Open Access
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The ‘Grayrigg… ten years on’ article ( RAIL 820) offered a long, deep and meaningful insight into both this fatal accident and the safety learning experiences which emerged from the subsequent RAIB investigation. However, I cannot help but wonder whether the railway safety industry has not missed something far more fundamental.
The one big clue to the ‘root cause’ of the Grayrigg fatal accident, and indeed several other remarkably similar accidents, is contained within one very short sentence: “The offending points at Grayrigg have since been replaced by continuously welded rail.”
During the past two decades, no less than four of the UK’s seven most serious rail crashes were caused by sets of switches and crossings (S&Cs) - sets of points to the layman. These four crashes were at Grayrigg, Potters Bar, Ladbroke Grove and Southall.
In the first two cases, the points themselves were found to be defective (for different reasons in each case). In the second two cases, the drivers had misread the signals protecting the points (again for different reasons in each case). However, the ‘root cause’ safety learning is surely that in three of these four locations, immediately after these accidents had occurred all three sets of points were all permanently removed from the railway network. In these three locations, there is now just plain track.
Furthermore, the permanent removal of these superfluous sets of S&Cs at these three accident sites has not apparently had any adverse effects on train routings or timetabling. Indeed, their removal has not affected any of the key train service performance monitoring indicators along these routes.
In another two of the seven fatal crashes during this 20-year period - at Great Heck and Ufton Nervet - the primary cause of these two accidents was high speed trains hitting trespassing motor vehicles.
However, both of the formal accident reports into these two incidents (they were not accidents) noted that the initial collision between these two trains and the offending/obstructing motor vehicles had only caused a minor derailment to the train.
It is important to note that well after their initial impact with the cars, both trains continued for some considerable distance further along the railway line (both almost upright and thus wholly intact). It was only when these two trains’ ‘already derailed’ wheelsets then hit a set of points that both were so spectacularly derailed. Thus both sites of these two multiple fatality accidents were, once again, actually located on a set of points.
Surely the critical safety insight into the single most important root cause of at least three (and possibly as many as six) of the UK’s seven big recent rail crashes is that inherently simple track layouts are essential for safe railway operations. Quite simply, boring mile upon boring mile of boring plain continuously welded track - ideally designed without any complicated, expensive and downright dangerous switches and crossings - is far and away the safest possible layout which can be designed into a safe and modern railway network.
Accordingly, one has to wonder how many other sets of redundant, superfluous and underused sets of switches and crossings are still lying in wait - literally ‘accidents waiting to happen’ - across the remainder of Britain’s railway network.