The safety appliance acts: the reason the US still has loose car railroading?

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Al recommended this to me today:

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It made me realize "holy *****, railroading in a place without the various US Safety Appliance Acts must SUCK.

Which then got me thinking: is this the reason why railroads in the UK have basically ended it?

I can't imagine the modern UK health and safety regulations would square easily with so many freight cars that lack things like grab irons...

[bigdawgks]

UK has practically abandoned manifest rail freight. Everything is now unit trains. But I think that has more to do with economics and policy than safety (couldn't compete with roads). This change occurred before the modern health and safety culture took off.

This has some good explanation of historic freight rail operations in the UK:
https://igg.org.uk/rail/7-fops/fo-intro.htm

I will also say that before the downfall the UK invested quite a bit into automated hump/marshalling yards to mitigate a lot of these problems. But also consider that when individual wagons are only 10-20 tons, shunting was a lot simpler (horses and tractors were often used).