Recent content by Spet0789

That’s a selective quote. Clearly safety is very important. It’s all about the interpretation of RP.

That’s absolutely true, so it’s the railway’s responsibility to look at all causes of delay and see how many of them can be eliminated / minimised. It feels like some minds are quite closed on these topics. The job of the railways is not to maximise safety. If it were we’d have a Christmas Day...

That last is an interesting statement. Is there any information on the follow-up? Did those individuals get appropriate support or did they go on to commit suicide elsewhere or in another way? 1729596193 A very sensible post and thanks for it. Your point that running at caution may prevent...

And I assume from your lack of further comment you’ve realised that my numbers are correct and your 35 is not? Anyway, it’s not for me to run the analysis. It’s for the railway to have balanced the delays on the one hand against the lives saved, if any, by delaying or stopping services.

1729548715 Actually that’s the number for 23/24. For 22/23 it was lower still at 10. My source is the ORR. What’s yours?

I’m not trying to save cost. I’m trying to reduce delays. 1729548119 You’re right. I am making assumptions. What are the low-hanging fruit in reducing delays in your view?

The number was 12 in 22/23 and has been between 10-20 for the past 5 years. The NHS would typically pay about £1m per life. How about we start there?

I agree that other sources of delay are more important. I just recall a number of times where I have been delayed by trespassers. Some lines (urban lines I expect) are obviously more prone than others. Just because there are other sources of delay doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to reduce delays...

Perhaps I should have been clearer. I know full well that road vehicles stop more easily than trains. That said, your numerical comparison is absurd - you seem to be comparing a car at 10mph with a train at 70mph. The stopping distance for a train at 70mph is ~400m. For a car it’s ~80m...

The person can avoid the train much better than the train can avoid the person. We accept pedestrians within feet of road traffic which wouldn’t be able to stop if that person chose to leap into the roadway. We don’t stop the traffic on the road (except exceptionally rarely, such as with...

A bus driving down a busy High Street can’t stop if someone steps out into the road. We accept that risk. Other modes of transport don’t feel the need to protect someone with a complete inability to keep themselves safe. Why should the trains?

It always is. Surely trains would be safer if they only ever ran at 5mph? They don’t because we compromise between safety and utility. Take this specific example… in my view it seemed to me that the railways over-react to trespassers on the line and put a tiny improvement in safety ahead of...

Why? 1729450418 No, we live in the real world, which is full of complex trade-offs. I think the travelling public want to see more reliable and cheaper railways.

Each time it happens is a tragedy, but you and your colleagues deserve the same consideration as those who have to do it on the roads.

Some of these answers lead to the following question… are the railways too obsessed with safety? Already, rail travel is by far the safest mode of ground travel but is so expensive and unreliable that many people choose to expose themselves to risk on the roads.