TRANSCRIPT - PANORAMA "PADDINGTON: AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN" VIVIAN WHITE Last month two trains collided. MARK ROGERS 'I remember thinking I don't believe it. I don't believe it. We've hit a train! BOB POYNTER REGIONAL OPERATIONS MANAGER, WESTERN REGION, 1984 - 1990 A lot of people are wise after the event. This was one of the incidents when we were wise before the event SIOBHAN HAY I really thought we were going to die. VIVIAN WHITE Tonight: Paddington. PADDINGTON: AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN SIOBHAN HAY Terror I think, and noise was just incredible. It was evident that we were still moving and everything sounded like it was breaking up, and I was just waiting to be hit by something. STEVE JONES Complete and utter disbelief that it would happen, and at the time no comprehension of what had happened it was.. 'what's happened to the rest of the train?'. No comprehension that we'd actually hit another train at all MARK ROGERS it was as if the whole world had been turned upside-down. I was pitched into the lap of the woman sitting opposite me and there was, you know, screaming, immense noise of crashing metal and smashing glass, an unbelievable racket. SUPERINTENDENT TONY THOMPSON BRITISH TRANSPORT POLICE BRIEFING There was a collision between the Great Western train, the 6.03 from Cheltenham this morning heading into Paddington. It collided with a train coming in the opposite direction, a Thames train going to Bedwyn. MARK ROGERS It ought not to be possible for two trains travelling at 50 miles an hour, 60 miles an hour, to hit head on in 1999. VIVIAN WHITE This is the aftermath of what the official interim report into this disaster describes as "a systems failure". The immediate cause of the crash was that the driver of the Thames train went past a signal set at danger. But all this wasn't caused by just one driver. On Britain's privatised railway this was an accident waiting to happen. Tonight we tell the story of two trains heading towards a collision - the story of four passengers - and the safety black spots along their routes, the warning signals on the system that failed. The station for well-heeled Cheltenham is on the outskirts of the town. Just before 6am, on October 5th, a group of passengers gathered in the darkness to catch the First Great Western Cheltenham Flyer: but Steve Jones cut it a bit fine Steve Jones. STEVE JONES I actually overslept in the morning so they were actually shutting the doors. I ran down the platform and dived onto the carriage and wandered up through the first class carriages and took my seat. INTERVIEWER So you just made the 0603. STEVE JONES Just made it, yes. VIVIAN WHITE Steve Jones a management consultant and a recent convert to train travel settled down, in Coach H. His fellow passengers there remained, for two hours more, mere strangers. STEVE JONES There were two people opposite me who.. I was listening to their conversation, as you do when you're sat on a train, but we didn't actually engage in conversation at the time. I'd sort of not considered that I wouldn't get on at Cheltenham and get off at Paddington in one piece every time I made that journey, not even considered that it would be a risk . VIVIAN WHITE His destination: Paddington where privatised Railtrack were proud to advertise the lavish commercial redevelopment of their property. Around the concourse there are new designer cafes, shops, and soon there'll even be a supermarket all bringing in valuable rental income. And just after eight, as the shops were beginning to do business, and the station was filling with commuters, Mark Rogers arrived by Underground. MARK ROGERS I remember getting to the platform with two minutes to buy my ticket and get onto the train. I get my ticket. It's just past 8:05. I've got 30 seconds or so to get across to where the train is. I arrived there and no sooner had I sat down than the doors closed so I was just before 8:06 and the trains leave very punctually. VIVIAN WHITE Mark was a regular who commuted from Paddington to a publishing company in Slough on the Bedwyn train every day. In the centre coach, the one in front, was Siobhan Hay, who'd started working for a television shopping company and travelling to Maidenhead a couple of months before. SIOBHAN HAY I was quite relieved to find I had a spare seat next to me and it wasn't cramped. The first thing I did actually was put some makeup on because I had been in such a hurry that morning, and that took a couple of minutes and sat back with my book for the rest of the journey. MARK ROGERS You've got no reason to assume that if you're putting your trust in the train driver that they're not going to get you to your