Britain Investigates Another Rail Crash
Combined Reports
LONDON - Safety officials have been investigating whether vandalism or poor maintenance caused a rail crash that killed seven people and injured more than 70 in Britain last Friday. As grieving relatives visited the crash site at Potters Bar station and prayers were said in local churches, the government insisted the tragedy was a freak incident that didn't affect the rest of Britain's rail network. Rail authorities believe Friday's accident at the suburban station, about 20 kilometers north of London, was caused when the train passed over a faulty set of points - a switching mechanism that diverts trains onto different tracks. British Transport Secretary Stephen Byers said on Sunday that extensive safety checks had not found similar difficulties elsewhere on the rail network. "The Health and Safety Executive and Railways Inspectorate are saying that they think this is unique. They have tested something like 400 points up and down the country," Byers told the BBC. Byers said further investigation was needed before "we will be able to find out whether or not it was mismanagement, whether it was the fault of an individual worker not carrying out their job properly [or] whether it was a deliberate act of vandalism." The accident, the sixth fatal crash on Britain's railways since 1997, has sapped public confidence in the country's rail network and prompted calls for a public inquiry. The crash brought the death toll on Britain's railways since 1997 to 60. The accident has also reopened debate about the structure of Britain's railways, which were broken up into many companies by privatization in the 1990s. Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union, said the accident showed that railway maintenance should be conducted "in-house" rather than contracted to outside firms. "The time has come to recognize that this is no way to run the railways," he said. However, John Armitt, chief executive of rail-infrastructure overseer Railtrack, said there was no evidence to suggest poor maintenance had been responsible for the crash. "We have as much confidence today as we have had in previous weeks about the condition of our points throughout the network," Armitt told the BBC. However, it was also reported that, well before the crash, Armitt had been "deeply concerned" about the working practices of Railtrack's maintenance sub-contractors. Armitt told The Times newspaper on Wednesday that contracts with rail maintenance companies such as Jarvis were too short to encourage investment in sufficient numbers of qualified staff and modern equipment. "There's always a tendency, particularly in construction-related industries, to take a short cut and try and do a job more quickly," he was quoted as saying. "By encouraging contractors to employ direct labor rather than relying on an agency to send them along at the last minute, the likelihood of [accidents] is reduced," he said. Armitt said he planned to offer contracts that were 50 percent longer than the current four years to provide companies with more incentive to train staff properly and reduce their dependence of staff hired from recruitment agencies. Rail authorities believe that nuts securing one set of points became detached, causing the points to move as the train passed over them. Investigators were conducting tests on Sunday to establish why the nuts became detached. Jarvis Plc., the company responsible for maintaining the stretch of track, said the points had passed safety inspections the day before the crash. The Mirror newspaper quoted rail union bosses as saying that workers had raised repeated concerns about track problems in the area only a few miles away from Hatfield, the scene of another fatal derailment in 2000, which was caused by a broken rail. Crow said workers have complained of metal fatigue, and "wet-bedding," where flooding washes away the tracks ballast foundations, making it more likely for bolts to vibrate and come loose, the paper said. Nobody from Jarvis could immediately be reached for comment. (AP, Reuters)
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