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Good news and not so good on the rail front

We might even do that once we reach the letter Z and have updated it with your comments. Some of your observations are printed on page 28 but the big relief for us is that there aren’t many of them. There’s always a risk when launching the results of primary research into the big wide world that it will be riddled with errors, but the good news is that no major or important named train appears to have been omitted so far.

Our publishers have told us that it might be possible to publish the whole survey in book form once it’s complete – and even if it doesn’t prove possible to do that, we intend to post the complete register on our website for the benefit of future researchers and historians.

In the meantime, we reproduce above a picture we didn’t have space for in November’s ‘A to N’ part of the encycopaedia – an extremely rare shot of an HST carrying a steam-age metal headboard. It was taken on May 21, 2004, during the last week of Virgin HST running to Holyhead.

On the railway as a whole, there’s good news and not so good. The good news came from Chancellor George Osborne when he announced a whopping £1.4billion worth of rail infrastructure projects to help kick-start Britain’s ailing economy. The not-so good news concerns the two runaways that struck the North Yorkshire and the Pontypool & Blaenavon railways within the space of two days.

Until the full results of the inquiries are available, it would be wrong to speculate on the exact causes, but the crashes should nevertheless serve as a warning to every person working on a heritage line that anno domini is having an effect not only on the equipment they are using but on them too!

For those reasons alone, even more vigilance is going to be required as we move forward.

I have often wondered why it is that almost all road vehicle drivers will stop and wait at red traffic lights even though it’s obvious nothing is approaching the junction from other directions – yet a much higher proportion will drive though flashing red lights at level crossings if they see no train.

It has to be something to do with mental conditioning, probably reinforced at a youthful age by the driving test, and it makes me wonder why Network Rail and the highways authorities don’t simply replace crossing lights with standard traffic lights.

In countries that have experimentally adopted this course of action, some quite astonishing facts have emerged In South Africa, for example, the number of such accidents has reduced by no less than 86%, while on the Salzburg Lokalbahn in Austria, a similar project has virtually eliminated such incidents… reducing them by an incredible 91%!

In the modern vernacular, introducing such a system in Britain would seem to be what’s known as a ‘no-brainer’.

Nick Pigott
Editor