The collision - luckily at a low speed - between two Class 158s in Wales in October made Cassandra sit up and think. In RAIL 1021, published a week later, a senior railwayman said this:

"What's important now is that we understand exactly what caused this incident, so that we can make sure that nothing like it happens again."

To Cassandra's mind there is no doubt about the cause of the accident, given that it happened deep in the countryside in late October. Trees. And making sure that it doesn't happen again is also simple to say, if time-consuming and not without controversy. Cut them down.

When Cassandra's mother was small there was a shallow embankment nearby to which she and her pals would go with a tray and slide down. Occasionally there was great glee when the cry "Fire on the bankie" went up. Sparks had lit the grass. Naturally, this being Scotland, and the bank being pretty small. the fire soon went out and downhill sliding was resumed. No nasty spark-producing engines now, and consequently lots of tree seedlings are no longer burnt, inevitably meaning lots of trees. (A bank from which Cassandra train-spotted - grass then - is now thickly wooded nearly 70 years later.)

But chopping down trees is wanton: global warming and all that. So for every tree chopped down two should be planted, but planted somewhere at least 100 metres from a railway line. Who pays? Network Rail in the first instance should immediately draw up plans to remove every tree within their boundary within, say, five years. They know where autumn wheel-slip is worst: that's where they start. Network Rail's PR chaps must think out a way of harnessing volunteers - schools would be a good place to start as young people seem to be pretty engaged with global warming - to plant young trees then. Who pays? Cassandra doesn't know, but is aware that if no-one pays then there will be more train crashes in autumn, and that means reputational risk as well as the high probability that one of these predictable events will lead to much heavier loss of life.

Pandora wrote about this in FNE 85 in February 2022 following almost exactly the same incident near Salisbury. Nothing has happened. Cassandra isn't about to rush out to buy shares in chainsaw companies though. And that is a pity.