Sorry to spoil the story ; I went to the check-in at the Eurostar terminal in Brussels to ask about liquid restrictions . Nobody knew anything about them. This story must have been a hoax or some freak incident (the only restrictions anybody could remember concerned frozen food, for hygienic reasons). When I asked about limitations on luggage they mentioned bicycles.

But how could you blow up a train with a bicycle?

Mike

Some of my fellow FT'ers really seem to dislike trains :D

Simple, load the front and rear panniers on your touring cycle with C-4 or equivalent military-grade high explosives. You can probably pack 80 pounds into the panniers with room to spare.

I can give you 3,000+ in support of it.


I win.



My point is valid - I say there is more danger from someone blowing up a train than commandeering it. Therefore I would expect screeners to be more concerned with things that are or could be used to make bombs, than with things that could be used to take over a train.

Hmm, come to think of it, the Madrid incident you mentioned was the result of..... a bomb! So I will kindly take your 191 reasons in support of my argument, thankyouverymuch.

I think you may have misinterpreted that. Eurostar does not require the baggie. It has, however, long had a policy that already-opened beverages of any kind may not be taken through, and I believe the reason for it is quite simply that they were fed up of having liquids spilt inside their X-ray machines from poorly-sealed bottles, coffee cups etc which does indeed cause problems.

If the bottles are sealed, you can take on what you like. Even knives should be permitted (the rules say so, though I've heard of individual agents being a problem) so long as they would be legal to carry on the street in the UK (which basically means small penknives only).

Of course I don't think that. I'll be less oblique ...

corp'666's proposition that rail-centered terrorist acts affect fewer people than aircraft-centered attacks struck me as silly, and frankly, rather callous. The friends and loved ones of the 191 killed -- to say nothing of the 2,050 wounded -- in the Madrid train bombing (see hyperlink in my post) I'm sure find nil-to-none comfort over which target of terrorist act kills more people on average.

This discussion has gotten way off course. Which type of "terror" incident is more lethal is irrelevant. The fundamental facts related to screening are:

1) "Terror" incidents collectively are an almost insignificantly meaningless threat to lives. If preventing a few hundred or a few thousand deaths a year is worth putting millions through some ridiculous baggie ritual, then why isn't worth 10x the effort to do something about the half million people who die in automobile accidents every year? Why are those deaths casually accepted as just a part of life? Simple answer -- politically powerful auto, tire, and oil companies don't lose money when you go after "terror" deaths.

2) None of the screening or other policies put in place do anything to make people safer. What WOULD make everybody safer is if everyone -- including the governments that develop, produce and deploy ever more sophisticated systems of using violence to coerce others to do what they want -- would abandon organised violence as a policy tool. It's been pointed out more than once that there is no moral difference between flying a plane into a skyscraper and dropping a "MOAB" on a crowded Baghdad neighbourhood, or enforcing laws that prevent humanitarian aid from reaching Iraqi, Palestinian or Serbian orphanages. As long as governments continue to try to use violence for their ends it is meaningless for them to try to condemn others for responding similarly.

3) At most, screening policies shift the violence somewhere else. Can't get the bomb on the plane? Fine, then bomb the people standing in line for screening. Then when screening lines are protected, drive an explosives laden vehicle into the lobby. There's always a soft target somewhere, and no amount of screening is going to change that.

How does one buy a chef's knife in the UK? Do you need some sort of specially licensed delivery company to take it home?

Apart from the fact that the above incident did not involve knives, rather bombs, that is a poor argument because a packed commuter train will suffer more than a far less busy high-speed long-distance train such as Eurostar, which by virtue of its compulsory reservation policy will never have more than about 70 people per vehicle - and bear in mind that those bombs didn't even destroy entire vehicles.

You buy it from a shop - but it would be down to you, if stopped by the police and searched, to justify why you did have it, for example showing a receipt that you'd just bought it and were on your way home, or proving that you were a chef on the way to work (though in the latter case leaving it in the kitchen would be preferable).

Eurostar, quite sensibly, remove the argument, though it does mean that (unlike flying) there isn't a way to transport such items on their services. Indeed, while there's no safety/security issue, merely by virtue of that policy it surprises me that they allowed an ice axe on board.

Why do you assume terrorism is about killing people - generally terrorists are making a political statement - 9/11 would have been just as bad if there had been no deaths. And don't forget the economic effects of a bombing - just look how the Bali bombing virtually ruined the economy of Bali