Rail infrastructure company Network Rail (NR) was fined £3 million (€3.4 million) in Britain today for safety failings over the 2002 Potters Bar train derailment that killed seven people.
The company had admitted breaching health and safety regulations in the May 2002 Hertfordshire disaster. Its predecessor company, Railtrack, was the infrastructure company in charge at the time of the crash, but NR has accepted responsibility.
The prosecution, at St Albans Crown Court under the Health and Safety at Work Act, was brought by the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR).
The now in-administration maintenance company Jarvis, which was responsible for the section of track at Potters Bar, also faced prosecution but the Office of Rail Regulation decided in March not to proceed as the prosecution was “no longer in the public interest”.
Sentencing Network Rail and ordering the company to pay £150,000 costs, Judge Andrew Bright said the crash had been “catastrophic”.
Judge Bright said Railtrack had had no specific guidelines for installing, maintaining and inspecting the kind of points that failed at Potters Bar.
He added that Railtrack’s procedures and standards were “seriously inadequate” and that the serious faults with the points “could and should have been identified sooner”. The company’s failures put the travelling public and train crews at the risk of serious injury, the judge said.
Considering how far up the Railtrack organisation the failings went, Judge Bright said that although there were very serious failings by Jarvis, “overall responsibility for the breach of duty lay with Railtrack at senior management level and their failures were significant and extensive”.
The sentence against Network Rail was imposed by the judge after Nicholas Hilliard QC, appearing for the Office of Rail Regulation, had said the poor state of a set of points on the track at Potters Bar had made the crash “inevitable”.
The judge said there were individuals who bore responsibility for the maintenance failures that led to the tragedy. “I do not doubt that those who lost loved ones in the crash might have hoped to see those individuals held to account for their failure," he said. "However, they are not before the court, and it’s Network Rail Infrastructure who fall to be sentenced for an offence committed by Railtrack plc."
Six passengers - Austen Kark, Emma Knights, Jonael Schickler, Alexander Ogunwusi, Chia Hsin Lin and Chia Chin Wu - were killed in the crash on May 10th, 2002. They were on a West Anglia Great Northern express train travelling from London to King’s Lynn in Norfolk that derailed at a faulty set of points just outside Potters Bar station.
The seventh victim was Agnes Quinlivan (80), who was walking nearby and died after she was hit by debris.
PA