Expert Witness Journal Issue 68 August 2026 - Flipbook - Page 81
When the Specialists Mark Their
Own Homework
by James Byrne & