RAIU Report

[Colm Moore]

RAIU Alerts - a new report has been added to our website

Subscriber,

The RAIU have published Car Strike at Morrough Level Crossing, XG173, County Galway, 14th February 2011

Click on the link to download the report: Car Strike at Morrough Level Crossing, XG173, County Galway, 14th February 2011


Regards,
The Railway Accident Investigation Unit

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[Mark Gleeson]

Turns out Irish Rail's signage failed to meet with the accepted standard

Wasn't helped by the previous user of the crossing leaving the gate opened.

[James Howard]

I thought it was interesting that a contributing factor was that the Irish language version was on the left hand side of the road and was easier to see than the English version. Both driver and passenger saw the Irish version but couldn't read the content.

There seemed to be very little blame apportioned to the person who left the gate open.

[karlr42]

I'm not sure the RAIU is able to "blame" anybody other than who its reports are prepared for, the various public bodies involved. In previous reports about level crossing accidents they end up picking over minutaue of signage since they can't just say the road user was entirely at fault. Besides, the point of the reports isn't to assign blame, it's to investigate and make recommendations.

My interpretation was very much that the local authority has some role to play here. The road was in some kind of weird black hole where it was private property so there was no requirement for the usual level crossing road works, but yet it is still accessible to the public and marked on maps. Certainly if you were looking at a map trying to get to the beach, the road jumps out as a valid route. Accident waiting to happen, really.

In terms of leaving the gate open, if you read previous reports you'll see that all crossings they mention have been noted in the past as having been found open by patrol gangers, multiple times. People will always leave gates open no matter what you do or what kind of signage you have. The goal should be towards automating or eliminating all at-grade crossings.

On a side-note, the front-facing CCTV seems to be a great feature in case of accidents like this.

[Colm Moore]

Originally Posted by karlr42

The goal should be towards automating or eliminating all at-grade crossings.

This is the long term goal. Already there are none from Dundalk-Dublin-Thurles and only 4 between Cobh and Buttevant. There are 12 from Thurles to Buttevant and more than a thousand on the branch lines.

Click on 'Features' here: http://www.irishrail.ie/index.jsp?p=119&n=157 and select Level Crossings

[2200DMU]

There is none between Dublin-Carlow but there are 10 between Thomastown-Waterford of which 7 are automatic.

[Inniskeen]

Originally Posted by Colm Moore

This is the long term goal. Already there are none from Dundalk-Dublin-Thurles and only 4 between Cobh and Buttevant. There are 12 from Thurles to Buttevant and more than a thousand on the branch lines.

Click on 'Features' here: http://www.irishrail.ie/index.jsp?p=119&n=157 and select Level Crossings

Are you sure that Dublin/Thurles is free of field/accommodation crossings, I am sure I saw several only a few days ago. I don't think the Irish Rail website information is remotely comprehensive. Will pay more attention on my next trip.

[Inniskeen]

Originally Posted by Colm Moore

This is the long term goal. Already there are none from Dundalk-Dublin-Thurles and only 4 between Cobh and Buttevant. There are 12 from Thurles to Buttevant and more than a thousand on the branch lines.

Click on 'Features' here: http://www.irishrail.ie/index.jsp?p=119&n=157 and select Level Crossings

There are in fact several accommodation/field crossings between Ballybrophy and Thurles, although unlike other routes they do not appear to attract any speed restrictions.

[James Howard]

Originally Posted by karlr42

I'm not sure the RAIU is able to "blame" anybody other than who its reports are prepared for, the various public bodies involved. In previous reports about level crossing accidents they end up picking over minutaue of signage since they can't just say the road user was entirely at fault. Besides, the point of the reports isn't to assign blame, it's to investigate and make recommendations.

Fair point - I didn't put that terribly well. It just strikes me that the report seems to point towards the usual instinct of abdicating personal responsibility and apportioning the responsibility to the county council and Irish Rail.

It seems to me that the root cause of the accident was the gate being left open and perhaps some kind of publicity campaign about the importance of closing gates might be appropriate.

The other thing that really struck me was that the Irish version of the warnings being more obvious than the English version was a contributing factor. But that is a can of worms that we probably don't want to open. Personally I think this is taking a principle a far to compromise safety in the interests of linguistic balance but I can see that others in the country see things from a different point of view. Personally, I do tend to filter out Irish information from signs on the grounds that if the information is important, it would be in both languages but it might be that I need to start revising this tendency.

Anyway, in this case, the signage was rubbish both in English and Irish. In this case, I probably would have seen the sign and thought I was in a Gaeltacht and there was some sort of building project going on. Coupled with the non-standard gates, I would probably have sailed through that crossing without even thinking.

[Mark Gleeson]

There are two IE level crossing tv ads doing the rounds

The ERA ad from Brussels and the lamb at the farm gate