this summer will continue to motivate me to work for a future where we do not disrupt the weather by pumping pollution into the atmosphere, and we have a railway network resilient enough to cope with whatever the weather may bring.
See Also:
See Also:
- In Fog 1: York's Railway History on Stage
- On Stage: "George Stephenson" by Hunter Davies (Book review inspired by In Fog and Falling Snow)
- ICE Triennial 1: On Desmond and Destruction
- Living Life in Orange, Or, What I Learned on My Track Safety Course
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