Sir, - The reports of yet another fatal train crash in Britain lead one to wonder how such preventable catastrophes can still happen. Could they happen here?
Firstly, most people who have travelled on both Irish and British railways will agree that our own trains have better ride and comfort than those across the water. This is due to an inherent design weakness in the British rail infrastructure - its gauge, at 4' 8 1/2" (soon to be reduced to 4' 8 1/8") is simply too narrow, compared with our own 5' 3". Now, seven inches may not seem much, but the results are there for all to experience, with far less rocking and rolling (and therefore, more stability) in our carriages.
Secondly, our railways are under the control of two quite similar companies, Iarnrod Eireann and Northern Irish Railways, both service- as opposed to profit-led. This is preferable to the mish-mash which pertains in Britain after the division of British Rail into many small, privately-owned railway companies, with the tracks themselves being owned and operated by yet another entity, Railtrack - a clear case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.
If one is served packet soup in a gourmet restaurant, one should not be fobbed off with the excuse that the proffered fare was the result of a cost-cutting exercise. Neither should one be expected to have one's safety compromised on a rail journey, with maintenance being the casualty of the accountant's pen. Yet this seems to be what happened in Hatfield, with trains being allowed to travel in excess of 100 mph (to keep to schedule) on a track which had already been found to be faulty, and for which repairs had been put on the long finger.
The Paddington disaster, just over a year ago, was apparently the result of an even worse mindset o the part of those responsible for keeping costs down. In order to further cut maintenance costs, a new horror has been invented - the single-lead junction. It has long been recognised that, where two lines diverge, the normal double track in each direction causes severe wear on locomotive and carriage steel tyres, as well as on the track itself, due to the pummelling action as the wheels ride over the joints. The profit-orientated thinking goes that, if all divergent and convergent traffic were to be re-routed onto one track from a short distance before a junction to a short distance after it not only would there be reduced wear and tear, but also, only one set of points would need to be installed and maintained, instead of two.
The drawback, of course, is that convergent traffic needs to travel on the "wrong" tracks for perhaps a mile, including, part of the way, on a main line. In theory, given modern signalling techniques, such a manoeuvre should be reasonably safe; however, as recently reported, the incidence of "SPADs" (Signals Passed At Danger) has reached new levels on British railways.
So next time you're on the slow train from Sligo on the eve of a football final, with no seats available and the buffet car run dry, you can at least console yourself with the thought that, bad though things are thanks to our antiquated system, they could be a lot worse. - Yours, etc.,
D.K. Henderson, Castle Avenue, Clontarf, Dublin 3.