destination safely. VIVIAN WHITE Over 700 trains a day come in and out of Paddington. The Thames train driver had been recruited in February, and he had practised leaving Paddington with an instructor over a hundred times. But this was only his tenth shift in charge of a passenger train. And almost immediately on his route was the first black spot. On the second row of signals, mounted on a gantry above the track, there was SN 63: a signal with a history. Between February 1994 and December 1998 this signal had been passed at red ten times - a worse record than the final, fatal signal. We've talked to some drivers who work this line. To protect their anonymity, their words are spoken by actors. This is what they said about SN 63: Driver 1 Well it's difficult to see, you just get limited visibility approaching the signal. Driver 2 The signal is obscured by the bridge until you have cleared under the.. gone under the bridge, and then you are able to see a clear gantry. VIVIAN WHITE There was a signal there, SN63, that had a history of ten times being passed at danger over the past few years. SIOBHAN HAY That's.. incredible. I don't... Once is too much. That should.. should make people sit up and take notice and do something about it. It's.. This was, you know, an accident obviously waiting to happen. It could have happened at any time, on any train. VIVIAN WHITE For her train the 8 06 to Bedwyn, SN 63 was showing double yellow, advance with caution; two signals further on down the line there was another black spot signal. And the train going the other way, the Cheltenham Flyer, stopped at Didcot Parkway at 7 27. Among the first class passengers who got into Coach H there was a solicitor who pays £5000 a year for the privilege for commuting daily from Didcot to London, David Miles DAVID MILES Commuting can be extremely frustrating. But when it works, one just gets into a groove, a routine and you really don't take very much notice of what's going on around you. VIVIAN WHITE David Miles was busy catching up with work as 14 minutes later, the Cheltenham train stopped at Reading. Then it would be go non-stop to Paddington, just 28 minutes away. Sometimes Coach H, the first coach, got pretty full here. This morning it didn't- and that was going to matter. DAVID MILES The Great Western trains had been performing in their normal and customary fashion, so the train in front of us was late. It had cleared off a lot of people waiting for our train who had arrived a little bit earlier. STEVE JONES We left Reading, sort of coach H, maybe half to two thirds full, something like that. VIVIAN WHITE Soon after Reading the Cheltenham train approached Maidenhead: a fatal accident black spot, but David Miles needed no reminding. On the 8th September 1995, he'd been on his way home: DAVID MILES I caught a slightly earlier train. I always catch a slightly earlier train on a Friday evening. We'd got to Maidenhead. There was suddenly a huge great bang and we looked up and saw flames going past the outside of the windows. VIVIAN WHITE A fuel tank from the power car had worked loose and dropped onto the track, and diesel fuel had ignited, setting the front of the train on fire. DAVID MILES Then the carriage began to fill with smoke. It suddenly got very, very thick very, very quickly. We were starting to think well how are we going to get out of this because 125's have a central locking system, and the doors were locked. Apparently, there are little green hammers that you can break windows with, but I knew nothing of that. VIVIAN WHITE Someone did manage to get a door open and David Miles got out- onto the track. DAVID MILES Unfortunately, the first chap who jumped out of the carriage had been, I think, quite keen to get away from the smoke, and again, like me, I'm sure it never occurred to him, had jumped down full into the path of an oncoming 125 going towards London and had been killed VIVIAN WHITE An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive into the 1995 Maidenhead fire recommended that "there should be a review of emergency equipment and de-training facilities provided for passengers including emergency window hammers and signs and instructions." Had the safety lessons from Maidenhead been learned? London was now 18 minutes away. David Miles was completely untroubled. DAVID MILES After Maidenhead I thought statistically I was safe. I had had one accident in my life and that should be it." VIVIAN WHITE And 6 minutes later his train was at Airport junction, where the Heathrow express trains join the route. Because of these there are masts and high voltage power wires strung above the track. From here on the railway had been substantially altered. TONY BLAIR "I'm delighted to