Talk:Abbots Ripton rail accident
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Untitled edit
The 'fundamental causes' section looks to be arguing a case, going beyond the evidence actually given,and not necessarily doing everybody justice. A more modern enquiry might indeed look at defects of the system of management (if that was in its terms of reference) , but to do so it would take more evidence on these points:
- difficulty of getting signals to work properly in snow is not necessarily failure to manage a known problem; it might be failure to have an adequate system for reporting matters of safety concern (Cockshott interjects after Piggott's evidence that he had heard of rare instances of imperfect signals during snowstorms, but never of erroneous ones)
- note also that 'fighting on the wires' is another problem well-known at low level but clearly being filtered out by middle managers
and if it hadn't taken the evidence, it wouldn't leap to conclusions about what the evidence would have been. At the very least, the section should be reworked so that any leaping to conclusions is done by the reader. Rjccumbria (talk) 22:30, 13 October 2010 (UTC) I set to to tweak the entry slightly to be less judgemental/benefit of hindsight and ended up rewriting to more accurately reflect the evidence given to the Inquiry Rjccumbria (talk) 20:27, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
The Illustrated London News 1876 edit
This link indicates that a number of pieces of information are available in the January editions, if someone is able to get access. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:11, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
- My copy of Rolt (op cit) has illustrations, including an engraving of the disaster scene from the ILN 'from a sketch by a passenger' which quite clearly shows signals out of their slots but not up to the 'danger' position - matching accounts in the inquiry report, but somewhat at variance with the 'frozen in slots' account in Rolt. ILN engravings are not always reliable - the ILN front page picture of the failed Tay Bridge has it curving L (rather than R)at the N end. It would be interesting to see what (if anything) the ILN's text said about the signals Rjccumbria (talk) 11:30, 2 February 2014 (UTC)