Charter Plane down- breaking news

Paul Corfield wrote

I have never really understood this either. The nearest explanation
which seems to work for me[1] is that the death of an individual here
and there is of little or no importance to me but taking them out a few
hundred at a time is an issue I should be taking notice of.


[1] Prolly some sort of deep rooted animal instinct thing I reckon.

 

Someone at my current place of work is part of that. They were amazed
to find that Network Rail didn't know how many tunnels and bridges there
were.

heh

 

I can't believe I just read that.
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'^'

 

I sincerely hope that they didn't use dye.

 

As a lot of the pipework would be Austenitic Stainless, they wouldn't
have used MPI.

Depends upon the size and wall thickness of the pipe, not to mention
access.

I have to be honest here and admit that any experience I have (be it
first or second hand) would be based upon smaller scale reactor designs.

 

Yep - they've converted a former HST to do this work.

Network Rail could probably save themselves a fortune and ask the
trainspotters to tell them what exisits out on the railway. They are
bound to know exactly where *everything* is.

 

I think it was more along the lines of they want to reallocate more of
the money into the pockets of the directors and investors. This is after
all, the aim of private industry is it not? The whole rail privatisation
fiasco has been one huge rip off of the public from start to finish.

I used to own a bit of BR. Then they offered to sell my share to the
highest bidder. Then they asked me to carry on bailing it out even
though I'd been disenfranchised. Then when they'd bled it dry they threw
their hands up and left me to pick up the pieces and bail it out again.

In the meantime,the number of crashes seems to have increased, the
trains are more expensive to use, and You can never find out whether two
services will connect or not.

I realise this is wandering OT but it's symptomatic of the overall
decline of the service IMO.

The safety implications of all this should have been given much more
consideration at the time. When any organisation is given a big shake
up, a lot of knowledge leaks away with early retirements, the scrapping
of old records etc.

It was the usual Tory bollocks. Public ownership too inefficient. 'We
can do twice the job with half the staff' etc etc.

The whole lot of 'em are in the dock on this one Paul. Jointly and
severally liable the phrase is.

Its a long post already, I had to trim and I didn't mean to bend the
argument through unfair editing.I read your examples and took note. My
answer is that you can prove anything with statistics. Saying that we
are no worse than other countries doesn't cut much ice with the consumer
however.

ITYF they are.

Nono. I tried to steer away from the public/private thing because it
muddy's the waters.

The names of the directors whove been banned from operating PSV's? I
shall try to find them.

Take a look again. Did I say we shouldn't have these reports? No I
didn't. But when the report says that we should install APT then thats
what we should sodding well do.

You obviously do, and I'm only a concerned punter who keeps himself as
well informed as he can. I won't be brow beaten because of that though

What about the considered response of an enquiry which took an age to
report?

Like 30 mph speed limits and things like that?

I'm with you all the way on that one.

Ok mate, Thanks for listening to my gripes, and keep up the good work.

 

I wouldn't be at all surprised, actually.

 

I can.

 

The Wall St Crash.

 

Chris H said...

And there was me thinking the 2 planes hit the WTC, just goes to show
how the media twist things around.

 

In the early 80s I new a guy who was tasked to produce a database of the
rolling stock as they kept loosing freight cars.

I've posted this in full a few years ago if anyone wants to Google.

 

Lol! On behalf of JC and in solidarity with my norven bruvver

Up yours twat!.

*DING*

TBH my source, who shall remain nameless unless of course Geoff Hoon
feals the heat coming on, did say that the 'bad' welds were within the
margin of safety, but would have been knocked back by the boffins. The
problem here is a weakness in the authantication chain where it is the
judgement of the subcontractor which counts, rather than that of the
inspectorate. It was suggested to me that there was connivance involving
the main contractor and the inspectorate, because the penalty clauses on
overrun were looming large. If this is so, it may have been a case of,
"It's OK, I've seen the other Xrays and nothing's gonna break."

I hope so anyway.

