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Millions of people travel on the trains without giving a second thought to their safety, as there is surely no safer way to travel.

Two recent collisions in the United States on the rails, have highlighted the need to avoid any complacency on the part of the train operators and passengers.

It's amazing how often everything can seem to be running smoothly when out of the blue one accident occurs, swiftly followed by another.

Let's hope that's it as far as the railways are concerned, but the tragedy has already affected families, who have lost loved ones or seen them badly injured.

July's crash in San Francisco is the second big collision in the United States within a month.

Two light rail trains collided in what Pat Gardner, a deputy chief with the San Francisco Fire Department called: "probably one of the largest casualty incidents in recent years (in San Francisco),"

It was a horrific accident with 48 people being taken to hospital, with investigations underway immediately to find out the cause.

The crash in June resulted in fatalities, but the safety record of the Metro system in Washington D.C appears to have previously been quite sound.

It was the first crash resulting in fatalities on the system since 1982, when three people died following a derailment.

In fact the Metro system has only been running for 33 years and this is by far and away the worst incident to date.

The accident occurred when a train ploughed in to the back of a stationary train, which had been waiting for another to clear the station ahead.

Carriages of one of the trains came to rest on top of the other resulting in nine deaths and approximately 70 injured.

There seemed to be no attempt to brake as the train approached the other according to reports from passengers on the train, so it isn't clear if this was human error or a fault on the train.

As investigations in to those two crashes determine the exact cause, we are reminded that as passengers we are still at the mercy of the skill and concentration of the drivers.

An accident in California at the end of 2008 showed that the driver has to be fully focused on the job.

The crash in Chatsworth, California killed 25 people and injured 135 in what was the worst train accident in the U.S for 15 years.

It was later discovered that the driver, who was one of the fatalities, had been receiving and sending text messages seconds before his train skipped a red light and collided head-on with a freight train.

It seems more can be done from a safety point of view by introducing anti-collision technology called positive train control (PTC).

Immediately after the Washington D.C crash, Senators Barbara Boxer and John D. Rockefeller IV wrote to a key Senate Committee and requested at least $50 million in funding for a new railroad safety technology grant program.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation has indicated that PTC could have prevented the crashes in Washington and Chatsworth, and maybe this would also have been the case in San Francisco.

It seems that whatever the cost of updating technology in our transport systems, the safety of passengers has to be the most important consideration.