Tomorrow (Saturday) is D-day for local Labour MPs Hazel Blears and Ian Stewart, as local party members in Salford & Eccles constituency decide which MP is the weakest link. As I commented earlier this week, the race looks to be going down to the wire. It will be interesting to see whether the Salford Labour Party has the guts to deselect a Cabinet Minister who has let our City down badly.
Archive for January 18th, 2008
I read with horror the story in today’s Manchester Evening News about a man falling between the platform and a train at Greenfield station in Oldham:
A DAD has told of his miracle escape from a ‘death trap’ after getting stuck between a train and the platform.
Paul Steele slipped in pouring rain as he was handing over two-year-old daughter Chantelle’s pram to the conductor at Oldham’s Greenfield station.
The 36-year-old father frantically freed himself and managed to get on board before the train set off.
Greenfield is not the only station to suffer from death trap platforms. Northern Rail and Network Rail have been told by passengers here at Walkden - and reminded repeatedly by representatives from Friends of Walkden Station - that the platform is an unsafe height. There must be many other stations across Greater Manchester that suffer from the same problems. Here’s what FOWS have to say on their website:
The height between carriage doors and the platform is as much as 17 inches in some places, much too high for safe, comfortable boarding and disembarking of trains.
We understand the problem has been caused by track maintenance operations which have steadily raised the level of the railway lines over the years. Northern Rail, Network Rail, and GMPTE have all acknowledged the problem but no rectification work is planned.
FOWS believe the large gap presents a serious safety issue, with at least two passengers having fallen into the gap and onto the track in the last few years.
Latest status … (10 Dec 2007) FOWS have written to the chairman of Network Rail about this specific problem, but been told that Network Rail have no plans to fix it until major construction work is next performed at the station. At present we do not believe any such work is planned, so we have escalated the issue to the government’s rail safety watchdog (the Office of Rail Regulation) to ask for their intervention.
I can only hope that the rail companies do not wait until the horse has bolted before they take action on this issue. It would be a tragedy if it takes a death or serious injury to provoke action.
There’s a small piece in this week’s Advertiser (sadly not online) about the visit to Salford earlier this week of Theresa Villiers, the shadow secretary of state for transport. The visits are covered more extensively on the Walkden Conservatives and Salford Conservatives websites, so I won’t get overly repetitive other than to say I am extremely pleased that Theresa not only took the time to visit Walkden station to discuss the issues affecting commuters and rail users in the local area but also showed a genuine interest in how we could work to solve those problems, particularly the issue of overcrowding at peak periods.
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