sucks being a Virgin

The Graybrigg accident, like all others on the railways, received a huge amount of press coverage. It seems every time something happens on the railway system it is the duty of the media to blow it out of all proportions and try to scare every person in the world away from using the railways.

Some more realistic points really need emphasising. The first one is a simple one, which should really be emphasised every time an accident happens, as its the reason they make front page news. The railways are the safest form of land transport by far. The best figures for measuring this are casulaties per mile travelled. Or to put it another way how many miles would you have to travel on average before having an accident. If we compare the roads to the railways the railways are literally hundreds of times safer (I don't have figures to hand and haven't seen any since 2003, since when I expect railways have improved). Railway accidents make front page news because they are so rare. A couple of major incidents a year is the most you are likely to see. How many accidents do you see on the roads each day? There are hundreds, many resulting in deaths. There are not daily deaths on the railways.

Secondly, the use of the phrase 'accident' is important as far as I am concerned. If you read a red top newspaper you probably saw 2 words used in relation to the incident; disaster and miracle. It was in truth neither and this is just sensationalist reporting. The word disaster conjours images of hundreds of deaths, which there were not. There was one (RIP), an 80 year old lady, which logic suggests could have been caused by anything like a heart attack. Now it is a horrible thing that somebody died, but when you look at the nature of the accident and what the train went through it is anything but a disaster compared to what could have happened.

So was it a miracle? Well, no. Much more it was a credit to the good design of the rolling stock. One of the newest pieces of rolling stock on the network stood up very well to hitting catenary masts and rolling down an embankment, probably with the front 2 carriages colliding with each other. It has not busted, it has not crumpled, it is very intact. And that is a testament to the good design that was a part of it and its good build quality.

If anything this is, in a rather twisted way, a positive to the railways in the safety debate. As horrible as it is that the crash happened, we know they happen very rarely and now we know that they stand up to an impact like that brilliantly, so we're all far safer on the railways.

Now we just have to get fares lowered!