Purley Station Rail Crash - Trial, Report and Appeals

Trial, Report and Appeals

Before the Ministry of Transport report was published, Robert Morgan the driver of the Littlehampton train, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and sentenced to 12 months in prison plus 6 months suspended.

The report was published in 1989, and found no fault in the Littlehampton train or signalling system, concluded that the driver had failed to keep the train's speed under control, missing the preceding caution signal and passed the danger signal protecting the Horsham train. The line is equipped with four aspect colour light signalling and British Rail's automatic warning system (AWS). However, the report noted that the signal had a high incidence of being passed at danger – four drivers had previously passed the signal when at danger in the previous five years. The AWS in use gave the same warning for either of the caution signals and danger and was capable of being reset by a driver in a lapse of concentration. The report recommended that an automatic train protection system should be introduced without delay and in the interim a repeater for the signal that had been passed be installed.

The driver's sentence was later cut to four months upon appeal, and on 12 December 2007 his conviction for manslaughter was overturned by the Court of Appeal, ruling the conviction unsafe as "something about the infrastructure of this particular junction was causing mistakes to be made" as new evidence showed that there had been four previous signals passed at danger at the same location in the five years before the rail crash.