Don’t blame health and safety for killing the Harry Potter steam train

When the operators of the most popular steam train service in Britain decided to challenge the safety authorities, they were confident that sentiment and nostalgia would win out. They’ve been proved wrong. The health and safety brigade has triumphed and consequently the Jacobite train, popularised in a Harry Potter film and running along one of the nation’s most attractive rail lines between Fort William and Mallaig on the West Coast, will no longer operate.

It’s the culmination of a lengthy battle between the train-spotters and the grey men of the Office of Road and Rail (ORR), who are insistent that a temporary concession to allow the trains to operate without key safety equipment cannot be extended. That key safety issue is that these carriages, which date from the early days of British Railways, do not have a central door-locking device that is now mandatory on all trains operating on main lines but are still allowed on heritage routes on which services are limited to 25 mph.