Safe Speed Forums

I'm not sure if this is the right section to talk about this so feel free to move it.

But that fast train has got right up my nose. We are told how wonderfull it is that this fancy new train will do 125mph. Even His Tonyness was there looking pleased. It is going to cut x amount of time of the London to Manchester trip and it's great and we should be pleased and the sun will always shine etc.

Isn't 125 mid range Mondeo territory? Won't 125 get me thrown in jail or at least banned? They interviewed the driver. He said something along the lines of " I'm gonna give her hell on the way to London." What? If I talked like that I'm classed as some wild young tearaway that should be locked away for the good of the children. What about the environment? Surely a train used more gas when given the beans than it would if it trundled down south. Imagine how much time we could knock off journies if we were allowed to give 'er hell.

Not only are we not alowed to go that fast, but the tax on our fuel is subsidising the poxy thing!

I'll shut up now

That's some hooter, you've got there, adam.L!

_________________
I stole this .sig

That's just so 0.05% of the travelling public can travel at 125mph, while the rest of us have to make do with 70mph - on a good day.

Regards
Peter

And they get paid for going that fast ! They have only got to steer the thing. All us other Mortals have to worry about other Idiots on the road. With a train you would think It would be safe with just one on a track,sometimes they get that Drastically wrong.

_________________
RoADA Member -GOLD 2008
If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Either there is much ironic, tongue in cheek comment here, or annoyance being aimed in totally the wrong direction.

It's a freakin train for crying out loud .

What? Are we supposed to halt developments in mass transport now just because a few folks are getting pissy about not being permitted to drive as fast as they want. Have a word with yourselves.

Hopefully not. I'm all in favour of trains going as fast as they can as long as public safety is assured. I daresay they often carry freight at >56mph, too.

_________________
Keep right on to the end of the road ...

What mass transport? A train is nothing more than a single vehicle with a few hundred people in it. The masses travel by car.

Regards
Peter

Why be obtuse?

OK then...so we should halt development in single vehicles capable of carrying a few hundred people...for the reasons I stated above?

The fact is that the train driver is not obeying the safe speed rule -- ie. only going at the speed at which he can stop within the distance he can see to be clear.

Train tracks tend to have very bad sightlines and if he rounds a bend at 125 mph only to find a tree lying on the track, everyone on board is dead.

Exactly the same arguments about safe speed apply to trains as do to cars, so I don't know why the politicans can't see it that way.

You're having a laugh..right?
You really can't see the difference between a train on tracks and a car on a road?

There is no irony at all in my post, I'm seething. Car manufactures are frowned upon for making top speed claims, but on public transport it is great and the technology should be embraced. Huh? There are bikes that will do 125 with gears to spare and then trundle round town like a scooter, but Tony and the dogooders weren't at the last Fireblade launch were they?

Exactly what is the stopping distance for several hundred tonnes of train with metal wheels travelling at 125 mph?

I would also be interested in the effeciency of the thing (grammes of fuel/ kw/hr) compared to my 1.4 litre Japanese car.

Well, it's the similarities we are concentrating on here, and it is a fair point. Just think - if the politicos applied the same logic to trains as they are currently using with roads they could save the millions they are currently spending on track and trackside fencing maintenance to keep the rails safe by instead applying the logic that if children/cows/vehicles stray on to the track or the track itself is damaged it is the train driver's fault an incident occurs because they are going too fast to be able to stop.

Then rigidly enforce lower and lower limits on this basis, fining train drivers who exceed them to pay for the offices of the people who enforce the limits, while the tracks and fences continue to deteriorate.

Sounds familiar??..!

The similarities are incidental and outweighed by the differences.

Trains run alone on controlled sections of track. They are driven by trained professionals within a system that monitors their performance and suitability to be at the controls.
By contrast the road network is chaotic and random, with hazards likely to appear in the blink of an eye.
Thus, the 'politicos' don't need to apply the same logic to trains as they do to cars any more than they need to apply it to, say, Boeing 747s trundling down the runway approaching V1 speed.
It is a logical fallacy to try and make such a connection.

The objective of any modern trasport system is to be safe, efficient and fast. We seem to have forgotten the benefits of "fast" but only for road traffic. The assumption that fast=dangerous is false because the speed and safety relationships are far more complex. Yes, "too fast" can be extremely dangerous. But when we're talking about traffic speed and speed limits, "fast=dangerous" is false because the terms of reference are too oversimplified.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul, I know this sir but I cannot for the life of me see how the argument is advanced one millimeter by attemts to draw comparisons between the 'randomness' and unpredictability of the road network with the controlled environment in which trains run.
Yes, I know the railways have had their issues and problems, but by and large these involve failures within the system rather than those of individuals operating the system at any given point in time. And of course when those failures do happen the media has a feeding frenzy at the expense of the unfortunates involved. Extrapolating this scenario onto the roads network would see thousands of drivers every year lambasted for their actions.

I think the argument IS advanced a few millimetres when we examine policy and it's application. We can clearly see that policy makers have forgotten that faster is better when applied to road transport, but not when applied to railways. I'd call that predjudice.

All accidents on roads and railways are "system failures" of one sort or another. One great feature of our road safety systems is the degree of fault tolerance, with few errors leading to near misses, few near misses leading to crashes, few crashes leading to injuries, few injury crashes leading to serious injurires and few serious injuries being deaths.

btw, fatalities per passenger mile on the railways are are comparable to roads if "tresspassers" are included. From memory, railway deaths are about 300 per year, and the annual passenger mileage on railways is around 10% of that in cars.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Yesterday a boy was horiffically injured by a train while trespassing on the railway. Do I assume that safety campaigners will now instigate a 'kill your speed' campaign against train drivers, with a blanket 30/50/70mph speed limit enforced strictly with cameras?

Of course not, why would they? The only similarity between trespassers on the railway and pedestrians on the pavement is the proximity of people to modes of transport. Thereafter the differences are numerous and obvious.
Why do folks insist on trying to draw "by this logic and that logic we should do the other" type meaningless comparisons..it's beyond me.

There's no practical comparison to a trespasser on the railway and a pedestrian on the pavement, but in fairness I can't see where anyone did make such a comparison. Pedestrians in the road on the other hand... Pedestrians crossing the road are leaving an area that is designated for their safe use and entering one that is not. (BTW, I'm not talking about pedestrian crossings here. When the green man is lit up as far as I'm concerened as a driver I should treat that bit of road like it was a pavement until the lights change.) Okay, so crossing the road isn't actually banned and trespassing on the railway is, so any comparison falls apart at that point. I'm just saying that in either case the pedestrians is entering an area of potential danger and should bear at least some responsibility for ensuring their own safety beforehand.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

True, but whether or not it's banned doesn't really affect the safety of the activity.