From: "Andy" <as-AT-spelthorne.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Austria's Haider in London
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 10:07:33 +0100



Only saw your message this morning, so missed the opportunity to harass the
hotel. It wasn't an item on any news programme I listened to last night.
I'll see if it's in any of the papers.

By the way, I found out that Jill's father's company makes the signal lamps
for the signal in question. He says that BR/Railtrack  have always had a
historic problem in placing them in bad positions, particularly when there's
low-lying  sun light in early morning and late afternoon which is spot on
for the time of the crash. It sounds from what ASLEF [the driver's union]
say, that this is perhaps going to be part of what happened - they are now
insisting on two drivers up front to look out for this sort of thing.

The initial enquiry from the Health and Safety Exec talked of "system
failure" - at this point the HSE are not blaming the drivers. Sounds to me
like it's a combination of profit, but also the breaucratic inertia [in not
re-siting dodgy signals] that you remember so well.

Bit of the old BR culture plus a bit of the new privatised culture perhaps.

Perhaps Mussolini wasn't so bad.....they always say he made the trains run
on time. I'd be interested to know if railway safety was a positive aspect
of despotic leadership. I read somewhere that the Chinese Government are
insisting the head of their state run airline is actually in the air on one
of the planes as midnight strikes for the Y2K bugs. On the other hand the
French seem to do trains well - or so I remember from my back-packing days -
definitely preferred French to German ones, with Greek trains at the bottom
of the heap.

Andy