Lincolnshire train crash

Yeah, the 333's are 4 car (but arrived as 3-car and had an extra carriage added later). I think the 321's on Leeds to Donny are 4 car as well.

Will it be any better when Central lose their franchise in a few years time?

Hate to think what will happen with the intergrated ticketing, because Central Trains(& a few other train operators as well) & Travel West Midlands(bus company) are all part of the National Express group, recreating in part, the WMPTE scenario that existed from 1969 till 1986.

(I found it ironic that the National Bus Company used to own the likes of Midland Red, who were sort of rivals to WMPTE, & operated the coaches, their succesor company Nat Ex now own WMPTE's succesor, TWM !)

Where on the Boston - Nottingham line, there is NO Sunday service westbound until 14:00 (Winter timetable Sept - May), and no Sunday service AT ALL (Winter OR Summer Timetable) on the Lincoln - Sleaford - Spalding - Peterborough line!

C@ck, isn't it?

Where it's possible for road transport to cross the path of the rail causing these crashes, in my mind that's a fault of the rail network..

not likely. central trains aren't perfect, but then i don't know of a rail company who are. the one that comes closest to the definition of perfect is chiltern - but then they only really have one service to concentrate on. and yet instead of giving the companies less responsibility - they're making the franchises larger.

and for us in the midlands, that means our moans and groans will be mixed up with the existing moans of the northern and southern franchises. brilliant.

suppose its slightly better for those of us in the wm county, cos we can moan to centro, who the franchisees run the service on behalf of.

We all have to live with some risk.
So what would would you propose by way of an alternative. Bridges? A car might fall off a bridge - think Selby - so there's still risk there. Tunnels? Increased risk of a road accident I guess.

And would you pay higher train fares to pay for the thousands of bridges or tunnels?

Vehicles have to cross railway tracks. Fact.

You might as well ban pedestrians from crossing the road.

There's one train operator that's better than Chiltern, and that's Island Line, who operate the Shanklin - Ryde Pier Head service on the Isle of Wight - they run ex-London Underground stock too...

Well said. The fact is you cannot get rid of Level Crossings completely. In cases like this and the Berkshire crash it's been down to the driver of the vehicle. As long as those who think know best continue to completely have disregard for road safety and not a thought for everyone else it's always going to be a risk.

It's interesting to note however that Britain has one of the lowest rates of accidents that happen on Level Crossings (in the world? or Europte?) . The only reason the likes of this one made it to broadcast was because of the Berkshire incident. There are hundreds more incidents which could be reported but simply aren't. etc "Jumpers", "Major Signal Failures" all go un-reported but cause huge disruption.

I'm not saying level crossings should be got rid of completey - just that a lot of them could be made a lot safer.

Good grief, this thread really has turned into the trainspotter's forum!

Indeed, although maybe it isn't all that strange that TV pres and interest in the operation of the railways is connected. It's all about branding, companies changing their names, new liveries etc!

This is the sort of thing you'd see if this forum had an off topic forum!