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18/07/2008
Trainspotters beware the risks of personal injury
As news comes in of a group of trainspotters narrowly avoiding personal injury at the hands of the Scottish armed police, perhaps it's a good time to have a look at the ways in which this seemingly harmless hobby can result in accidents and compensation claims.
Just as we're regularly told to keep behind the yellow lines, the same must be true of the trainspotters at the end of the platform awaiting the arrival of a train. These messages are part of the ways in which station staff keep up their duty of care towards those of us on their stations; if these messages were absent or inaudible, you may be able to argue that a kind of negligence had occurred if a passing train were to cause a personal injury to a person too close to the edge.
You may also find that the stereotypical image of these locomotive collectors - which includes the idea of them carrying their vacuum flasks of tea - carries the risk of a product liability claim. If the glass inner of one of these should shatter in normal use, especially if it were due to a known fault, and the glass were to cause damage to the person drinking, then a faulty product injury claim could well be understandable.
It's probably likely, however, that being a spotter, or 'gricer', means that you are at less risk of being involved in a train accident than someone actually on board a train; this is simple maths, based on the fact that the train is only near a person on the station for seconds, maybe minutes if it stops at the station in question, whereas a person on board can be in close proximity to the train for hours. A gricer would have to be particularly unlucky for a train crash to occur in those few moments.
In contrast to the risks that the hobby throws up, it's probably worth mentioning the angle of safety that it brings too. British police have asked UK trainspotters to keep an eye out for things out of the ordinary, whether that's suspicious objects or suspicious behaviour, and to report any that they see. The idea is that this helps to prevent terrorism.
And that adds a piquancy to those trainspotters who were hunted down by the armed police at the top of this article. It turns out that the position they'd chosen to hunker down with a top-of-the-range high-powered camera would have given them a good view of the home of the Prime Minister, and it was only through persuading the gun-toting officers that the camera was to point at the passing steam engine, the Great Marquess from the 1950s, that they were not apprehended - or worse.
The next time I rattle through Crewe or Clapham Junction, and see those little notebooks, you can be sure I'll be more aware of the potential for personal injury that these courageous chroniclers of the transport industry endure. Brave trainspotters, I salute you.