declare the Heathrow Express officially open…" VIVIAN WHITE In 1998 the 100 mph electric Heathrow Express service began, and to accommodate them, Paddington station, 11 miles away, was rearranged and Heathrow Express trains were given prime platforms, right in the centre of the station, convenient for the new airline check-in facilities opposite. So now more trains were scheduled to weave their way across the new layout to reach their platforms; but there were critics PETER RAYNER Yes, I think once you run the Heathrow Service, your service determined on speed and 15 minute departures, that means more crossing movements and more - what a mathematic friend of mine calls - more collision opportunities. VIVIAN WHITE The 0806 to Bedwyn had left platform 9 on the north side of the station and was moving across the system- on its way down towards the main line. MARK ROGERS You're aware of the train moving across the tracks and you're conscious of any delay in that process. We were going quite quickly, and I was just sort of thinking at that stage, if I was thinking about it at all, I remember thinking 'Oh that's good, you know, we're picking up speed, you know it'll be a smooth run in this morning'. VIVIAN WHITE A new high speed layout had been put in from Paddington to Airport junction in 1993. The man in charge of planning the system. was Bob Poynter BOB POYNTER The intention was to improve the line speeds, increase the line speeds through the connections at Paddington to increase the capacity and the number of trains that it was possible to run. VIVIAN WHITE For a mile and a half between Paddington and Ladbroke Grove there are 6 high speed tracks, which trains can use in either direction, with signals in rows above the line. PETER RAYNER CHIEF OPERATING MANAGER, LONDON MIDLAND REGION (LMR) 1986-1991 I think because the 6 lines are signalled bi-directionally, great care has to be taken to ensure you know which line of the 6 you're on, and which of the signals refers to you. That would be difficult enough. It's made more difficult because the line is curved, and as you go towards curved signalling it isn't easy to align yourself with your own signal. Also there are over bridges in some cases where the signals are less than easy to see. DRIVER 1 Well we found that the signalling was very difficult to pick out and also it seemed ramshackled in the way of the layout with the signalling. Some were on gantries right across, which were placed above the eyesight of a bridge and you were unable to see them till the last minute coming under the bridge. VIVIAN WHITE The new layout hadn't originally been electrified, but when Railtrack added the overhead wires for the Heathrow Express trains some of the signals became more difficult for drivers to see: because insulators and electrical equipment got in the way. DRIVER 2 Under the old signalling the signals tended to be on posts individually so it was a lot easier to see. Now they've placed them a lot higher and then after that they put in the overhead electrics for the Heathrow which with the isolators for the wires and things that went on, it made it even worse. So the visibility was just.. it got worse from day one really, from the minute they set it up DRIVER 1 I did myself find I was reducing from the maximum speeds on the final approaches to Paddington for my own safety. PETER RAYNER All the way from Airport Junction it was designed.. it's a very clever piece of designing. I suppose it's an engineer's dream but it became, and is, a driver's nightmare. INTERVIEWER A nightmare? PETER RAYNER It is very difficult for those signals to be as easily read as others. VIVIAN WHITE Was the whole system a potential black spot- not just one particular signal? CHRIS LEAH OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, RAILTRACK We have not received either directly or indirectly, complaints from drivers about signals. If there were any signals which were causing concern, especially over a period of time which we are working with HSE very closely indeed, then I would have thought that body would have come along, again with either an improvement notice or a prohibition notice, which they did not. VIC COLEMAN It is very much the responsibility of the railway companies themselves to actually make sure that the signalling and the layout are safe and comply with their own legal obligations. Having said that of course, this was an area that was of some concern to us and, as I say, with respect to the electrification, this was a matter that was specifically raised and where we got a specific assurance that the electrification had not interfered with signal sighting. VIVIAN WHITE But heading into this system on Cheltenham Flyer, Steve Jones