ON THE WRONG TRACK
Ross Clark says that trains would be safer if they had no drivers
Aslef, the train drivers' union, has threatened to strike. Nothing among the hours of broadcasts and thousands of inch- es of newsprint dedicated to the subject quite summed up the mood so well as last Friday's Newsnight, on which a panel of assorted malcontents had been assembled to arraign absent Railtrack chief executive Gerald Corbett. As the body responsible for providing and maintaining signalling, Railtrack naturally has a case to answer, but not the case which Newsnight's guests were putting to it.
'What I would like to see is a renation- alised railway,' said Bob Crow, assistant general secretary of the Rail and Maritime 'Because you're down-trodden at home doesn't mean you should put up with any browbeating at the office.' Transport Union. The fragmentation of the railway is to blame, said another guest. 'I want to see two drivers on every train and I want to see them now,' thundered David Taylor, a Great Western passenger.
QED: rail privatisation costs lives. Let's go back to the comforts of the good old 1970s and no one will ever die on our rail- ways again. If only there were such a neat solution, but there isn't. Listening to and reading much of the nonsense put out last week, one might have imagined there had never been an accident on British Rail. What about Harrow and Wealdstone (112 killed in 1952), what about Hither Green (49 killed in 1967) and, of course, what about Clapham Junction? You can't blame Railtrack for those mishaps. What you can say about Railtrack is that it has managed to get through an entire year — 1998 — without killing a single passenger; some- thing which eluded British Rail.
I worked for British Rail's research department for a year in the mid-1980s and, though I wouldn't accuse that organi- sation of being uninterested in safety, its safety-consciousness was of the pedantic kind which, combined with the bloody- mindedness of the rail unions, ensured that any form of innovation was ultimately doomed. The two-inch-thick British Rail- ways rulebook decreed that I had to wear an orange 'high-visibility vest' when per- forming an experimental operation on a long-disused branch line, even though no train had entered the siding for several decades and it was no longer even connect- ed to the main line. A guard was sacked — and lost his pension rights — for having a beer at his leaving party, even though he wasn't going back on duty afterwards. A safety officer came round to check the office kettle several times a year.
When it came to genuine technological advance on the safety front, though, British Rail wasn't quite so hot. The development of high-speed trains, with much more advanced and safer signalling systems, was held up because the unions dreamt up a rule — purely on the grounds of safety, you'll understand — that any train capable of going faster than 100 mph must have two drivers. The Paddington rail disaster doesn't provide an argument for having two train drivers; it provides an argument for having no driver at all. If one driver can't be trusted to look out for a red light, why should two? Whether he was dozing, reading a newspaper, pouring himself a coffee, we shall never know; all that can be said about the driver of the Thames Train in last week's accident is that it would have been better if he had been sound asleep: then he wouldn't have been able to cancel the automatic warning system which would otherwise have brought the train's brakes on automatically.
If we want technology to eliminate human error on this scale, it should be a form of technology which eliminates the humans. Even back in the mid-1980s there was talk at BR's research centre of a sys- tem called Automatic Train Control, Which envisaged driverless trains con- trolled cheaply and safely from a single control centre. Unsurprisingly, that option hasn't passed the lips of Aslefs finest this Past week. Automatic Train Protection is really just a watered-down version of the fully-automated system, designed to appease the drivers. Taxpayers would be made to .pay twice over: once for the elec- tronics and again for the drivers, who, though stripped of most of their responsi- bilities, would be retained as a kind of good-luck charm, rather like the grotesques which the Vikings used to carve on the bows of their boats.
• Ultimately, rail privatisation will improve safety for the simple reason that it encourages innovation. Once shed of union power, for example, full automation becomes a possibility. Virgin Trains are already developing a signalling system Which transmits instructions direct to the train cab and does away with the need for line-side signals of the type blamed for last Week's accident. The easy option of blam- ing greedy private enterprise for all ills will be seen to be a nonsense whipped up by Job-creating union leaders.
The fact is that private organisations have to pay much more for their lapses in safety than do public ones, because they face instant commercial extinction. Look what happened to PanAm, once one of the 'So it seems he hasn't done "It" after all.' mightiest corporations in America, after it failed to stop a terrorist bomb being loaded on board Flight 103. Had PanAm been a state monopoly it would still be happily fly- ing now; one or two token heads would have rolled, a few minor security improve- ments would have been negotiated with the unions, but ultimately the airline would have been able to take its passengers for granted.
None of this is to say that the privatisa- tion of British Rail has been a perfect exercise. As with many of the privatise- tions, the spoils were artificially divided. Maybe it would have been better if safety had been hived off to a new authority; per- haps companies should have been allowed to bid for the tracks as well as the trains which run on them, as they did before nationalisation, in order to give them more incentive to invest for the long term. But the hysteria over the Paddington disaster belies the fact that rail travel in Britain has a generally good safety record. It is a sobering thought that in the past week twice as many people have died on the roads as perished at Paddington: road fatalities are running at ten a day. Mile for mile, you are about 15 times as likely to die on the roads as you are on a train; though unless one of the victims happens to be a princess, road accidents are merci- fully spared the full spread of 'How was it allowed to happen?' articles which accom- pany every rail accident.
If I were a rail-union official, I think I'd cut out the moaning about the lack of ATP: all it is going to do is highlight the incompetence of some drivers and scare the passengers who pay railmen's wages. Instead, I would be demanding to know why the railway industry has to compete with a form of transport which is allowed to get away with much slacker safety stan- dards. Never mind Automatic Train Pro- tection, I'd want to know why motorists aren't being asked to shell out for auto- matic car protection, which would stop them jumping traffic lights and breaking the speed limit.
'You can't put a price on safety,' the unions like to assert. They might not be able to, but passengers can and will. If faced with the fare hikes required to pay for the job-creating 'safety' measures on British Rail, they are likely to go rushing for their car keys.
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