Impact
The speed restrictions and track replacement works caused significant disruption on a majority of the national network for more than a year.
This disruption and Railtrack's spiralling costs set in motion the events which resulted in the collapse of the company into administration at the insistence of Transport Secretary Stephen Byers MP, and its replacement by the not-for-dividend company Network Rail under Byers's successor Alistair Darling MP.
Train operating companies were affected extremely adversely by the disruption – with an estimate of a 19% revenue reduction for passenger train operating companies in the first year after the crash. Freight operator EWS was cancelling up to 400 trains per week as a result, whilst estimates put Freightliner's resultant losses at £1 million per month. The cost to the entire UK economy of the disruption was estimated at £6 million per day.
The Institute of Rail Welding (IoRW) was set up in 2002 by The Welding Institute (TWI) and Network Rail as a consequence of the recommendations in the investigation report. It provides a focus for individuals and organisations involved in rail welding and facilitates the adoption of best practice.
Read more about this topic: Hatfield Rail Crash
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)