Return of the Cotton Mill Express

Try looking on the Cotton Mill thread and lets keep this thread for GB3 as is its title and not for something covered elsewhere.

Dave B

 

That's totally the wrong approach. Yes, accidents and failures do happen but the aim of everyone should be to ensure that the chances of them happening again are lessened. You wouldn't expect a plane crash to be ignored because, as you suggest, 'accidents will happen' would you? There is nothing wrong in discussing them. When the cause is known, it should be told, if only to make others aware of the possibility of a potential failure. A while ago, now, a gudgeon pin failed on a loco due to fatigue. Some other loco owners heard about it and, when their locos were examined for this, I know of two that were found to be similarly defective. When the cause isn't known, it needs to be investigated, hopefully by the parties concerned. Sometimes the cause isn't obvious and hypothesises come into play. Another word for this is speculation. Unfortunately, Heritage Railways as individual organisations do not have the resources to carry out in-depth investigations of incidents and failures and sometimes, it is only by pooling information that solutions can be found. Unfortunately, there is no real system in operation to let loco owners know about incidents, their causes and the follow up actions unless the incident is severe enough to involve HMRI/RAIB. It is largely word of mouth. The wider the audience, the more likely it is that there wont be a recurrence. Sometimes someone will, say, that happened to our loco the other year and we did this to prevent it recurring. Sometimes a pattern might emerge. You don't know these things unless you inform.

If you want to see steam locos continue well into the twenty-first century, then these things need to be well in the open and the lessons learned put to good use. If you cover them up, steam will surely die because, one day, there will be an serious accident that experience showed was preventable and on the day, 'Luck' was on holiday. This Forum may not be the best place to discuss them or even disseminate information, but it is as good as we've got at the moment.