was not concerned. He assumed trains had a high tech safety system, in any case. STEVE JONES I suppose I'd taken it for granted that that wasn't my sort of.. the backstop wasn't an individual, the backstop was some sort of technology. VIVIAN WHITE There was a backstop fitted to his train, because ten years earlier British Rail had been concerned about drivers going through red lights. BOB POYNTER REGIONAL OPERATIONS MANAGER, WESTERN REGION, 1984 - 1990 we sought expert advice from outside to see if we could identify why a driver who had been driving a train for 30 years suddenly made a mistake and ran past a signal at danger. There was no one thing that we could really put our fingers on, and, as a result of that, the operations directorate of the time made a recommendation that we should install a proper automatic train protection system of the sort that was being installed in Europe. VIVIAN WHITE So in the late eighties tests of automatic train protection began. "British Rail set up a pilot scheme on the London to Bristol High Speed Inter city line also known as the Great Western Main Line." VIVIAN WHITE ATP continuously tells the driver what the safe speed is, and, if the driver goes too fast, it puts the brakes on. "For British rail safety is a tradition and in 1988 a team was assembled to draw up the specifications for the ATP national system." VIVIAN WHITE But ATP never went nation-wide. The industry decided that it cost too much. In 1994 as Railtrack were waiting in the wings to take over the railway, at a conference in London their first Director of Safety and Standards applied cost benefit analysis to Automatic train protection: "The cost per life can be taken as £14 million…" he told the Conference, and "there is a considerable gap between the costs and benefits of a significant ATP installation". STEVE JONES I have this difficulty with the concept of saying one life, £30 million, £50 million, £100 million. The fact of the matter is, if I'm paying for a ticket to go from A to B, I just expect to get there. VIVIAN WHITE The industry and the Government back-tracked, and the national installation of ATP was abandoned. But it could save lives. Would the ATP decision Railtrack's safety director asked the 1994 Conference, stand up in the aftermath of a major train accident? The ATP trials on the Great Western were continued as the trains were privatised. The Cheltenham train now past Southall, 11 minutes from London, a severe crash black spot that involved a train like theirs, with ATP. Here another Great Western high speed train had gone through a red light on the 19th September 1997, and collided with a freight train. Seven people were killed and 147 were injured. DAVID MILES There was great pressure to reopen the line so that initially, after the Southall crash, we went past. the carriages. A lot of the train was still there while they were removing it. So you saw the debris left after the train, and it was a nasty accident. So one always noted Southall, again mentally, rather like Maidenhead. VIVIAN WHITE At Southall, 'Automatic Train Protection' ATP was fitted to the Great Western train as well as a much more basic system, AWS, which sounds a warning hooter. But neither system was in operation. the company was convicted, of breaching health and safety regulations and fined a million and a half pounds. Sentencing Great Western the judge said:. "Had ATP been operating on this train on this journey the accident would not have happened." STEVE JONES "It's a question of having something there that wasn't being used. So that raises other questions with me in terms of the safety culture, whose decision is it to turn it on, whose decision is it to turn it off." VIVIAN WHITE Great Western were still having technical difficulties with ATP, in particular with the antennae on the power cars. The minutes of a meeting held with Railtrack on the 28th January 1997, 8 months before Southall, show how reluctant they were to spend £350,000 more to make it work. Great Western said: ATP put them "commercially at potential disadvantage." But, an internal memo said that: "After we have spent this extra money - we, with Railtrack's support, will be able to argue we have done everything reasonably practicable to get it to work." CHRIS LEAH RAILTRACK There wasn't a will to make it work. There was a will to spend as little as possible and hope it worked. There was a history of unreliability with those high speed train sets, and First Great Western did have problems with antennae. Railtrack did not have any difficulty with the infrastructure side of ATP but it was all about the rolling stock. VIVIAN WHITE On October 5th, the ATP on the Cheltenham Flyer wasn't operational. First