There’s nothing like a picture of a derailed train lying on its side to attract media attention. What ultimately was a rather minor accident occurred nea
r Lewes in Sussex on August 13 when the rear three carriages of an eight car train became derailed and detached ending up on their sides down a small embankment. The accident made front page news.
At this time it is unclear what happened. There are two possible explanations given the subsequent photographs of very buckled sections of track. Either the train passed over a section of buckled rail, or the embankment partially collapsed, leaving the rails unsupported underneath and consequently forced out of alignment by the back of the train. That second explanation is made more likely by the fact that the front coaches did not derail.
There were only two serious – but not life threatening - injuries and 20 minor ones, but nevertheless the media coverage was extensive. I was on half a dozen radio shows and am writing a piece for the Spectator. Yet, a couple of weeks before the Lewes accident the annual road death total slipped out and yet again it has hovered around the 1,600 level mark since Covid and after a sharp reduction in the early 2000s, it has stayed remarkably constant. However this terrible death toll attracts little attention. The government did issue a road safety strategy last year but it was aspirational rather than setting clear targets and ways to reach them.
Rail safety since the turn of the century, by contrast, has improved. From the 90 deaths in the 1960s, the rate has fallen to near zero annually in the last two decades, punctuated only by a couple of accidents with a handful of casualties. This is really quite extraordinary and yet is rarely celebrated. There have been countless new safety measures, including the strengthening of carriages for which passengers on the train at Lewes will be deeply grateful as they largely escaped unscathed.
Perhaps the fuss about rail accidents has been instrumental in reducing that toll but one cannot help that a double standard is operating here. Railways are expected to meet far higher standards than road transport. Yet, there are things that could be done – the wider adoption of 20 mph zones in urban areas, greater enforcement of speed limits through hidden cameras – why should they be yellow ? - and tighter enforcement – only this week a lorry driver who killed a cyclist through careless driving escaped a jail sentence because he had served a month in remand.
At least this is not America where the death toll, barely mentioned in federal government circles, is an astonishing 40,000 annually. But in both countries, the issue needs to be taken far more seriously with a clear agenda of how to reduce the death toll. Otherwise in 20 years, this story will simply never change.
Please support my work by becoming a premium subscriber.
Could not agree more! In two weekends in Ireland ten teenagers wiped out on the motorway.
Carnage for over one hundred years- but as owning and driving a motor seen as a statement of individual liberty- though the tax payer pays for the infrastructure, its none of your damned business -any railway which maimed or killed in the numbers the car does would be shut down immediately and rightly so!
There is of course a third option beyond the two that Christian mentions for the cause of the derailment. That would be that the track was stressed by high temperatures, but the rails didn't actually buckle until the weight of the train passed over them and then caused the rail fastenings to fail. But we shall learn in due course.