Down with the HSE (again)

Transport Blog rants at the "Safety Fascism" affecting the railways.

Last week an engineer found some loose bolts on the brake disks of two Silverlink Trains class 321 trains during routing maintenance. They decided to withdraw the entire fleet of trains for safety checks, cancelling the entire service the following day. The advised commuters "not to travel".

It took several days before they restored a full service on the line.

I do not believe there was any serious risk to life. What happened is that Silverlink management, fearful of a prosecution and possible jail sentence in the unlikely event there was any kind of accident, decided to err on the side of extreme caution. I take the fact that another user of the same type of train, First Great Eastern, didn't withdraw their fleet as evidence that this was indeed an overreaction

Then the real villains of the piece get into the action. Once Silverlink made the decision to withdraw the trains, they couldn't just put them back into service as soon as they checked the rest were OK. Oh no, can't have that! Enter the Heath and Safety Executive, that unaccountable amorphous bureaucracy that's slowly strangling the railway industry. Only this sanity draining red tape monster has the authority to put the trains back into service.

Why in Brunel's name can't the train company that took them out service in the first place be able to decide to put them back?

The HSE is a bloated bureaucracy that's mainly concerned with protecting it's own existance. They don't care if any of their stupid decisions end up costing more lives that they 'save'. They get away with it because the tabloid press are quick to blame the rail companies for everything that goes wrong with the network. Sadly there don't seem to be any votes in cutting the HSE down to size, something that's going to have to be done if we're serious about keeping a rail network in this country.

Meanwhile, on the roads, things like this happen every day. But there's no chance of the HSE imposing the sort of crap they inflict on the railways on road users. Motorists would never stand for it.