Great Western declined our request for an interview. Thames trains also declined to give us an interview. Mark Rogers and Siobhan Hay commuting on their Thames Turbo had been thinking about the Southall accident, too. The public inquiry into the crash had only just begun, in September. SIOBHAN HAY We travelled through Southall every day, and the question of safety did cross my mind but following that incident I really and truly believed that we had to be on the safest stretch of track in the country, that having had an accident and learning lessons, that it really could not happen again, certainly on the same stretch. VIVIAN WHITE But on the final stretch into Paddington further down the line, there was another black spot. In February 1998 a new Heathrow Express train narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a First Great Western train which had overshot a red signal. The Heathrow Express trains have ATP and always have it switched on. The First Great Western train did not have its ATP operational - or it could not have passed the signal. INTERVIEWER Five months after Southall. VIC COLEMAN Yes, and that's an appalling situation. INTERVIEWER What had First Great Western been doing? VIC COLEMAN It's a situation that was of course immediately followed up by the inspectors who looked into that incident. It wasn't just technical problems at that time, it was actually the availability of train drivers. It was made very clear to them that they were facing direct enforcement action if they did not solve that particular problem. VIVIAN WHITE But Siobhan Hay and Mark Rogers were on a train unprotected by ATP because it had not been introduced nationally. Their Thames Turbo had a much more primitive warning system which the driver himself could override. Called AWS, this sounded a hooter in the cab if the train passed a signal set at yellow or red: but so long as the driver then pressed the cancel button, the train could carry on. SIOBHAN HAY It would never have occurred to me that the sole responsibility would be on the driver for any reason. I find that quite surprising and disturbing. VIVIAN WHITE Do you regret that the Thames Turbos didn't have ATP fitted? They were new trains. VIC COLEMAN They were new trains and I think that... INTERVIEWER Do you regret it? VIC COLEMAN Let me say, as a safety man I would like to see as good a train protection system as we can on the whole network. I believe that we did not have the legal powers to require that system to be retro-fitted with respect to those trains. VIVIAN WHITE The man who planned the complex high speed layout in and out of Paddington thought that the argument for automatic train protection had been won, and had expected it would operate on his system. BOB POYNTER I certainly had expected that ATP would have been.. that there would have been a.. that the production part of ATP there would have been probably a ten year strategy to put it onto key parts of the railway, and clearly at a very early stage within that it would have made sense to have put ATP on the Thames Turbos. INTERVIEWER Did you ever expect that automatic train protection wouldn't be fully protecting the rail system that you'd planned on the Paddington approaches by 1999? BOB POYNER No. Absolutely not. VIVIAN WHITE The 0806 Thames train without automatic train protection now passed signal SN 87, set at yellow. The hooter sounded and the driver cancelled it as normal, and went on. A single yellow meant that the next signal could be set at red. But the next one on the route was another black spot signal: SN109. It was one of the row of signals which guarded the point near Labroke Grove where the six two-way tracks out of Paddington narrowed to four one- way lines. And it had a history, already. It had been passed at red eight times, over a five year period. The First Great Western train was approaching this system with its signals set at green. SN109 was set at danger. The Thames train accelerated slightly towards it then passed beneath it at about 50 miles an hour: there were now 600 yards left. MARK ROGERS I'd got to a really gripping bit of my book I'd been reading the English Patient and it was a section of the book where, as it turned out, the bit where there's a pilot who crashes through.. he's terribly burnt and you don't know why he's burnt. I looked up. A woman screamed there was a terrific crash. DAVID MILES .. a huge great bang MARK ROGERS .. and then I was thrown forward with huge force. SIOBHAN HAY ..just being jostled and thrown around really and just holding on for dear life I think. I really thought we were going to die. MARK ROGERS There was a sort of slight smoke in the air which could have just been dust I guess from