In Episode 10 of Green Signals, Richard Bowker visited the Siemens Mobility HQ at Chippenham for an event remembering 35 years since the tragic Clapham rail disaster in which 35 people died and a further 69 suffered life-changing injuries.

Clapham remembered

Clapham was a disaster that led to fundamental changes in railway safety management. The subsequent inquiry into the accident, chaired by Anthony Hidden QC was groundbreaking because, instead of attributing blame to the individual who had made the wiring error, Hidden turned the spotlight on an industry which consistently talked about the importance of safety but had failed to turn those words into meaningful action.

You can read the Hidden report here.

There were two books mentioned during the episode. One was The Clapham Train Accident: Causes, context, and the corporate memory challenge by Greg Morse which can be bought from Pen and Sword Books.

The other was the classic Red for Danger by L.T.C Rolt. You can find out more about that here.

PHOTO CREDIT: London Fire Brigade.

Scotland Part 2

We had an interesting discussion with Transport Scotland Director Bill Reeve about the Borders Railway, which you can find out more about here.

Paddington

During our analysis of the disruption at Paddington on December 7, which led to stranded passengers self-evacuating, we mentioned Network Rail Chief Executive Andrew Haines’ very honest and open post on LinkedIn following his own personal experience of the incident. At the time of writing this blog post, his LinkedIn piece had received more than 4,000 reactions and over 450 comments. You can read it for yourself here.