I’m not saying that the rail industry is stuck in the past or anything but…
We get a regular health & safety newsletter telling us about recent rail-related incidents, with advice about how to avoid repeats and lessons learnt. This month there was a story about a contractor who obviously did not move to a place of sufficient safety when a train was coming, as a strimmer he had attached to a harness was hit by a train and smashed.
There is an illustrative photo of someone with a strimmer on a harness, and the caption is:
The train struck this part of the housing. The shattered casing was found two chains further down the line.
Two what?
Is there anybody under forty who is going to know what a chain is?
This is probably why the Channel Tunnel rail link took so long. The French engineers were working in metres and our lot were asking them “how many poles is that then?”.
When are we going to get shot of these archaic and complicated imperial measurements and start thinking in metric?
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