Page 999 - Reading Mercury

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Sat 27 April
RAIL CROSSING FAILED TWICE IN TWO DAYS
Both the Wokingham Society and the town’s Mayor, Cllr. Ernest Blan were angry
yesterday (Friday) at the failure of the automatic level crossing at Star Lane, twice in
two days. Cllr. Bland is calling for the crossing to be manually operated until an
inquiry is held to establish its safety. He told a reporter, “I use the road myself and
feel that the crossing should not be automatically controlled until there is a 100%
guarantee that it is safe. There already has been one fatal accident there and as Mayor
I am very concerned about it.
On Wednesday morning local people noticed that one of the barriers was stuck and
traffic was held up until railway workers arrived to operate the crossing.
The electrical equipment failed again on Thursday morning as motorists and cyclists
were on their way to work. Again the traffic was held up and as an extra precaution
the railwaymen held up rush-hour trains with a red flag.
Mr. Anthony Cross, Chairman of the Wokingham Society who has protested to the
Ministry of Transport about the crossing is to include details of the latest incidents in
a dossier of all happenings at the crossing since it was opened. The dossier will form
supplementary evidence at the public inquiry being held into the Hixon crossing
disaster. Mr. Cross said, “The inquiry will also examine proposals by the Society
which it is felt will improve safety factors at the crossing. We are suggesting that
rubber pads, linked to a danger signal should be placed on the crossing so that if a
vehicle stalls and is stuck there the engine driver will have fair warning and stop.
The Station Master at Wokingham, Mr. Gordon Gregory, told a reporter, “There
was a technical fault with one of the barriers stopped in the down position with the
light flashing. We had a man on the spot in six minutes and the crossing was worked
manually until perfectly safe. With any electrical equipment there must sometimes be
a fault. But there are laid-down safety precautions and these were taken immediately.
There was no danger provided the public obeyed the regulations.”

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Sat 4 May
To avoid having to put a weight restriction on Skew Bridge, near Wokingham,
while it is being rebuilt, two temporary bridges are being constructed over the top of
the bridge to take half the traffic.
The bridge which, carries traffic between Reading and Wokingham, is one of many
now considered to be performing work they were not originally designed for which
have been surveyed under operation “Bridge Guard,” by British Rail Southern
Region. A spokesman for the Southern Region said on Wednesday, “Although the
bridge is weak, it is definitely not dangerous.” The bridge will be given a new deck of
pre-stressed concrete beams and will be widened on the south side.
It had originally been thought that a weight restriction would have to be enforced,
but as this would have meant rerouting all the buses and heavy lorries through the
residential areas of Wokingham, Berkshire County Surveyors’ Department came up
with the idea of the temporary bridges. They will be constructed over the existing
bridge, forming a “double-deck” system, and it is hoped they will be completed by
early June.
When the south side of the bridge has been extended, the reconstruction of the rest
of the bridge will start, one lane at a time. This leaves two lanes of the bridge still in
operation and a further two lanes are provided by the temporary bridges. In this way
weight restriction is avoided by having only half the usual amount of traffic on Skew

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