...you clearly are too immature to realise that!
I've stalked this thread since its inception. I was briefly surprised by how young Charlie was, but I've encountered this sort of mentality before. I wager young Charlie has been told at some point that he is young and therefore probably a bit soft and a bit mollycoddled, so he adopts all the chippy chunterings of his elders to try and seek their approval. A disaster to work with people like that, as they actively seek out the lazy corner-cutting and prejudices of their elder peers in a bid to be 'one of the real men'. I encountered a lot of this mentality at agricultural college from the farm boys, and as such I don't really ever trust 18 year old boys in flat caps.
To get back to the opening post, I'm surprised that the notion of "more and more heritage lines are becoming more like businesses" is perceived as a bad thing. I'm sensing that, traditionally, if you volunteered for a railway you were automatically granted the privilege of going wherever you liked and getting to see stuff the ordinary plebs didn't. This privilege has been revoked at some point recently, upsetting Justin Smith to make him start this discussion. All this does is make me question the motives of volunteers like Justin Smith. Do you muck in because you want to see a railway succeed, or do you do it for the exclusivity brownie points? I thought volunteering was meant to be a selfless act.
Back when I was a kid I loved crawling around the collection at Bo'Ness. I remember walking in between two uncoupled vehicles (I don't remember what they were) and being warned by somebody, possibly my father, to avoid the grease on the buffer beams, which were at head height relative to me. I don't recall exactly how much freedom we had to simply go and explore the sidings, but I wager there is less of it now!
You also can't simply turn up at a building site on Monday morning and ask for a job, or spend your summer holidays cleaning factory boilers. Times have changed, and on a much bigger scale than simply within the realm of heritage railways. If these railways maintained a fast 'n' loose attitude towards on-site safety then they would be the one weird outlier and, following a couple of stiff lawsuits, a bit thin on the ground to boot. I'm sensing a lot of forumites are nostalgic for a time in the past when you could crawl around sheds full of engines with carte blanche (myself probably included) but this era has ended. Justin Smith is simply experiencing the growing pains that come when this transition occurs and places have to become more safety conscious.
As for the notion that too much helf 'n' safety simply erodes at personal responsibility, I wager that those doing the complaining are probably the same who would never report a 'near miss' or not-so-near miss in the workplace to avoid the hassle and the paper work. To use an analogy, I did an eco-driving course at work a few years back. The instructor said he was glad to be teaching me as I was a relatively new driver. He said the worst people he had to deal with were older male drivers (he mentioned age and gender, so no ageism or sexism on my part here), as they categorically over-rated their driving skills and had the most ingrained bad driving habits. These were guys who were happy to stand on the brakes at every red light, "rev the guts out of it" (his words, not mine) at a green light, and reckon they drove their best when they were 'making progress' at 80 on the motorways. These guys were simply not good drivers as they had terrible situational awareness and a slew of terrible habits that, if nothing else, put premature wear on their vehicles. They also didn't think they needed to be taught anything new about driving, as they new 'proper driving' in their 'proper cars'. By way of sharp contrast, my instructor was simply introducing me to some ideas to help me score a higher mpg by better reading, and anticipating scenarios, in the road ahead. He said that some of his older clientele seemed to take this sort of instruction a bit personally!
Likewise I reckon that those like Justin Smith, are probably nowhere near as personally responsible or safety conscious as they claim. "I know trains, me" will be the order of the day, but really they are a liability and general headache for everybody else.
