Playground safety and the playground police

are in the news again.
This time it is because a child apparently got stuck under a "train" in a playground in a country town.  The train has apparently been in the playground for the last thirty-three years. The playground is named for the train. 
Children have been climbing over, around and under the train all that time. There must have been more than one accident in that time. It is likely that a child has fallen off it and broken an arm or a collar bone, and more than a few knees have been scraped as well as heads banged. 
But now it has been declared "unsafe". Children can no longer play on it. They can no longer pretend to be the driver or the guard or order their passengers around. They cannot use it to go anywhere in their imagination.
For my third "birthday and Christmas" present I was given what I had been calling a "train toy" set. It was a Hornby clockwork train with two carriages and tracks that could be set out as an oval or in a figure of eight. It was a present from my paternal grandparents.
It is also my first memory of actually being able to read something. I read the instructions for putting the track together to my father. (We set it up under the big table in the dining room of my grandparents' home.) I still remember the thrill of doing that.
I loved that train. I turned the dolls' house my father had made me into the railway station and I went everywhere I could think of at the time. My brother came with me. We had to wait for the weather to be bad enough outside to play with it inside of course. Our mother sent us out of doors, unsupervised, when the weather was good - and even not so good.
Outside, across the road that led to a farm, there were some enormous (to us) concrete drainage pipes. They had been left there by the roads or water supply people while work was done. They seemed to stay there for months and months - and probably did. All the local children played in them. We raced our little tricycles (with the trays at the back) through them making train noises as we went. We called out to each other. The older children climbed on them and ran along the top. All sorts of games were organised around them.  Of course we should never have been anywhere near them, let alone played in them. Somehow though the workmen just left us to it, even asking occasionally where we were going that day if they heard the train noises. 
We caused no harm to those pipes. Nobody injured themselves very badly although I know there were a few scraped knees and elbows and some bruises.
Now of course if such things were left waiting to be in put in place there would be notices up on cyclone safety fencing saying, "Do not trespass." All the fun we had would not even be contemplated. I doubt children the age I was then would even know how to play in them.
The playground safety police have stopped all that. They are stunting imagination and physical activity and independence and so much more. I am waiting for them to say that the "whale" in the shopping centre, much loved as a piece of climbing equipment about one a half metres in height, is unsafe. It won't be long.