Madam, – To state that “however good we may be at building things, we are woeful at maintaining them” (Editorial, August 25th) casts an unwarranted slur on the professionalism of generations of railway engineers who have maintained the Irish railway system in safe and serviceable working order for 150 years, surviving wars, recessions and the occasional re-structuring.
To echo the call of blogger Mark Gleeson of Rail Users Ireland for “a systematic programme of bridge inspections” misses one important point – there always has been a systematic two-year maximum interval bridge inspection on Irish railways.
Indeed, there may well be two parallel-running programmes in place – the traditional divisional engineer / assistant divisional / chief inspector inspection culture and the newer consultant-designed top-down ISO9000-compliant model favoured by the Railway Safety Commission.
This is perhaps the most dangerous condition – the traditional culture out of favour and the new culture not yet in place.
The maintenance of the permanent way (track, bridges etc) is and always has been a core-activity of the civil engineering department. It is a boots-on-the-ground activity, often done under severe time-pressure on busier road-inaccessible lines, experienced eyes constantly looking for anomalies, signs of damage, structural distress, physical deterioration. Not a consultant in sight.
Perhaps senior engineers are spending too little time on permanent way inspection and too much time on vanity-projects such as, pace my Western cousins, the Western Corridor “line to nowhere”.
The Malahide viaduct failure demands a reckoning. The tide has been ebbing and flowing through the spans of this viaduct for more than a century and it’s incomprehensible that every mood of that tidal flow hasn’t been observed and logged over all these years. – Yours, etc,