Hereford - services, facilities and incidents (merged posts)

[whole diary]

[PhilWakely]

My inclination at a scene of crime, disaster or accident would be to film or photograph the incident.
NOT with the intention of publication, as someone has already said, what about decency and respect.

Presumably you refer to the incident itself and not the aftermath?  I would have thought that the emergency services are extremely unlikely to want film/pictures of the aftermath.

[broadgage]

Yes, I was thinking about the incident and the very immediate aftermath. Later events are as you suggest probably well recorded by the emergency services.

I once observed a fatal civil engineering accident, I had been watching the work and photographing it simply out of interest. When it all went terribly and fatally wrong I had some "good" pictures of the work just before the accident and of the immediate aftermath.
I would never publish such, it just seems wrong. But I did give the film to the police. I never even saw the pictures my self, I gave the undeveloped film to the police and suggested that it be placed into a sealed evidence bag, and then developed by an expert police photo lab.

[Witham Bobby]

I heard on BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) Radio Hereford & Worcester this morning that services by GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway), West Midlands and tfW were "not calling at Hereford" because the signalbox there was out of action by staff illness.

It seems no OWW^▸ (Oxford Worcester and Wolverhampton) route services were affected except 1P18, (0642 Hereford) which was cancelled between Hereford and Worcester Shrub Hill.  Other Operators services between 0600 and 0745 were hit, though.

[IndustryInsider]

It is a rare but unfortunate occurrence that staff illness closes signalboxes.  Generally the more remote they are the more likely that they are single staffed and the longer it will take to source a replacement member of staff.  That's one of the advantages of having larger signalling centres in that replacement staff are easier to find.  Even then that's not always guaranteed to be the case as I remember one of the workstations at the Didcot TVSC^» (Thames Valley Signalling Centre - about) had to shut for an hour or so a couple of years ago.