Why close rail but not riskier roads?

Are you taking a risk travelling during bad weather? With yet another warning of severe conditions across Scotland issued for tomorrow the issue is taking on increasing significance.

Transport secretary Mairi Mcallan remarked last week that “we are in the midst of a storm season of unusual severity and frequency”.

Significantly, there was an unprecedented two shutdowns of the Scottish rail network in three days at the beginning of last week. But the irony is trains are the safest form of land travel, and at a time when they were emptied of passengers, the country’s roads remained open.

But the past thinking that trains could or should continue when other forms of transport are halted by bad weather has been turned on its head, reinforced by the fatal Carmont crash near Stonehaven in 2020.

Scotland’s railways have become more risk averse, but those in the industry say justifiably so because trees are far more likely to fall on lines north of the Border, and several trains have also been hit or engulfed by landslides.

People opting to travel by train are entitled to believe they are being kept safe since someone else is doing the driving, on a discrete network over which they have no control. But what happens when that transport option is no longer available?

I hear of concerns among rail chiefs about the wider risk in such situations, of folk switching to less safe forms of travel, such as driving.

It is true that last week police warned against unnecessary travel and for people to consider delaying setting off until the conditions improved.

However, that comes across as take-it-or-leave-it advice since most people consider their travel as necessary. It also contrasts rather sharply with passengers being told by the rail industry ‘it’s too dangerous to travel by train, so we are preventing you from doing so’.

If passengers opt to drive instead, the difference is, of course, they are transferring the risk from the corporate responsibility of a train operator to themselves when they get behind the wheel.

But if we are in for more extreme weather perhaps we’ll need to countenance stronger warnings, or even across-the-board travel restrictions, rather than simply reducing the risk to some modes and increasing it on others.