As far as we are concerned it is just a commercial thing about making money,” she said.. RAILTRACK IS preparing to pay a fine of at least pounds 10m for failing to reduce train delays, it emerged yesterday. Quickmap, a London-based company, has produced a new map which includes overground rail routes and forgoes the straight lines of the colour-coded original, produced by LU electrical engineer Harry Beck in 1931.
Quickmap’s version includes a bus map on the reverse side, and costs pounds 2.50.Peter French, a Quickmap spokesman, said: “The London Underground map sticks in people’s minds as just for one system. We want to give the overground system the same prominence.”A London Underground spokeswoman said LU already included overground interchanges on its London Connections map, available free from any tube station.”A lot of people do strange versions of our maps.

THE TRADITIONAL London Underground map, recognised internationally as a symbol of the capital,, faces competition. The Cullen hearing into the Paddington crash is to start next March, after which there will be a joint inquiry into train safety systems.. ATP would have avoided both the Southall and the Paddington crashes.Most observers think that the fundamental problem in a fragmented industry was the absence of a single authority to insist on the use of ATP.The Southall inquiry will hear final statements from the main contributors on 20 December, and Professor Uff’s report will be published next year. Under ATP the speed of the train is controlled by a computer, which will slow it down at yellow lights and stop it at red – it cannot be over-ridden by the driver. She is anxious for the point not to be lost when John Uff QC, who presides over the Southall inquiry, sits with Lord Cullen of Ashbourne, who will also chair the Paddington hearing, to consider different safety systems.Another factor evident in the Southall inquiry was the failure of Great Western Trains and Railtrack to ensure that the fail-safe automatic train protection (ATP) system was in operation. The high-speed service was going too fast, and the red light was too near the point of impact.Louise Christian, a lawyer representing those bereaved by the Southall crash, is keen that TPWS is not seen as the definitive answer to train safety.

SN109, the red signal passed by the local train, is far enough away from the crash site that the train would have had time to stop safely.The Southall inquiry has heard that even with TPWS the Great Western express on its way to Paddington would still have smashed into a freight train coming towards it. The device, seen as a short-term answer to safety problems, will bring the train to a halt, no matter what the driver does.That would have been sufficient in the Paddington accident to stop the Thames Trains commuter service on its outward journey from the west London station before it slammed into the oncoming Great Western express, killing 31 people. As the inquiry into the Southall accident sat through its 32nd and final day of evidence yesterday, the bereaved pointed out that the safety system that would have prevented the Paddington tragedy in October would not have averted the disaster in which their relatives died.
One element in the 52 bundles of evidence submitted to the Southall hearing has shown that the train protection warning system (TPWS), expected to be installed on most trains in the wake of the Paddington accident, would not have prevented the collision at Southall, in which seven people died.Unlike the more basic automatic warning system, TPWS cannot be over-ridden when a train jumps a red light. IN HALF A MILLION pages of submissions to the inquiry into the Southall rail disaster, a critical difference has become apparent between that crash in 1997 and the one in Paddington last month. Police obtained a DNA sample from the dead man, who had been questioned originally with some 2,600 people.Hundreds of unsolved murders, rapes and other cases are being reopened thanks to new investigative and DNA analysis techniques.Forensic scientists can now provide DNA profiles of criminals from a single blood cell, a sperm or even from a flake of skin.. But the murderer of Rita Sawyer, 18, whose body was found in a field near Chesterton, Warwickshire, in September 1970, had already died. We had tested a sample obtained from clothing, but it did not produce a profile.”Police are particularly keen to find a man who in 1977 was described as being in his mid-20s, about 5ft 10ins with a long face, a thin nose, lightish brown hair, light coloured eyebrows and a bad complexion.In August, police revealed that using a new DNA profile they had discovered the identity of the man who killed a pregnant woman 30 years ago.

Det Ch Supt Taylor said: “We hope that by reconstructing the events just prior to Mary’s death will help jog some memories.”He added: “We have been waiting for advances in the technology of DNA. The film is expected to be shown in the New Year on BBC1’s Crimewatch UK.Det Ch Supt Taylor said that the murder shocked the tight-knit community of Shipley, where Mrs Gregson had lived in a canal-side cottagewith her 50-year old husband, Bill, and their son Michael, 11.Mr Gregson died in 1981 from a heart attack Their son still lives in the area. Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Taylor, who is heading the murder hunt and who worked on the original investigation when he was a sergeant, said a witness saw a man standing over a woman’s body near the River Aire on the night Mrs Gregson was murdered.In their latest attempt to trace witnesses police are using a model to re-construct the final hours of Mrs Gregson’s life. Police are now widening their search and are trying to track down people who have moved from the area since 1977. They are concentrating on men who were aged from their late 30s to their mid-50s in 1977. At the time of the murder more than 9,000 people were interviewed. The “Yorkshire Ripper”, Peter Sutcliffe, was ruled out after DNA profiling in 1997.The case was reopened in June after forensic scientists used a new technique known as SGM that allows genetic profiles to be obtained from a single cell.Since then DNA tests have been carried out on more than 400 suspects who were questioned at the time of the murder.