NewsBreakingOnline

Inquest shown photos taken by investigator of broken brackets, empty boltholes and vital bars missing altogether The broken points that caused the fatal Grayrigg train crash were found to be faulty within two hours of the accident, an inquest has been told. A specialist engineer working by torchlight as emergency crews evacuated 86 injured passengers from the wrecked London-Glasgow express, realised the cause as soon as he checked the mechanism. “The points should not have been in the state they were,” said Keith Vernon, a track engineer for Network Rail trained in the investigation of derailments. “There were defects throughout them.” He told the second day of the inquest at Kendal, which is investigating the cause of the death of the only person killed in the crash, 84-year-old Peggy Masson, that he had focused straight away on the Lambrigg 2 points, which allow trains on the West Coast main line to change tracks. An inquiry by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) has already blamed defects in the points for derailing the eight coach train. The points had been due for an inspection five days before the crash, but it was never carried out. Vernon said the points were clearly faulty. “The first thing was, it was apparent there was some damage and something did not look right,” he said. The inquest jury, sitting with south and east Cumbria Coroner Ian Smith, were shown photos taken by Vernon at the time of broken brackets, bolts out of their holes and vital stretcher bars that separate moving rails at the junction missing altogether. Some damage was almost certainly done by the train, but Vernon found no other faults on the stretch of track, deep in the Cumbrian countryside near the village of Grayrigg. He had the points covered with a tarpaulin for a closer inspection in daylight. The state of the points was described in more detail by Simon Kay, an accident inspector for the RAIB, who was part of a team that spent more than a week analysing the area of the crash, which took place on the evening of 23 February 2007. He said that they realised early on that the points were to blame. Explaining the principle of the junctions, which must be able to change the direction of heavy trains moving at high speed, he showed the jury photos and diagrams of what had gone wrong. Three stretcher bars had failed, he said, which meant that the weight of the Virgin Pendolino forced the switching rail to move and the bogies, or wheel sets, on the lead coach slid between the lines, derailing the train. Nuts and bolts had become detached and all three stretcher bars had snapped. The driver of the train, Iain Black, whom Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson called a hero after the crash, said he had no chance of regaining control of the train. He told the inquest earlier how it had “leapt into the air” at 95mph , and although he had throttled back from 125mph shortly before the accident, there was no time to reduce speed further. Black, who is 50 and had been a driver for seven years at the time of the crash, broke his neck as he was flung into the ceiling of his cab. He used his mobile phone to alert colleagues as he drifted in and out of consciousness after the train had slid down an embankment with some coaches jack-knifing through 190 degrees. “You can only see 15ft [4.6m] in front of you,” he told the inquest. “Had I noticed the points out of synch, I could not stop the train. With 300 tonnes of metal at 95mph it is going to go wherever it wants. I had no control. “We stopped at 300m (984ft) that night because we were hitting stuff.” An automatic braking system was triggered within seconds of the derailment but even under normal conditions, a train at that speed would need half a mile of track to stop. The inquest continues. Rail transport Transport Martin Wainwright guardian.co.uk