BRITAIN: One of Britain's largest rail union's demanded the reform of network maintenance contracts yesterday as the Transport Secretary said the Potters Bar rail disaster appeared to be a "one-off" incident.
As a 1,000-tonne crane was being manoeuvred into position to remove the final train carriage, which became wedged underneath the platform canopy, the Rail Maritime and Transport Union insisted the network should be re-nationalised and all track maintenance immediately organised "in-house" to guarantee standards across the industry.
Rail accident inspectors said at the weekend that the cause of Friday's derailment was points failure, probably caused when two metal bolts worked loose from the track.
The points are connections on the track that move from side to side, enabling a train to switch from one track to another. When the fourth carriage of the 12.45 p.m. from London's King's Cross to King's Lynn, in Norfolk, passed over a set of points at 96 m.p.h. south of Potters Bar, the stress of the 300-tonne train on a metal bar connecting the points, which should have been held in place with the bolts, caused the bar to break.
The points began to switch from one side of the rail to another, derailing the carriage and sending it crashing into a bridge and the platform at Potters Bar.
It is not yet known whether the bolts, which were discovered lying beside the track, could have worked loose over a long period or whether they were deliberately removed. But as the investigation into the cause of the crash continued, the private construction company, Jarvis plc, which holds the contracts for track renewal and track maintenance on the East Coast Main Line, insisted the set of points had passed a visual inspection the day before the disaster.
Rail engineers began checking hundreds of sets of points at the weekend to ensure their metal bolts were securely fastened.
"It does appear to be a one-off, isolated incident affecting this set of points 200 yards to the south of Potters Bar station," Mr Byers told BBC's Breakfast with Frost programme. "I think the first thing to do is find out exactly how this happened, so that we know the circumstances in detail, and then we will be able to find out whether it was mismanagement, whether it was the fault of an individual worker not carrying out their job properly, whether it was a deliberate act of vandalism."
The defective set of points was removed from the track for forensic analysis as relatives of some of those killed in the derailment visited the site to lay flowers. Among them were relatives of Irish-born former nurse and great-grandmother, Mrs Agnes Quinlivan (80). They spent 30 minutes close to the bridge beside Potters Bar station where she was struck by falling debris as she returned from the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Assumption.
More than 100 people had earlier attended a Mass in her memory at the church where Father Bill Wilby remembered Mrs Quinlivan, who was a church volunteer, with "great affection".