The deaths of five people in a train derailment in Bavaria have led to renewed focus on rail safety.

The derailment of a regional double-deck train near Garmisch-Partenkirchen is still being investigated. The accident happened on a slight curve and a technical inquiry is taking place.

I feel safe travelling by trains and, thankfully, accidents and deaths on the railway (excluding suicides) are rare. Although the German accident made news headlines around the world, in a sense that highlights how safe the railways generally are. Fatal accidents make news because they are not everyday occurences.

Falling number of fatalities

According to a recent report from the Office of Rail and Road, Britain’s railway remains one of the safest in Europe.

ORR’s analysis found that Britain ranks first for ‘whole society’ safety risk. The regulator said that this measure of risk combines the overall average number of fatalities and serious injuries across five risk categories.

Indeed, the number of deaths on the railways (excluding suicides) has been falling in recent years as this chart from Statista shows.

And the general pattern across Europe also shows a decline in the number of railway accidents according to Europa.

And there is some interesting analysis behind those headline figures. In 2020, more than half of fatalities from railway accidents in the EU involved unauthorised persons on the tracks (60%) and almost one third occurred at level crossings (31%). Train crashes are very rare.

What the Dickens

Britain has benefited in safety terms from being a pioneer of the railways. Safety has been improved as a result of accidents and disasters so that it is now one of the safest forms of travel.

From the mid-1860s to the 1880s there was a spate of high-profile railway accidents including the train derailment at Staplehurst in 1865 with novelist Charles Dickens on board. It led him to write his horror/mystery story ‘The Signalman’ which was published the following year and is still shown regularly on TV.

These early accidents were graphically reported in the popular press.

As the German derailment shows, trains coming off the tracks still make the news. So you might think nothing has changed in the last 160 years.

But behind the headlines is a story of a railway system which is much safer than in the past and much safer than other forms of travel.

Don’t just take my word for it: RailEurope has come up with ’15 reasons trains are better than planes’ and other analysis suggests trains are nearly six times safer than planes.