Down with the HSE

politX notes the large-scale rail closures for engineering work during the bank holiday weekend. There are blockades on the West Coast Main Line (again), on the 4-track Great Western Main Line between Slough and Reading, and also on the East Coast line and South Manchester.

You can blame it all on incompetent past or present management or on privofragmentisation, as many commentators are doing. But one villain seems to be ignored by the mainstream press, the Health and Safety Executive

There is a reason I put these guys in the 7th Circle of Hell. It's largely their rules that mean Notwork Rail have to close all four lines of a four track railway when they're replacing sometime like a set of points on just one of them. And HSE red tape inflates the cost by a factor of π (as estimated by Roger Ford of Modern Railways)

An example. In the last years of the nationalised railway, British Rail spent a lot of money on bi-directional signalling on the London-Norwich line, and invested in clever high-tech track relaying machines that could relay one track while trains could still use the adjacent one. The idea was that you'd only need to close one track, and allow single-line working on the other. There would be delays, but still preferable to closing the line and shutting people across the blockade on replacement buses.

But HSE won't allow them to do that; can't have men working that close to a running line. So there are going to be something like 18 months of weekend closures while they replace worn-out sections of track.

All these temporary speed restrictions during hot weather are their idea too; while there may be some known trouble spots where there's a risk of rails buckling in the heat, a blanket 60mph speed limit across large parts of the network was never justified. (And I find out that the 60mph was for passenger trains. Freight was limited to 30 mph!). One reason for the severe delays to my a couple of weeks back was that we were stuck behind a freight between Leamington Spa and Banbury.

HSE, like many mindless bureacracies, don't care about the big picture. The idea that some of their stupid rules might result in more deaths by driving people to use other, less safe transport modes simply doesn't occur to them.