Carmont inquiry ties fatal crash to off-design drain and missing records

Carmont inquiry ties fatal crash to off-design drain and missing records The Carmont derailment inquiry has found that building the drain at the derailment site to its approved design might realistically have prevented the August 2020 crash that killed three people. Sheriff Lesley Johnston set out her findings in a 199-page determination dated October 30 and published on November 4, when Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service outlined the findings. It covers train driver Brett McCullough, 45, conductor Donald Dinnie, 58, and passenger Christopher Stuchbury, 62. They died on August 12, 2020, when the 06:38 Aberdeen to Glasgow service, train 1T08, hit debris washed from a drain onto the line near Carmont, Aberdeenshire, after very heavy rain. The High Speed Train was running at about 73 mph, and six other passengers were injured. The fatal accident inquiry heard evidence at Aberdeen Sheriff Court from January 26 to February 4, 2026, with submissions on March 30 and 31. It followed the criminal case against Network Rail Infrastructure Limited. The company pleaded guilty at the High Court in Aberdeen on September 7, 2023, to a breach of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and was fined £6.7 million. Three precautions tied to the 2011/12 drain In the determination, the sheriff listed three precautions that could reasonably have been taken. The first was for Carillion Construction Limited to build the drain, installed in 2011 and 2012, to the design prepared by Ove Arup and Partners. That would have left out a bund that formed no part of the design and that she identified as the significant cause of the washout on the day of the crash. The other two concern records. Carillion should have prepared as-built drawings and passed them to Network Rail. Network Rail should have followed its own standards of the time, which required it to receive those drawings and a health and safety file once construction ended. The sheriff also found a defect in Network Rail’s system of working: its failure to ensure the drain was built properly and in line with the design drawings. The determination lists several ways the drain departed from the design. Carillion put catchpit 18 in the wrong position and never installed the planned catchpit 17. Locally dug material replaced the specified gravel as backfill near catchpit 19, and carrier pipe went in where filter pipe was required. Between March 2013 and the derailment, Network Rail carried out no routine inspection of the drain section upslope of catchpit 18. Weather management in Scotland’s control room The sheriff also recorded that route control staff in Scotland were not adequately trained at the time in Network Rail’s national standard for managing extreme weather, NR/L2/OPS/21. The National Rail Weather Service was not configured in the control room to issue alerts from real-time weather data, and staff had not been trained to use it that way. Network Rail’s competency assessments and audits did not detect these gaps. Under the arrangements then in place, the control room had no basis to impose mitigations such as speed restrictions on extreme rainfall alone. The train was traveling just below the line’s normal speed, as the signaler had instructed and in line with the rulebook. Of the driver, the sheriff wrote: “His actions as train driver on 12 August 2020 cannot be faulted and in no way caused or contributed to the accident.” Why the sheriff made no recommendations The determination contains no recommendations. In March 2022, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch published an investigation report with 20 recommendations addressed to the Office of Rail and Road, and it updated the report in January 2024. The sheriff found that the vast majority have been implemented and that the few still open are being progressed under ORR oversight. She concluded: “I do not consider there are any other reasonable precautions, improvements or other steps that could be taken which might rea…