the impact and we stood up and I remember thinking it's going to catch fire. STEVE JONES Complete darkness, buffeted around, an incredible acrid smell, smoke, intense heat, then an incredible surge of sort of self-preservation. SIOBHAN HAY There was a feeling of calm until we saw the flames. VIVIAN WHITE Men and women who, moments before, had been absorbed in their ordinary daily tasks had suddenly to calculate how to escape from a burning train. David Miles had experienced Maidenhead. DAVID MILES I'd found myself in a smoke-filled carriage for the second time, and I knew that we were going to probably have to break a window to get out. I now knew about these little green hammers. So the first aim after standing up was to find and locate one of these hammers so that one could break a window. The problem was that it was absolutely pitch dark so I could not see where these hammers were. In fact I never found one of those hammers. STEVE JONES The guy I'd been sat opposite had found the end of the table and had started hitting the upper window. We'd broken the inside window down below but not the outside one, we couldn't do it. DAVID MILES Some chap had found what looked like a pick axe, and he was breaking the window with a pickaxe. I remember again thinking well a pickaxe was a jolly useful thing for him to have about his person at that particular time. Actually what it was, was the metal T support of the table. VIVIAN WHITE And David Miles escaped- again - with broken ribs and severe bruising, his clothes blackened by soot and diesel oil. Many of the survivors were injured or burned, and they were shocked. MARK ROGERS I saw what I thought was a dummy's hand outside the window, and I was thinking hand, arm - because I could see an arm - and I bent down and there was a woman trapped on her side under the train. MARK ROGERS There was a woman stroking the hand of this woman saying.. you know.. "You're going to be all right. You're going to be all right" like that, looking.. and I just sort of thought no, no you're not. You know, you're not going to be all right. SIOBHAN HAY Umm... There were people lying all over the track. Umm.. some black from smoke. Umm.. some covered in blood, just... strewn all over the place. I think perhaps most of them were.. were alive but barely. We could hear a lady calling from inside the carriage, and even she was very calm. She was calling for help but she wasn't hysterical. The carriage that she was in was black with smoke and... um.. totally ablaze. DAVID MILES One had the horrible period of standing really quite helpless looking at the flames beginning to lick round coach H knowing people were in there, being struck by the awful silence. There wasn't a sound coming from that coach. VIVIAN WHITE The death toll now stands at 30, with 259 injured, some critically. This is lower than many of the original estimates; but Coach H had been far emptier than the authorities at first understood. The clear-up went on for over a week. TONY THOMPSON BRITISH TRANSPORT POLICE We're still finding small items of property. They're having to go down quite deep, up to a depth of 12 inches to actually recover some of these items. VIVIAN WHITE Did privatisation and the complexity of the privatised railway contribute to the accident? Has it made the railway less safe? Railtrack deny that but they accept that communication has been difficult. CHRIS LEAH Communication lines we have been trying very hard to improve and we are a new industry because Railtrack has only been going what.. since 1994, 1996, as a private company. There are new players. So therefore there is an immaturity. We recognise that. VIVIAN WHITE But they say privatisation has not compromised the process of siting signals safely. And Railtrack have stressed to us that SN109 was not only working and showing red but the route indicator- the screen to the left, was blank- showing no route had been cleared. But SN109 had been altered twice: a third change was still under consideration. CHRIS LEAH If there were problems with those signals which the Health and Safety Executive have a problem with, then a) they did not serve an improvement notice, b) they did not serve a prohibition notice, and c) we have not had, as I said, representations about those signals. VIVIAN WHITE The HSE had publicly pressed the industry to take action over signals being passed at red but only used their legal powers and imposed an improvement notice on the 22 worst signals across the country including SN 109 on the day after the crash. VIVIAN WHITE Isn't it plain that you should have done it earlier? VIC COLEMAN I think it's plain that we did draw attention to these things earlier. As I said earlier on, the responsibility