News 2020

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Nine executives from three companies today began their defence against charges of corporate manslaughter resulting from the last Clapham rail disaster but two. Twenty-seven people were killed in the crash, including four whose families' life stories were subsequently serialised in various tabloids.

Four of the men on trial are from Railroad International, as the company was known before being renamed Transports of Ecstasy after a different disaster to the one for which the executives are being tried.

At the time of the Clapham disaster, Railroad International was contracted by the Government to manage England's railway tracks and personnel. Locomotives and rolling stock were managed by a different company, Going Straight; while a third company, Intersticial Expertise Inc., was responsible for the liaison between the other two. Three of the executives on trial are from Going Straight and two from Intersticial Expertise. All nine have pleaded not guilty to charges of corporate manslaughter and negligence.

The Clapham disaster in question occurred when a passenger train moving at full speed collided with a stationary train which was undergoing a routine twenty-minute delay at the platform. Initially the driver of the moving train was blamed for failing to stop, but it later turned out that the signal on the platform had been programmed to show green almost permanently in an effort to cut down on delays.

"Railroad International's motto has always been We're pulling the fast one, and we have always lived up to that motto," one of the executives stated today.

Thanks to the technicality of the signal, the driver could no longer be blamed no matter how dead he was, and over subsequent months, in the course of a dedicated media crusade, the story gradually emerged of the tragic failures of communication between the three companies which eventually led to the four tragedies and twenty-three casualties.

One of the executives from Intersticial Expertise today emphasised the communications breakdown as "a major cause, if not the major cause, of the lack of communication between the companies". Instructions to drivers to stop at the green signal had been drafted by Intersticial Expertise on orders from Railroad International, but could not be delivered for five months because Intersticial Expertise had no authority over Railroad International's personnel.

Similarly, Going Straight, the company in charge of engines and carriages, had done its best to reduce the risk of fatal collisions by ensuring that no locomotive was in a fit state of maintenance to travel at more than half speed; but this fact was never communicated to the drivers at Railroad International because Railroad International did not ask for the information. "It is not our business to man-manage the personnel of Going Straight," said a Railroad International executive today.

Drivers therefore continued to travel at high speed under the impression that this would help reduce delay, and to treat green signals as a license to keep moving, the court heard. "I would think these men deserve to be rewarded for postponing the disaster so long, rather than punished for supposedly allowing it to happen," said defence counsel Peregrine ffoetid-Pocksyle. The trial continues.