ONE year on since the Selby rail disaster - and finally we have signs of action to reduce the risk of it happening again.

We welcome the publication of two reports yesterday on railway bridge safety - but nothing happens quickly, does it?

A report by the Health and Safety Commission says risk assessments must be carried out at thousands of railway bridges. Has it really taken a year to come up with such a blatantly obvious conclusion?

This newspaper inspected 50 bridges on the East Coast Main Line shortly after the Selby crash and produced irrefutable evidence that urgent action was required. In many cases, rotten wooden fencing was all that stood between an out-of-control vehicle potentially ending up on the tracks.

Now, at long last, we are to have risk assessments. How long will they take?

It is easy to categorise the Selby disaster as being the result of a freak set of circumstances which cannot happen again. But let us not forget that, in the three years leading up to the accident, there were 31 incidents involving motorists losing control of their vehicles and landing on railway lines. In ten cases, the vehicles were hit by trains. Rare, but not unique.

A second report by the Highways Agency calls for better procedures for updating safety barriers, despite its conclusion that "there are no serious shortcomings" in the standards of safety barriers on major roads.

Major or minor, it only takes one out-of-control car - and there remain plenty of shortcomings on the bridges we inspected.

And what of the central question of who pays for the repairs? We are told that plans to apportion responsibility should be completed by June.

Our overall impression is that this is a mission which is chugging along rather than being driven at speed.

Ginny Clarke, who chaired the Highways Agency's working group, said: "The tragic accident at Selby was an extremely rare event, but this does not mean that we are complacent."

So, a year after ten people died and many more were left with permanent mental scars, we have risk assessments in the pipeline and some vague thoughts on who might pay for safety measures.

We wouldn't like to see them in action if they were being complacent.