The danger here is from the train, not the electric child trolley thing. The railway crossing is supposed to be designed to mitigate that risk, but in this case it has proven either inadequate or defective (which could include procedural error on the part of the person operating the trolley, perhaps by fumbling with unresponsive controls rather than moving children to safety). No doubt we'll find out when the outcome of the investigation is eventually published.
Level crossings are notoriously difficult to make safe, and most countries are somewhere behind the UK in level crossing safety. Bridges are much safer, but hard to do in areas not blessed with an abundance of Geography.
The outcome should be an improvement in safety, not a needless clamp-down on practical vehicles.
Agreed.
If you look at most Dutch level crossings, they have a barrier that comes down and settles at about 1m. If you compare that to say the St Dunstans level crossing in Canterbury, a whole gate comes down and blocks everything from 1m to the floor. This would make the whole crossing safer.
Dutch crossings also seem to have a large number with only half barriers.
There have been numerous incidents of trains hitting things on crossings, more than I've heard reported in any other EU nation, tho that may be exposure bias.
There is a concerted effort to remove level crossings on some of the more popular lines. It's weird, until very recently the max speed of Dutch trains was 140kph. Compared to the ~160kph of even your standard class 375 south eastern train. As such there has been a move to increase this speed to 220kph (just shy of the magic 225kph when incab signalling is needed), with a requirement that all Dutch mainline rolling stock purchases must be 220kph capable[1]. With these speed increases the need for grade separation becomes more important. But it's expensive, and made more so by the fact many of the level crossings are next to stations, so it's not just a case of sinking the track further into the swamp...
J
[1] Related useless trivia, The new stock that was bought for the high speed line to replace the botched Fyra acquisition is only capable of 160kph, but HS-Zuid isn't considered mainline, but highspeed line, there is no requirement to be capable of 220kph. Meaning the slow speed trains are faster than the highspeed trains...