Train crash at Potters Bar

More here.

Co-worker M___ is very angry about this as he wants to go home early for a rugby club dinner and this means his trains up to the midlands will be delayed. He is squeaking at the inconsideration.

the kings cross-stevenage stretch doesn't seem very safe, i remember reading about the antiquated track after the hatfield crash. i use this line a lot, and was due to have been on this bit in about 3 hours time. i don't feel hugely safe getting the gner as it is, even before this...

at least it was not a packed rush hour train, but that is not much of a consolation

First to crack a joke about the typo gets unlimited free travel with GNER.

John Major and John MacGregor should be put in prison for murder.

Or to put it another way: if any of the protagonists of rail privatisation were to die in train crashes themselves, could you even bring yourself to feel sorry for their friends and family? I know I couldn't.

In fact, if any of the six people who died this afternoon in Potters Bar voted Conservative in 1992, FUCK YOU, YOU DESERVE IT, YOU HAD IT COMING. I know that sounds harsh but that's how I feel. If they didn't vote Tory that year of course I have my sympathies, but if they did, then I don't give a fuck about their grieving relatives. Effectively, if any of those six people voted Tory, they killed themselves 10 years ago.

It pains me to say it, but John Major's original plan for the break up & privatisation of British Rail, though stupid and romancic, in the harking-back-to-thee good old days of GWR et-al sense, did at least have one advantage over what we actually wound up w/. A key part of sthis plan was to have 4, or perhaps 5 tightly regulated rail companies each operating trains, and owning and operating the infrastructure within a geographic area. Apparently the shit situation we got - a national infrastructure company, and what? 25? 26 ? different nominally competing train operators was forced on major by ideologically motivated civil servants. The tail wagging the dog. Figures I have from sept 2001 indicate that the cost of railtrack's wilful, and if there was any justice in the world, criminal neglect of the nat'l rail structure was 644 million quid. Believe it or not, that broke down into 83 mill for repairs, and 561 million for compensation claims to the train operators. I don't know if this latest smash, with its attendant loss of life is down to poor rail maintenance, or overworked train staff or whatever. Perhaps it wd have been unavoidable whatever the circumstances, but really, the rail system is a national strategic resource, and running such a thing for the benefit of corporate shareholders is just fucking stupid. I think it is time to pull the plug on this fucked system, renationalise the railways, and run them on the basis of passenger efficiency and safety, not shareholder gain maximisation. Who in their right mind would claim that public services are better run privately, or in some stupid public/private partership rigged market? Well, Tony Blair's govt, it would seem, judging by his record on this matter. Wasn't there s.th. in the Guardian recently abt the americans complaining b/c the fire services at air fore bases were going to be privatised? Unbelievable.

I've just realised this [possibly] fuXors my chances of getting home on Sunday after 8pm.

Graham you're at Salford University aren't you? = if so you'll be coming down on the West Coast Main Line = this was on the East Coast line

Just remembered that I have travelled over the Hatfield / Potters Bar stretch four times since privatisation (but before these two crashes). Worrying.

Norman you are absolutely right about Major - he himself was a hopeless romantic idealising nostalgic blah blah BUT he was harmless compared to the rabid ideologues who foisted the current rail system on us (and at least he wasn't a Richard Body / Christopher Gill type loony). He tried to rein in the worst excesses of free-market dogma and shareholder value within the party but he could never have succeded because it was too far gone: they'd been spoilt under Thatcher for so long, and knew no other way. Even Robert Adley, the old high Tory MP for Christchurch and hopeless dreamer of steam days, impractical though his values were, was quite right to warn his party of the disaster that they would reap shortly before he died in 1993. They have reaped what they have sowed in the shame of human life. Fuck them and fuck them forever.

Yeah, but late night on Sundays involves going via Leeds or York

they said on Radio 4 this morning that that section of track had been replaced since the Hatfield crash, so maybe that doesn't say much for their quality of repairs