Safety work on BR carriages 'too costly'

CHRISTIAN WOLMAR

Transport Correspondent

The recommendations of the inquiry into last year's Cowden train crash in which five people were killed look set to be ignored because they are too costly to implement.

The inquiry report, published in May, recommended that old Mk I rolling stock, whose poor crash resistance contributed to the scale of the disaster, should be replaced or refurbished to more modern standards.

But a British Rail report leaked yesterday to the Labour Party suggests safety modifications to the rolling stock would not be cost-effective.

Four options are considered for refurbishing the coaches, but even the cheapest would cost pounds 31.5m per life saved. The benchmark for such investment is pounds 1m to pounds 2m per life saved.

The leaked report, Maintaining a Safe Passenger Railway Using Mark 1 Rolling Stock and written by Tony Roche, BR's central services group managing director, admits the old rolling stock is less crash-resistant than new carriages.

On providing new trains, it said: "Statistics show that the actual number of accidents occurring is small. This has been tolerable to customers and users of the railways so that the promise of better trains in the future has been an acceptable situation and there is not generally a demand for the immediate renewal of older vehicles simply because they are less crashworthy than new vehicles."