On Friday close to 5pm a train of East Midland Railway crashed into the back of a stationary train near Bedford in England.
Some eight hours later two freight trains, in the process of shunting, collided on a bridge in Munich, resulting in two coaches of one train falling over the bridge. There was one fatality in the accident.
The rail accident in England caused the death of the locomotive driver; 28 people are in hospital, nine of whom are critically injured.
As with all rail mishaps both accidents will be carefully studied; there will be inquiries to discover what happened.
With the English crash it is difficult to understand how a train could run into the back of another train.
On BBC Radio 4 yesterday morning a rail journalist said that England had one of the safest railways in Europe. And then in an unbelieving tone he said: ‘Ireland claims it has a better safety record than the UK’.
It was an unpleasant comment, inappropriate, unnecessary too.
Could the UK system be so antediluvian that a signalling system allowed a train to enter a section already occupied by an another train. Is that possible anywhere in the world in 2026?
As with the crash in Bedford, the cause of the Munich collision was not immediately known.
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