Another sorry mess on our railways
February 18th, 2004Details are starting to emerge of Sunday’s rail accident in which four men died. They were maintaining the track near Tebay, Cumbria, when a trailer carrying rails that had been running down a hill hit them. Now a Guardian story shows what a mess the situation was - there were five different firms contracted to work on the same site, there was little communication between the different teams, the helmets impaired workers’s hearing, the trailer was of a cheaper and less sophisticated road-and-rail type, and worst of all, it was only being held in place by a pair of wooden blocks before it started careening down the hill.
All shaping up to be yet another example of how shoddy the state of the fragmented, privatised rail industry is. Will any meaningful reform (both of the rail industry and our near-useless corporate homicide laws) from this horrible tragedy occur, or are we going to be fobbed off yet again?