Working to Rule
Sm,—Dr. Wingfield-Stratford's remarks about the safety regulations on the railways are unfortunately true; but his example is inaccurate. He must be referring td the -collision near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, shortly before the First World War (I have not the exact date at hand), as this is the only head-on collision to have taken place in Wales until the minor one at -Fishguard about a year ago.
The accident was caused not because of any customary inattention to the rules, but by the negligence of the stationmaster and the driver, which resulted in the train's departing with the token (the driver's authority to proceed on a single line) for the section he had just left instead of the section he was entering, with the result that the train collided with another train which had the necessary authority to proceed. Only two rules had been disobeyed—(a) the stationmaster allowed an unauthorised person to work the single-line token instru- ments, and (b) the driver never examined the lettering on the token to see whether he had the right one;. it was never suggested that the rules were regularly broken. Incidentally, the system was not fool- proof by modern stapdards, since the signals were not interlocked with the token instruments; if they had been, the accident could never
Previous page
