HSTEd
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 14 Jul 2011
- Messages
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The reason I referred to freight trains is because the vast majority of conventional air braked trains in this country are freight.
Passenger services braked in that manner are in the minority. So I would find it strange to equip the small majority with your wonderful, expensive safety system yet not equip the (up to 5000 tonne) freight trains that pootle about on the same network.
I'm simply suggesting, in this thread, that this train should be fitted with safety systems standard on almost all other passenger trains.
Electronically controlled braking should be fitted as standard to all trains, yes.If what you've suggested should be made standard, it would be likely (I would have thought) that the same system would be strongly recommended to be fitted to freight train vehicles.
But the railway industry, especially the freight industry, is notorious for its refusal to adopt technological innovations - at least since privatisation.
Fitting them would only cost $6,000-$8,000 per vehicle according to studies done in America. So the cost is negligible.
Finding the total UK freight wagon fleet size is quite hard, but apparently 600 trains run per day, which implies something like 2000 wagons in use each day. So perhaps 20,000 wagons in total at a reasonable utilisation rate.
That is something like $120m-$180m to fit the entire wagon fleet. Fitting the locomotives would be more expensive but there are so many less of them it almost doesn't matter.
In reality fitting a very large fraction of the total freight train movements would require fitting a much smaller number of wagons, like the freightliner rakes that run up and down all day every day.
There are various operational savings, and also the fact that it would completely eliminate run-arounds and other such freight operations because the same technology can be used for multiple working. So freight trains could top and tail or have non powered control vehicles.
But it will never happen, because the freight industry can always rely on subsidies to keep it somewhat competitive.
'Provided everything is done correctly' isn't a terrible thing to use as part of a safety case. The whole industry runs on the basis that every worker should be competent and adhering to the correct rules and procedures. There are safety systems in place to mitigate against dangerous occurances yet these dangerous occurances still take place (as the number of incident reports on the RAIB website demonstrate).
This incident was dangerous and had the potential to be very serious indeed. However, events of this nature are relatively rare so although there will rightly be improvements abd recommendations brought about in the aftermath of this, there has to be a bit of realistic thinking about how much money the industry is prepared to spend to safeguard against a rare occurance which can be safeguarded against by other means.
The cost of fitting this tiny fleet of 75 vehicles that operate with a special pool of locomotives with modern safety systems would have been negligible.
These are not ancient tank wagons where you can claim an economic exception.
This was brand new stock, and yet here we are.
And relying on "competent people" as the basis of a safety case in my own industry got us Three Mile Island, Tokai-Mura and Chernobyl.
It is only good fortune that there were not a lot of dead people that day.
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