Britains railways are safest ever One of the great things about blogs is that you can highlight stuff that the mainstream media decide to leave out of its coverage. My dad is a little bit of a train buff and takes The Railway magazine. Normally I leave it well alone but I had a look at the latest issue and it turns out that for the first time ever there have been two consecutive years 2005, 2006 with no passenger deaths on the railways. There have been 6 years in postwar Britain where there have been no deaths on board trains and half of them have been in the 21st century the other was in 2003.

So this is something of a golden age of rail safety. Lets compare to other forms of transportation. Train travel is 23 times safer than car travel and 849 times safer than motorcycles. As you can see from national statistics road deaths have been reducing over the last 40 years but roads are still the killing fields of modern Britain with thousands dead every year. Can someone please explain to me why people are so attached to their expensive, polluting and slow cars ....  ¶ 8:45 am