Throw in a succession of derailments, and trains hitting the buffers in London and Liverpool in recent months, and it might feel pertinent to ask if this is more than just a run of bad luck. Last year, though, came the tragedy at Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, when a landslip caused a Scotrail service to come off the tracks, causing three people onboard to lose their lives.īut this weekend’s accident in Salisbury marked the first significant collision between two moving trains in passenger service since the terrible events of Ladbroke Grove, London in 1999. Until 2020, the 2007 derailment in Grayrigg was the last time a passenger died in a UK train crash – a huge turnaround after a succession of terrible accidents in the days of Railtrack around the millennium. Nonetheless, the blemishes on the record have been appearing with concerning regularity in recent years. This, the UK rail industry believes, is what it does extremely well – to the point where it could justly proclaim itself the safest railway in Europe during the last decade. Whatever the cause turns out to be, the next phase of investigation will work out the deeper underlying reasons – and then address those factors, whether they be human, technical or systemic.
That might prove to be a fault with the signal or that a train passed a red light that the brakes failed or even that the brakes worked but the wheels slid, in the season when leaves on the line can make the rails treacherous.
But by now CCTV and data logs from signals and trains are likely to have given them a strong idea of what led the Great Western and South Western Railway services to crash into each other. Rail accident inspectors have said it is too early to release indications of what caused the collision between two trains at Salisbury on Sunday evening.
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