New Series: Monday 20th Feb BBC2 "The Tube"

[The Stationmaster]

I have the greatest respect for the staff and emergency workers involved with this type of incident, they must be under enormous pressure to reopen the system as soon as possible but dealt with the truely horrid situations in a very calm, professional and respectful manner.

What struck me though was the fact that they manage to reopen the line within around an hour or so, if there was a fatal road accident it seems the road can be closed for many hours for investigations to take place. Presumably the quick reopening is down to the fact that CCTV & black box recorders gives all the evidence needed?

I think that is probably the case. The normal thing with an on-line fatality is that the Police turn up and immediately treat it as a crime scenes and the delays that seem to result from that nowadays are far worse than they used to be in the past in my experience. In fact I can remember when we were given a written Instruction to no longer remove bodies until the poilce had arrived (and a verbal accompaniment that you should move them if it meant you could get trains running again but chalk mark the original position of the body - whoever came up with that bit clearly hadn't seen many). Oddly all of the - fortunately - few I had to attend saw me get to site after the police but in only one case was there any serious delay to trains (and I would have needed a very big piece of chalk to deal with that one).

 

But I think they did a good job in that programme with no over dramatisation and a lot of commonsense in the commentary - still does not make it a nice job tho'.