Every day in London, about a million people use the train to get to work. Most people like to complain about the service, from the lateness of the trains to the state of the carriages, but on the whole, while Londoners sit on the train reading the day's newspaper, they believe they are travelling in safety. Yet, as recent experience shows, when trains crash and lives are lost, the fear of travelling on trains increases and attention is immediately focused on Britain's rail service, which runs many trains on an antiquated network and, on some lines, along outdated safety systems.
Within hours of yesterday's rail crash close to Paddington station in London, the Health and Safety Executive announced its investigation into the possible cause would concentrate on a number of key safety areas.
These are likely to include whether a signal was "passed at danger" and whether there was driver error or the signalling system was at fault. Safety experts quickly pointed out that the line from Reading to London, on which the two trains collided about two miles outside Paddington, has a poor record of signals passed at danger (SPADs), whereby trains join a line on which they should not be travelling. Travelling on a train is about 15 times safer in Britain than travelling by car, and five times safer than coach and bus travel, but the Paddington crash was "almost certainly an exact repeat" of the Southall train crash in London in 1997, which happened on the same stretch of line, Mr Chris Jackson, deputy editor of the Railway Gazette International, said yesterday.
Seven people died and more than 140 people were injured in the Southall crash and two years later, the public inquiry into the disaster has only just begun its full hearings.
Mr Jackson was "99 per cent certain" the two crashes were identical. He said he was convinced of the urgency to learn the lessons of Southall to prevent more crashes.
"If you are going to hold back everything for two years, then it's going to mean a delay to lessons being learnt. It's certainly very, very sad and worrying that there should be another tragedy of this kind in the same area of west London," Mr Jackson said.
The demand for answers after Paddington will probably focus on rail privatisation. Opponents of privatisation will argue that yesterday's collision is further evidence that the policy adopted by the previous Conservative government is a failure.
Britain's rail system, and London in particular with its crisscrossing rail network, is now a complex mix of private rail companies which own and run the trains and Railtrack which owns the tracks and the stations.
It is a confusing bureaucracy of responsibility that leaves most passengers bemused.
In addition, the rail system has suffered because of the Conservatives' decision to cut a u £750 million sterling automatic train protection scheme (ATP), which links the train brakes to the signalling system, on the grounds of cost.
However, with the rail safety system facing severe criticism, shortly after it came to power, the Labour government introduced a limited form of the ATP scheme, which would only apply on key routes and junctions. The scheme cost u £150 million, but some safety experts criticised the decision, saying the scheme did not go far enough.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr John Prescott, who also has responsibility for transport, now has a difficult job to convince commuters to abandon their cars and take the train.
Privatisation has not brought down the cost of travelling by train - Britain's fares are among the highest in Europe - and after Southall and now Paddington, some commuters might think twice about taking the train again.