We are only talking about a couple of feet maximum. Considering that wholescale electrification is now on the agenda. Plus slowly there is a programme to raise clearances so larger freight trains can run. There is not point building new infrastructure to old standards, especially as the cost difference between them is not that high.

So it would be more expensive rebuild these bridges in the future.

As for the Airtrack scheme. It was ill thought out. The idea was good, but if they wanted to plough a viaduct through the town centre of Staines and double the length the barriers were down on the other side of the river then it should not have cancelled the new town centre station it promised. it was this that allowed people to use extra services from the West and South of town. Once they cancelled that. what was the point of routeing it through the town centre (other than it being cheaper),they should have just stuck it down the side the Motorway avoiding the town centre and the level crossings.

It could be revived though with just a link to Central London via Staines. That way it avoids the viaduct and the level crossings and would still serve the majority of the traffic. others could just change at Staines or Clapham Junction.

Bridging the level crossings in this area was a non starter as it would mean dozens of house no longer having driveways or even curbside parking.

Another observation is that the German Autobahns where no speed limit is in place are safer and cause less road rage because the slower users are always aware that faster traffic could be coming up rapidly behind them. Slower traffic generally keep to the slow lanes and rarely deliberately hinder faster traffic as many self appointed “policemen” do when speed limits are in place. Again here there is no assumed obligation upon the other driver to yield or to obey some regulation to stay under an arbitrary speed so sanity and courtesy prevails. The exception here i have often observed is what I assume to be (probably american) tourists driving underpowered hire cars staying solidly in the overtaking lanes at 100 km/h or less and not moving over to allow fast traffic (often coming up at 200 km/h) to pass unhindered.

I have also noticed, from spending some time in Italy, that Italian drivers are notorious for lack of “road discipline” and adherence to the traffic rules or lane markings, etc. And yet the accident rate in Italy is often better than that in Germany or Britain where obeying the road rules is often regarded as almost a sacred duty and assumed right of way is often defended to the point of causing accidents. In Italy most drivers (except the tourists from countries where road rules are regared as holy writs again) expect the unexpected from other drivers and allow themselves margin to correct.

Of course that logic cannot be taken to extreme, because then you get Africa.

An observation from commuting many years by bicycle through city centres is that pedestrians do not look out for traffic. I can only assume that they rely on their hearing but bicycles and electric (or hybrid ) cars are silent and give no aural warning of their approach. I have collided with pedestrians, at high (for a bicycle) speed on at least 3 occasions and in every case they simply walked into my path without looking. I forsee a lot more pedestrian accidents involving electric cars in the future. I suspect this effect is what happens at railway crossings, where drivers do not look but implicitly rely on there being some other undefined cue to alert them of the presence of a train.

I will admit there’s sometimes a reason to defeat the one-barrier type, and that’s when a train has stopped for some reason after setting the lower-the-gate switch. Typically I’d say 1/4-1/2 mile away. Then, after you watch a long time and it’s obviously not moving, you go ahead. But I don’t think those are the circumstances of any crash I’ve heard of.

I grew up in the country back in the 40′s and 50′s, and very few country crossings were protected. Busy lines often did have RR-Xing “towers”–I’m sure you know, a large black-and-white-striped “X” made of two timbers, attached to a tall wooden post, sometimes with two lights next to each other that would flash red alternately when a train approached. No sound. But a lot of crossings just had a standard yellow sign the size of a regular stop sign, that said “Caution–RR Crossing.” And I still see those sometimes, out in the country.

We had our share of near misses. I have no idea what the casualty rate was. But one of the things stressed HARD by our driving teacher (Grandpa, in my case) was STOP, LOOK, LISTEN. In fact they taught us that in grade school, for pedestrians and the kids who rode bicycles (that would be everybody, almost).

When RR traffic began to decrease significantly on some of the rural lines we started having more problems–carelessness because the likelihood of an oncoming train was less.

You would think that with all the movies over the last umpty years that feature murder-by-train (bad guy shoves good guy’s car onto tracks) people would be well aware that trains are nothing to mess with.

The old fashioned wooden gates some of which still exist, in Britain they always operated in the horizontal plane, were actually more prone to accidents than modern lifting barriers. There are a number of technical reasons for this which I won’t bore you with but even with a keeper on site to work them accidents were very common.
As for user operated gates, yes that’s correct they have to be opened by the user, which in the case of a vehicle driver means getting out opening the far gate first, then the nearer and then driving across, repeating the process on arrival, all the while checking constantly to make sure there is no train approaching. That’s the correct way of doing it and as you can see even that is inherently risky. When you consider that many users don’t follow the correct procedure you can see why there are so many accidents. Also a lot of crossings of this kind have no gates or barriers at all, some have road traffic type lights but many are completely unprotected. There are far too many instances of people just driving walking or cycling straight across without looking and getting killed as a result. As a railwayman I find this inexplicable because I know how dangerous trains are but most people just don’t appreciate that and disregard them in a way they never would with road vehicles. Another new hazard is earphones from mobiles or music pods, cyclists in particular seem to think it perfectly OK to wear these when riding and there have been a number of railway fatalities as a result. As I said before, what can you do about stupidity ?

Yes, we have many RR-Xing accidents here.

What’s wrong with gates (those wooden barricades, if they are still wood) that swing down from BOTH sides and overlap for a ways in the center, with virtually no clearance between them, on both sides of the track? (I’m sure there’s a problem — I just don’t see what it is.)

You have “user-operated” gates? You mean the gates are always closed unless a driver (or pedestrian) leaves his vehicle to push a button to raise them?

The problem with that, in relation to level crossings, is that trains and traffic don’t mix very well, certainly not trains of the sort of speeds and weights we find in the UK and even more so the US – there’s some really spectacular Youtube images of grade crossing accidents in the US. Even light rail is vulnerable to this despite lower speeds and people being, theoretically at least, more aware of the presence of trams.
I ought to clarify somewhat my comment about never having witnessed an accident on a crossing. I saw plenty of ‘incidents’ as we term them but nothing involving serious injury, still less death. The only train/vehicle accident we experienced at the box I worked in for the last twenty four years of my railway career was at an unmonitored user worked crossing where a van driver drove his vehicle across the line and was struck by a train, derailing it and wrecking the van, which sounds like carnage but amazingly nobody received more than minor injuries. This box has ten CCTV monitored crossings all of them very busy both for rail and road traffic and yet there has never been any major incident at any of them. If they were left unprotected I doubt that would be the case, in fact I know it wouldn’t be.

The theory is that once people knew they had to look out for themselves, the lights failing to do it for them, they became interested in being on the alert for crossing traffic.

I can think of other explanations, but anyway, there it is.

“Safety is also pursued in accordance with mindless rules….”

Rich Rostrom:

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

And the good is the enemy of the perfect.

Moi:

There is almost no such thing as a universally-valid blanket rule.

(Of course, what I want to write is, “No blanket rule is always right,” but– )