Workers' Liberty

A contractor has gone to jail for killing four track workers at Tebay in February 2004 through deliberate tampering to save money. But the root causes of the tragedy are still in place.

Mark Connolly, boss of MAC Machinery Services, got 9 years. He had disconnected the brakes on two wagons because the hydraulic systems were knackered and he would not spend the money to fix them. He tried to cover his tracks by filling cables with ball bearings to seem like brake fluid.

Roy Kenney, who got 2 years, operated a crane he was not qualified to, and jammed wooden chocks under the wagons' wheels. The second wagon ran away, rolling over the chocks, carrying 16 tonnes of steel rail.

A group of men working on the track downhill did not see the wagon because it was night-time, nor hear it because of the noise of a generator. Four were killed.

Tebay survivor Tom Angus got it right when he said that privatisation has reduced the industry’s safety consciousness because the involvement of contractors means that the chain of responsibility can be broken.

Privateers and contractors are a symptom as well as, in this case, the cause. While it is true that the shortcuts that led to the Tebay disaster were ordered by the contractor, they would also have been ordered by any number of cavalier engineers.

Possessions are too long and so less secure. Getting the job done and not over-running blockages and possessions is now the highest priority. While we have a railway where train delay and profit are the central criteria, as opposed to safety of public and staff, the potential for another Tebay exists.

And while some small-time bosses like Connolly) are being pulled up by the law, fat cats in charge of major corporations which cause death through profiteering (like Gerald Corbett, ex-Railtrack) are still at large.

A 47-year-old worker died at Edinburgh Waverley station on 21 March. He worked for Border Rail, a sub-contractor hired by AMEC in its £24m contract to build new platforms. He was crushed when a broken-down 'cherry-picker' slipped while being moved onto a low-loader at night.

You might not even see this one in the statistics on railworker deaths, as the police are treating it as a road traffic accident.

But it seems that as on other construction sties, companies carrying out rail projects accept the odd death as part of the process.

It may be an acceptable risk to them, but it is not to us. We need a strong corporate manslaughter law, and we need strong union organisation on the sites to enforce safety standards.