for dealing with this rests very much with the railway companies concerned. The study that we did last year, and the report we issued on the 2nd September, made it very clear that we were not happy at that stage with what the companies were themselves doing. VIVIAN WHITE An HSE report three days ago on the signal system at Paddington said that "there were problems with viewing some signals and there were no obvious or simple ways to eliminate these." Could signals simply be moved? Or is the radical solution still ATP? BOB POYNTER There have been three ATP preventable accidents in the last three years. Watford, Southall and now Ladbroke Grove. In my view the abandonment of ATP was not only a very bad safety decision it was a pretty rotten business decision too. I mean to say it's quite clear that it's now cost the industry millions of pounds. VIVIAN WHITE Mr Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, went to Ladbroke Grove on the day of the crash. The next day he talked about train protection. [JOHN PRESCOTT news interview 6th October 1999] "Cost is not a consideration; I want the safest railway system." VIVIAN WHITE Two months before the crash (10 Aug) Mr Prescott had committed the industry not to ATP but to a simpler cheaper train protection warning system, to be installed, at key junctions. TPWS only works effectively at up to 70 miles per hour: it would not end signals being passed at red, it would reduce it by two thirds. VIC COLEMAN This is worth going for in the interim. It's something that can generate an improvement now. INTERVIEWER But it won't stop the risk of fatalities through trains passing signals at red. VIC COLEMAN It is not automatic train protection. It does not provide complete protection and nobody has ever said that it does. MARK ROGERS I still find it baffling, baffling, that nobody stood up at any point and said this is a potentially - not even potentially, 'this is a fatal system, the system has fatal errors, people are going to die because of the decisions which are being avoided here'. VIVIAN MILES Three of the four crash survivors we spoke to are travelling by train again, but not without any qualms. David Miles says the railways are, statistically, safe. But he won't go in the front coach any more and he's prepared for the worst. DAVID MILES I've now gone to my local do-it-yourself shop and I got myself a hammer for £5. I carry it every day now I'm afraid. I'm serious about that. I am not going to find myself in a carriage again in the future with the problem of getting out of it with fire and smoke licking around at my heels. VIVIAN WHITE After spending two days in hospital recovering from burns and the effects of smoke inhalation Steve Jones met the fellow passengers who had helped him out of Coach H- the same two people whose conversation he had been shyly overhearing. STEVE JONES It was then a bit of a quest to track them down, and one of them said to me that, 'Do you think we'll sort of keep in touch?' and I said, 'I think we'll actually know each other till we're old and grey.' It was as though somebody had sort of just given you a 10-year friendship in an instant really. VIVIAN WHITE Siobhan Hay has just bought a car for her daily journey to work from her home in East London across to Maidenhead. SIOBHAN HAY I haven't taken the train to work since the train crash at Paddington. I don't really want to have to face that journey again. Maybe sometime but certainly not yet. I can still see it very clearly, very clearly, and I do see it, quite often during the day. It.. doesn't seem quite real somehow but.. I still see it very vividly. (pause) I imagine it's not going to go away in a hurry. MARK ROGERS I remember thinking 'I don't believe it. I don't believe it. We've hit a train! Two weeks after the beginning of the Southall inquiry we've hit a train, what is going on'. And I had this really furious anger at it... I mean I suppose it's just a reaction to being scared but I felt angry, even as we were going over, and I still feel angry, I still feel furious. VIVIAN WHITE This should have been the evening rush hour at Paddington on the day of the crash. The line remained closed for over two weeks. Railtrack have not yet been able to give an estimate of the financial cost of the accident: but it has cost the reputation of the privatised railway dearly. MARK ROGERS I mean there are acts of God and there are acts of wilful stupidity. It seems to me this isn't an accident. This is a kind of administrative manslaughter. _____ If you would like to make any comments on this programme you can visit our website at this address. Next week: Children with chronic fatigue syndrome: doctors and parents disagree over their treatment. 15