Storyville, Nick Fraser, BBC 4 10pm 'Brakeless: Why Trains Crash'

I’m not interested in trains, or cars or the latest gadgets and sadly my Japanese language skills are drawn from Mary Sanderson’s purple hair and 1981 number one hit ‘he’s my Japanese boy; he’s my Japanese boy’. But this interests me because the increasingly fast train—Shinkansen bullet train to Toyko used to take eight hours, it’s under two hours now and that time is shrinking—is a metaphor for our society.  Japan’s biggest train crash, 25th April 2005, in which 107 people were killed and many more left with life-long injuries was, as this documentary shows, easily preventable. JR-East initially blamed driver error. The train driver was one of the 107 killed. He’d took a bend too fast and the train derailed.  Former train drivers with JR-East told a different story. A one second delay in the departure and arrival time between stations had to be reported to management. This was logged and the train driver held responsible. Passengers were expected to be on and off the train at the train platforms within eleven seconds. Trains operated at 200% capacity. In simple terms the train was never full enough to squeeze on one more passenger. People were employed to push them on and make sure their bodies didn’t delay the shutting of the doors. On the day of the crash the driver was eighty seconds behind schedule. He’d already been warned and had to write an apology admitting his guilt to management for some other misdemeanour.  The phone in his cab was ringing. We know this because former train drivers told how they were constantly spied upon both electronically and by people posing as passengers and standing behind their pod and observing them as they worked, making sure a button on their uniform wasn’t unbuttoned or the lanyard on their hat on the wrong way, or worst of all sloppy signalling as they pointed at some prearranged signal and landmark.  Their job was to get the train there on time and this meant it was standard practice between stops to speed up and to leave braking to the very last second. On the day of the crash, the train driver had overshot a platform and had to reverse his train back into the station. To claw back eighty seconds he had to take even more risks. The maximum speed a train can travel at becomes the minimum speed it should. JR-East in the jargon of the West accepted some responsibility for the accident. Trains were fitted with automatic brakes. A technological improvement. Problem solved. They also admitted to being part of a blame culture, which in translation means the boss is the top bully and the bullying travels all the way down the line. They were very sorry, protocols were put in place and it wouldn’t happen again…until it does.    

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03yfwk3/Storyville_20132014_Brakel...