During the BR era and into privatisation the UK had rail major accidents pretty frequently - a quick look on Wikipedia shows that accidents with multiple fatalities occurred almost one per year through the 1950s and then decreased to every few years through the 60s and 70s, with just 6 in the 20 years between 1984 and 2004 (including Ufton Nervet, the cause of which was outside the control of the railway). Most of those accidents, and most transport-related accidents for that matter, have either engineering or human factors at the root: e.g. an undetected failure in a part, or a human makes a mistake like misreading signals.
In the near 13 years since Greyrigg the deaths which have occurred on the railway have been of the 'death by misadventure' type rather than accidents/crashes, so my questions are:
In the near 13 years since Greyrigg the deaths which have occurred on the railway have been of the 'death by misadventure' type rather than accidents/crashes, so my questions are:
- Is the decade-plus since the Greyrigg accident just the continuation of the trend of increasing safety and longer period between accidents due to the industry designing risk out of the system, or have we just been lucky?
- Normally, after an accident, there's a heightened consciousness of risk, but over time people become complacent. For those in the industry, have you seen examples of complacency slipping in? It seems that there have been a few 'near misses' of late, but is that just increased reporting?
- How do you avoid the normalisation of risk and remain sharp?