Railways are safe – so why the panic stations?

ONE of this Government’s most lasting achievements will be the permanent damage they have done to our railways.

Trains were just beginning to recover from the violent destruction wreaked on them 60 years ago by Transport Minister Ernest Marples (who ended his career by skipping the country, by train, to avoid the taxman).

Then our Prime Minister, in a self-harming moment worthy of Gerald Ratner, told everyone that it was far too dangerous to travel by t rain. Passenger numbers, already shrivelled by the shutdown of the economy, collapsed.

The t rains were effectively renationalised and have only been saved from bankruptcy by sacks of funny money, plucked from Rishi Sunak’s increasingly withered magic money tree. Now that is running out.

Services are just going to have to be cut, along with jobs. We’ll all have to travel on terrifyingly dangerous ‘smart’ motorways instead.

Yet as usual, the panic is based on bilge and tripe. The Rail Safety and Standards Board recently concluded after experiments that the risk of infection per passenger journey is only one in 11,000.

The German t r ai n operator Deutsche Bahn made a safety survey and found: ‘We see remarkably few infections in trains. No infections occurred in persons on board with a stay of less than ten hours. Not a single contact tracing has been identified in Germany and Austria as having been triggered by an infection on the train journey.’

The plight of our railways is just one of a hundred similar needless tragedies. When will we wake up to it?