The partner of a train conductor killed in a fatal derailment near Stonehaven said the crash turned her life “upside down”, after Network Rail admitted in court it was to blame for a series of failures over the crash.
Trish Ewen, 59, was speaking after Network Rail said on Thursday acknowledged a series of failures that led to the high-speed train crashing in August 2020 into a landslide, killing three people including her partner Donald Dinnie.
Network Rail agreed it had failed to impose an emergency speed restriction on the line and failed to warn the driver it was unsafe to drive at 75mph, after severe downpours and flooding led to an earlier landslip on another section of track nearby.
Eastern Scotland had endured severe thunderstorms and flooding in the hours before the crash, which led to Perth station being flooded and services on a Glasgow to Edinburgh line affected by the failure of a canal bank.
The derailment, which led to a severe fire, killed Dinnie, Brett McCullough, 45, who was the train’s driver, and passenger Christopher Sutchbury, 62. Sutchbury was on the train because his earlier service had been cancelled. The six other passengers on the Glasgow-bound service were injured.
In a statement issued after Network Rail admitted in court to two breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, Ewen said his death was “so incomprehensible that there’s no past experiences to draw on to ease any acceptance or recovery”.
She added: “The last three years has completely turned my life upside down. Donald and I should be thinking about retiring together and planning the rest of our lives – instead he was taken and I’ve been left to exist alone.”
Ewen said she had been telephoned at work to say there had been a train accident, so she went to a family member’s home and watched coverage of the incident on television. She could see ambulances, fire engines and police at the scene.
She had a feeling it was Dinnie’s service which had crashed, but even so believed he had survived. “I told myself, ‘He is the conductor so he’ll be busy helping the passengers,’ she said.
“While later we heard the driver died and that’s when my stomach started turning and I feared the worst. I felt dizzy. Like the blood drained from my head.”
During a hearing at the high court in Aberdeen on Thursday morning, Network Rail admitted it had failed to ensure that a drainage system near the track, built by the now defunct contractor Carillion, had been properly constructed.
It also failed to have a handover meeting with the contractors at the site to check the drains were built properly.
The charge, which was split into five parts, described how the drainage system failed, with gravel washing out from the drainage trench and on to the track. The high-speed train, which had two engines and four carriages struck the obstruction at 72.8mph, causing it to derail, decouple and strike a bridge parapet, before the lead engine burst into flames.
Network Rail also failed to have a proper training and quality assurance system for analysing weather forecasts: that meant it had no emergency meeting on the morning of 12 August to discuss the extreme weather affecting its services in Scotland.
Court papers showed documents outline how there was a forecast of “extreme rainfall” and reports of severe weather, landslips and flooding in Aberdeenshire and the surrounding area on the day of the crash. The Met Office had imposed an amber severe weather warning on north-east Scotland the previous day.
Alex Prentice KC, for the prosecution, told the court: “Network Rail co-operated fully with the investigation, and from the outset were clear that this case would result in a guilty plea.”
