“I apologise to everyone for raising the one subject which has caused BJ Mann to go into rant mode again and bore us all silly, namely the fact that rail travel is far safer than car travel, and that the majority of deaths on railways are of suicides, trespassers, or others who choose to ignore warning signs at level crossings. All he has proven is that, for some reason, he has a pathalogical hatred of vehicles which run on rails (like Mrs Thatcher). Don't know why, but we should all pity him for that.”

“
No wonder you can't manage to understand what I write, never mind formulate a reasoned response.

I can't speak for Austrian mathematicians, but I suspect that most of us just aren't sufficiently interested in your rants to read all those reams. Still, since you clearly derive close personal pleasure from writing it, don't let the complete lack of a readership put you off. If you like, you can even maintain the amusing fiction that some extensive silent majority" are hanging on your every syllable. snort. sorry.”

“Still struggling?

How about if the government switched us to canal transport for all North South traffic between London and Edinburgh.

And to make barge travel as safe as possible they removed all the bridges and fenced off the canals and made it illegal for the public who weren't passengers to go anywhere near the canals.

So that anyone who wanted to reach the other half of a community divided by the canals (just like those horrible roads which divide communities, and unlike the railways which join them!) had to go round London or Edinburgh and back again.

If no canal passengers whatsoever died on the canals, but hundreds of thousands of tresspassing kids, people trying to rejoin their communities, and suicides, drowned in the canals every year, would you argue that the government had delivered the safest transport system you could possibly imagine?”

“Still struggling to comprehend?

OK, here's another one:

Suppose they converted diesel trains to run on bio-fuels and ran them on, ooooh, say, baby oil.

And there was never a passenger death, or even a pedestrian death, in a billion miles of travel.

Would that make it justifiable in your mind?

Even though they were liquidising a dozen babies to fuel it for every mile travelled?”

“Here's another one for you to struggle to think about:

"They might be relevant when looking at the number of PASSENGERS killed on the railway, to compare the relative safety of TRAVELLING by rail with the safety of TRAVELLING by road."

Many people will have heard the claim that a PoW die for every sleeper laid on the Burma Railway.

But according to one of the original Environmentalists, Henry Thoreau, a Yankee or an Irishman died for every sleeper laid for the American railways.

And he wasn't talking about across the Wild West, but New England!

If it cost the life of a person for every sleeper laid in the UK today, would even the fact that no passengers ever died at all on that railway make it "safe"?

And if not, how does that stack up aginst your "argument"?”