Contractors jailed for Tebay killings

Two rail contractors have been jailed for a total of 11 years for the gross negligent manslaughter of four workers who were crushed by a runaway wagon. Mark Connolly and Roy Kennett were found guilty of four joint charges of manslaughter through criminal negligence by a Newcastle jury on 16th and 17th March. Connolly was sentence to imprisonment for nine years and Kennett for two years.

Connolly ran MAC Machinery Services, a subcontractor of maintenance giant Carillion Rail. Before dawn on 15th February, 2004, the pair (Connolly and Kennett) were working on the West Coast Mainline at Scout Green in Cumbria, moving worn rail sections. Kennett was using a road rail vehicle (RRV) fitted to a crane to lift the sections onto flat-bed rail wagons at a maintenance depot, when a wagon, weighing 19 tonnes, rolled over wooden chocks used to immobilise it and ran down a slope.

The wagon, travelling more than four miles of speeds of up to 40 miles per hour hit a group of 10 track workers near Tebay, killing four of them. Connolly was asleep in his lorry when the incident happened.

During the eight week trial at Newcastle Crown Court, the jury heard that Connolly disconnected  the brakes on two flat-bed wagons because the hydraulic systems were in such bad repair that they could not be used with the RRV. He then filled the hydraulic cables between the wagons and the RRV with ball bearings to make it look as though they were still full of brake fluid. Knowing the brakes were not working, Kennett used pieces of wooden fence post to try to keep the wagons from moving.