It may be too early to know the cause of the Bedford train accident, the worst for more than two decades. The outcome is horrific enough as it is. Nine people are in a critical condition following the collision between two trains on Friday evening in which the driver died and 89 people were injured. As details emerged, a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said that King Charles’s “thoughts and sympathies are with the family of the deceased and with all those injured or affected”. The scale of the tragedy warrants the soberest of words.
The question for the investigation team is likely to be why the Train Protection and Warning System introduced across the network after the Ladbroke Grove disaster, which killed 31 in 1999, did not prevent this crash. That system, designed to stop trains automatically if they pass a red signal, has worked well since then.
