Policy on bridges is off the rails

Last year in Ireland, road vehicles crashed into railway bridges on 105 occasions. Almost all of these incidents involved lorries hitting overhead railway bridges. In most cases, the lorry was too high to pass beneath the bridge. There is a danger that such incidents will cause train tracks to shift, leading to a derailment.

Such is the incidence and seriousness of these impacts that the head of Irish Rail safety, Mr Ted Corcoran, said in an interview: "A significant accident will inevitably arise sooner or later. It takes a very small amount of movement [by the tracks] to cause a derailment."

If an accident does happen it is most likely to occur on East Wall Road in Dublin. The railway bridge over that road has been struck by trucks over 100 times in the last few years.

Impacts with railway bridges have been identified as a problem for several years now, but instead of government departments working together to ensure a major rail accident is avoided, the two Departments mainly involved, Environment and Public Service, have worked in opposite directions.

Mr Corcoran says: "What I am concerned about is that while one arm of the State is trying to make railway travel safer, another is removing the height restriction on trucks because of some European Union directive." One of the problems - aside from Departmental inertia - involves a dispute with the EU Commission. According to the Department of Public Enterprise, the Commission instituted legal action against Ireland because it had failed to give adequate advance notice of the introduction of regulations governing the height of vehicles.

In July of last year Ireland simply caved in and revoked the regulations, and as of now there are no plans to introduce new regulations.

So the position remains: trucks too high to pass under railway bridges are allowed to travel the roads of Ireland, striking bridges at will, thereby endangering the lives and welfare of rail passengers, and the arms of State involved stand idly by.

But they are not, they will protest. There is a Level Crossing Working Group, comprising Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The Department of Public Enterprise said in the statement: "The group is aware of and concerned at the increasing number of incidents of [railway] bridges being struck by road vehicles." The Department assures us: "Iarnrod Eireann has established internal procedures to deal with bridge strikes [and] these are currently being reviewed with a view to their being updated."

Now isn't that reassuring? Procedures to deal with bridge strikes are being updated. Not that they are doing anything to prevent bridge strikes but they are updating procedures to deal with them!

Actually, in the case of East Wall Road they are going to replace the bridge at a cost of £10 million. But the railway bridge at Amiens Street and one in Longford are hit quite often, as are many others. There are no plans to do anything about them. So what's happening?

They are updating maps on railway bridges; they are going to have new traffic signs about bridges; they are going to tell city and county managers and the Garda about the risks of bridge strikes and they are about to "discuss" with the National Safety Council the "possibility" of initiating a bridge-strike-related safety campaign.

There is an obvious and immediate initiative that could be taken by the Government if there was a will to do something. It is to inform the EU Commission of an intention to reintroduce regulations governing the height of vehicles on the obvious grounds of safety. Such regulations would not be contrary to EU law (this is acknowledged by the Department of Public Enterprise). So what's the problem? Why don't they get on with it? Or is it better simply to hope against hope?

There have been a few other scares on the rail lines as well. Last year a train travelling from Cobh to Cork passed a red danger signal and kept going until it reached the next station. Luckily there was no accident, but it was close. Another train went through a red signal in Tipperary and travelled half-a-mile before being stopped.

The most alarming incident occurred between Bray and Greystones on February 10th last year. There is only one track on this part of the line so when a train passed a red signal and kept going for about 300 yards, a major disaster could have occurred.

Curiously, few appear to pay any attention to these incidents, although they are so fraught with potential calamity.

But by far the gravest danger centres on the impacts with railway bridges, and not alone is no attention being paid, but apparently there is a policy decision to do nothing or virtually nothing.

I shall return next week to the issue of Fine Gael's finances and report, I hope, on John Bruton's responses to 28 questions I put to him, arising from his response to my column of two weeks ago. In later weeks I hope to return to the John Gilligan case and the response to my suggestion last week that perhaps the Special Criminal Court got it right

vbrowne@irish-times.ie