An interim report revealed the cause of Friday evening's accident was a faulty set of points.

Louise Christian, the solicitor representing the families of those killed in the Potters Bar crash in 2002 said the two accidents were "incredibly similar".

And Bob Crow, general secretary of the rail workers' RMT union, echoed her calls for a full public inquiry.

The report by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) found one of three stretcher bars - which keep moving rails a set distance apart - was missing, the other two were fractured and there were bolts missing.
At Potters Bar there were nuts missing from points and the lock stretcher bar was fractured.

Ms Christian called for a joint public inquiry into the two crashes, focusing on the issue of railway maintenance, to find out "why the lessons haven't been learnt".

"I don't think it's good enough for the Government to sit on its hands again as it did over Potters Bar," she said.
Mr Crow said: "There are frightening similarities between Grayrigg and the Potters Bar crash."

Comments

1. Boswell / 4:32pm 27 Feb 2007

Yes, we deserve an inquiry.

Network Rail's inept maintenance and inspection scheme needs exposed once and for all. And I thought Railtrack was bad...

NR don't seem to understand simple concepts like the "four eyes principle". They also don't appear to appreciate how, when major engineering takes place, there is inevitably a settling-in period of the new components. This period deserves more frequent inspections. Once a bolt has been proven to retain its torque settings over a number of (proven and verifiable) inspections, one might imagine the inspection efforts could be scaled back to normal. This is simple engineering, not brain surgery for god's sake.

In the old days when ships (and locomotives) were made of iron there were daily inspections by wheel tappers and permanent way inspectors. Given the additional pounding the track now takes from higher speed trains I don't see any reason to relax such a (historic) regime. Unfortunately its bitten the dust as a victim of bean counters and supposedly superior materials (lol) that are available today.

Not too long ago NR made a big fuss in the trade press with their track inspection trains which would "revolutionise" the inspection regimes by using ir cameras, high speed video and the like that could be later analysed by computer. It seems they have failed to roll out enough of these sets, presumably because they thought one or two were enough given their higher speed of operation.

Fools: incidents (not accidents, please note) like this serve to remind us that such automated systems might have their place, but the regime needs greater frequency, with "high speed" (lol again) lines have daily inspection. You also cannot supplant manual, human inspection by a train passing over a set of points at 40mph, no matter how frequently its done.