Greater use of railways saves lives, lots of them

The Spanish high speed rail accident has broken the astonishing safety record of high speed trains.

The Spanish high speed rail accident has broken the astonishing safety record of high speed trains. Since their inauguration in Japan in 1964, there had not been an accident involving services running on dedicated track at full speed resulting in multiple passenger deaths. As I set out in my forthcoming book, Fast Track, due to be published by Penguin in June, there have been several accidents involving high speed trains such as Eschedde in 1998 and Santiago di Compostella in 2014 but these have either occurred when running conventional tracks or involved test runs.

Therefore the Spanish disaster in January was unprecedented, a permanent stain on a fantastic record. The disaster seems to have been caused by a simple technology failure, a broken rail, rather than any issue specific to high speed running.

I have to confess I had a lucky escape in relation to the new book. In the draft that I sent to the publishers in December, I wrote about high speed railways’ amazing safety record but then added ‘perhaps by the time you read this there will have been a disaster’. And indeed there was. Fortunately, there is still time in the production process to amend this and write a section on this terrible accident, but it did bring home to me how issues about the issue of safety on the railways can never be forgotten.

Indeed, in the 30 years that I have been writing about the railways, there has a remarkable transformation in railway safety. The accident rate has plummeted but only after the terrible blip in the aftermath of privatisation when there were four major accidents within five years. In a very revealing interview for my Calling All Stations podcast Gerald Corbett, who was the longest serving chief executive of Railtrack, set out how privatisation and fragmentation contributed to the two disasters that happened on his watch, Ladbroke Grove in October 1999 and Hatfield almost precisely a year later.

Corbett is a thoroughly decent man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and bore no responsibility for these tragedies but was forced out of Railtrack after Hatfield. In the interview, he was remarkably frank about how privatisation and fragmentation had contributed to the two accidents. Corbett explained in the podcast interview how there had been a whole series of SPADs in the Paddington throat before the disaster and yet because of the lack of coordination between the various parties involved, the recommendation to have a signal sighting committee was never fulfilled. There were several other ways in which fragmentation contributed to that disaster because, as Corbett puts it, ‘guiding mind’ who could see the wider picture.

Hatfield, too, was a result of the way the industry had been rushed into a new structure. The accident was caused by a broken rail which had not been replaced or crucially had a speed restriction imposed on it. That was because the extent of the damage could not be seen as a result of a cutback in the number of people who were walking the track. This was the result of the maintenance company, Balfour Beatty, seeking to cut costs, because under their contract with Railtrack their payments were reduced each year. Corbett is critical of the fact that the maintenance companies were privatised in the first place, but also argue that the incentives were not aligned. The train operators were seeking to run more trains, which imposed greater costs on the maintenance companies whose budget was being cut. It made no sense.

All this is a salutary reminder that safety must remain a priority in the rail industry. The creation of Great British Railways will require much reorganisation and people moving to new jobs. Unlike with the privatisation, this should bring greater cohesion and therefore improved safety. However, there are risks in any upheaval and the industry’s leaders must ensure that nothing goes wrong.

And if a wider perspective is taken, the very existence of the railways saves lives, thanks to its far greater safety record compared with driving. Over 25 billion miles were travelled by passengers on rail in 2024/5 and there were no fatalities. The death rate per billion passenger miles on the roads is about five and consequently if all the rail travel had been transferred to the railways, there would have been around 125 extra deaths in addition to the 1,600 that is the annual average. In America where passenger railways barely exist, there are 40,000 annual deaths on the road – think bow many lives could be saved if they had not killed off their passenger rail network. The Spanish disaster is a setback, as were the post privatisation disasters in the UK, but they should detract from the key message. Greater rail use saves lives, lots of them.

Thanks for you support

.