 

Mick Whittingham <> spouted the
following in

I know a guy who in the early nineties was commissioned by the DOT to
photograph every 'A'road and Motorway junction in the country from each
approach.

He's prolly still at it.

 

You have to be qualified these days to do NDT (non-destructive testing),
so only larger companies do this themselves as they have the resources to
employ in-house inspectors. In-house inspection is not always recognised
by the clients inspector or other inspectorate.
They sometimes do it themselves as a pre-inspection check, but also have
to get it independently done.

I would expect critical welds in a power station to be inspected by both
UT and RT and also a surface method.
It's not just faulty welds that can leak, think also about flanges, pumps
and other fittings like pressure guages etc.

Nor have I and I've been around a few nuclear power stations, nuclear subs
and other critical stuff. It's not worth the risk and usually the welding
contractors are very professional in these cases.

For important jobs, new welder qualification tests would be required,
specific to what has to be welded.

I've seen some horrible things, even when it was known the welds had to be
inspected. I'm thinking mainly shipbuilding here when there are *miles* of
welds and the inspection areas are not known to the welders...

 

Weld acceptance is decided by the specification, I've not heard of a
"margin of safety", unless he means borderline according to the acceptance
criteria. If there's any doubt, then it's a repair, but usually it's
blindingly obvious.
Penalty clauses wouldn't affect the inspectorate unless it could be shown
they were deliberately holding the job up for no good reason.

 

I backpedaled on that aspect of the debate because I didn't want to
muddy the waters. The point is, there are no longer any publicly owned
transport systems we can compare with.

I'm more concerned about the safety record of our transport systems than
who owns them, which I thought I'd tried to clarify in each and every
reply I posted to Paul.

My characterisation of our transport systems as 'privatized' was
descriptive rather than pejorative, although I do firmly believe that
private industry is inherently more secretive and less publicly
accountable than the Public services.

The bit of my first reply to Paul which you quote above, pretty clearly
shows that I immediately tried to get away from a public/private debate,
and onto the main issue, namely the safety of our transport systems.

So either offer something constructive to the debate, or leave me alone
please.

 

there are elements that have not worked. There are other parts that
clearly have.

"seems" - either they have or haven't.

except that prices on a lot of fares have been capped to inflation less
1% so in real terms some fares are far cheaper. This is partly why
ridership was over 1 billion journeys last year.

Never find out - funny I have a timetable at home that tells me and
there is also www.nationalrail.co.uk which works fine for me.

Except that I don't think you've proved any of the points you were
making. How many train journeys do you make a year?

So have a go at the politicians but don't blame the poor souls trying to
run it.

[accident stats]

But the consumer is very rarely equipped with the facts. Whenever I take
the time to explain to our passengers why something isn't quite right
they may not like it but they do understand. Most people get their facts
from the media and the whole media treatment of the transport industry
(with the notable exception of the car industry) is utterly abysmal thus
leaving people unnecessarily concerned and in some cases too scared to
use the service. The paranoid response to the Hatfield crash where
Railtrack panicked put so many extra people onto the roads (much less
safe) that it has been calculated that an extra 63 people died as a
result of that transfer (given relative accident rates for the modes).

[snip]

but the implication of your statement was that they were a waste of time
because people don't act on them and follow through.

And as an employee of an industry that is almost completely
misrepresented I fail to see why I should sit back and see a whole load
of ill informed nonsense portrayed as fact.

Yes but some of the results from the Southall / Ladbroke Grove enquiries
were wrong. You won't like that reply but any qualified railway safety
expert will tell you that the recommendations were disproportionate and
ill considered. If hundreds of people were dying on the railways then I
could understand your concerns but they simply are not doing so.

not necessarily - you can institute different procedures and checks in
the short term until some technological fix is introduced (if that is
deemed to be the best option).

But you still don't see that I'm right and you're wrong though.

 

"mb" <> spouted the following in

I think it was the main contractor who was about to fall foul of the
penalty clauses rather than the inspectorate.

 

I _knew_ there was something wrong, and hadn't registered who had posted
it.

No surprises, really.