Ray M: Re Accidents and Safety on Australian Railways Today and in the Past It's a bit hard to define what may have been common in the different areas and places. I spent a lot of time in the Melbourne yard at night in the late 60's and learned that there was a permant gang assigned to replacing the buffers which were knocked over mostly on or around pay-days because of the consumption of alcohol. It was *bloody noisy* and even scary on pay days because many shunters didn't have the patience or coordination they displayed magnificently during the rest of the fortnight. To my knowledge, those derailments were not much of an issue in that gravitational yard where shunters constantly had to leap aboard rolling waggons in the dark and assess their weight and momentum and then apply the ratchet-foot brake at just the right time before leaping off before impact. This 'jump-off' point was dictated to some extent by obstacles such as bags of wheat or briquettes spilled between the tracks --or perhaps another waggon rapidly approaching behind the first. If the following one wasn't quickly mounted and slowed down, then there wasn't much point in giving the first one a soft landing! So it was really only the bigger derailments or accidents that ever got put on paper. One of them was the case in early 1968, if I remember correctly, where a GY waggon (a standard wheat truck) was hit so hard that it not only hit the buffers in the "Per Shed" (Perishable shed - a quarter of a mile long) - it jumped out of the pit and onto the walkway at the end of the shed and went a further 20 feet - half-way out the double wooden (pedestrian) doors. I would be surprised if that ever happened more than once in the Victorian Railways. Another very bad, but sad one at about the same time,was the case of the out-of-control waggons hitting the big van in one of the sheds (A Shed or the Per shed) where the blokes were loading newspapers. One worker was killed by the impact and being hurled across the van. Getting back to smaller derailments: As far as I could tell, if yard derailments occurred they were just fixed, and everyone just carried on with the job. Sometimes it was hard enough just getting that done - without writing a story about it. Besides that, which white collar workers would care about such things anyway? The Vic Rail had a steam crane loco which was used for the more difficult cases. One of them was the night a heavily loaded waggon full of steel came off the rails in the middle of the Melbourne yard a few hundred feet below the neck. A crew with special hydraulic jacks worked all night trying to lever it back onto the rails because it was too heavy for "Polly" to lift one end of it. Generally though, railwaymen in the VR (and probably everywhere else) just took charge of most situations and did what they thought was best in tricky or emergency situations, and there was an unwritten law that you didn't create paperwork unless it touched upon the safety of the travelling public or employees. >Question: Are the rules/regulations now more strict than they were say 20 or 30 years ago? RM: Good question, but it's hard to imagine that things have improved, when they have abandoned such things as guards, firemen and even a white disc on the rear of some trains to indicate that it is complete. The abolition of many station staff to protect passengers and trains would also indicate that nothing is anywwhere near as strict or safe. There would probably be a lot more OH&S rules now, but that's become universal. >Question: There was a story about somebody running a wagon off the line and managed to get it back on and no one ever knew. What would the chances of this happening these days? RM: It's no big deal. The VR had a rule for virtually every conceivable event, except which driver goes first at Dwarf signal. They even had a rule that said a Station Master may not borrow money from a staff member, and another one which said if your pay was late you got 25% of your pay rate (if off duty) while waiting for it, but I don't recall seeing a rule about reporting minor derailments. The rolling stock is made of pretty sturdy material! >(Question :Because I get the impression that railways are very safety concious now compared to what they were) RM: No, that saftey-concious attitude in Australian railways (for passengers) has always been there. I'd say it was at it's peak in the 1940's but has gradually declined since then - particularly since about 1960. It's the saftey of employees that has been markedly improved in recent decades but as I said above, that's universal. Employee safety was atrocious in many ways in the first 80 years of Australian railways - particularly in shunting. If you really want to get some idea about how safe things are in any facet of railway operations, listen and see if you can hear railway staff and management talking about safe working during routine conversations. (I'm not talking about what's in the fancy colour brochures, but the mentality of railway staff on the front line). Of course you have to filter out some of the b.s. that some of the more rugged individuals express, but deep down they nearly all care about safety. I mean what's the point in bragging about being a railwayman or woman if you can't get your passengers and train safely to their destinations all the time? >Thanks to duffo21 and Ray Murphy ..... aus.rail.news .......