[Beeyar Wunby]

Yes we still have a lot of near-misses on the Fen Line. In addition to Bramleyman's comments about people with poor attitude (which I've experienced myself), I also think fatigue sometimes plays a significant part. Particularly during harvest time out on the Fens when agricultural workers are working from before dawn to long after dusk. It's not unusual for them to work in excess of 20 hour days - many of them are foreign nationals, and in any case they seem to be exempted from the sort of EU Working-Time restrictions that we have !

The previously mentioned bi-directional line between Downham Market and Littleport has a linespeed of 90mph, and all trains except the 2 daily sand trains are EMUs, so are almost silent on approach. People really don't appreciate just how quickly a distant train gets to them.

On UWGs (User-worked gates) the person wishing to cross is required to look out for themselves. Sometimes when they've been backwards and forwards across the line many times a day they get a little blasé. And they're often dog tired. Or they reckon they know the times of all the trains because the Kings Lynn service is a clock-face timetable......when in fact due to ECML problems it can be up to 30 mins late occasionally.

It's part of irrational human nature to believe that the more often you repeatedly do something that's wrong and get away with it, the more you convince yourself that it's not dangerous. Sadly though what you're actually doing is repeatedly exposing yourself to a risk, and are therefore more likely to invoke an incident.

So hopefully the new Wave Train technology will make the railway safer by giving audible and visual warnings at occupational crossings which currently have none. It would be great if there is a (relatively) cheap answer to making User Worked crossings safer.

The paradox about safety is you often never know when someone's life has been saved, but you always know when it hasn't.

BW