The dreadful train crash in Germany has concentrated attention on rail transport as well as on the huge number of casualties and what caused it. The Inter City Express is one of a large fleet of modern high-speed trains that have helped to change the face of the country's communications system - and increasingly that of Europe as a whole. Travellers have been diverted from overcrowded roads and airlines, benefiting the environment and giving a glimpse of what could be a more civilised means of transport in the century to come. It is very much to be hoped that shock and fear arising from the Eschede crash, or the investigation into what precisely was responsible, will not dim or divert this vision. The high-speed train systems have an excellent safety record in comparative terms - by a factor of 20 compared to the roads in Germany, for example, before this disaster. The same applies in France, Spain, Japan and other countries where they have been developed.
This complex of factors has encouraged planners to devote more resources to high-speed systems and to link them up throughout what is becoming a more integrated continent. Anyone visiting Berlin these days, as it is reconstructed to become the capital of a united Germany, is struck by the confluence of rail links there, symbolised by the magnetically levitated train planned to link Berlin to Hamburg in a journey taking a mere 55 minutes compared to the present three hours. The British government has now announced plans to finish the line from Folkestone to London, which will complete the high-speed link-up with Brussels and Paris, which has already substantially diverted air traffic between these cities.
Germany's addiction to speed on its roads nevertheless sits uneasily with its environmental awareness. Such dramatic accidents on the railway system may give many of its citizens cause for thought about the overall philosophy of speed and the hectic and relentlessly increasing pace of modern urban life which drives it. The crash is also a great affront to Germany's proud engineering tradition, whose productivity and innovative capacity is geared to systematic problem-solving. It will be essential for all these reasons to provide a full explanation of the crash. Looking at these issues, one is struck forcibly by how impoverished the Irish railway system is, whether in terms of investment or political priority compared to roads and cars. In coming years this will certainly come to be seen as a very short-sighted policy. Yesterday's report on Irish economic development from National City Brokers argues strongly and convincingly that in coming years there will be increasingly pressing reasons to decentralise in order to reduce congestion in Dublin.
In such a perspective, railway investment should be re-examined. It has been badly neglected in the allocation of EU and public funding, despite the pathetic state of much of the rolling stock and the tracks. There could be an opportunity here in coming years, if not to develop high-speed systems which would not be justified given the low density of population, then at least to avail of the fast-developing rail technologies on offer.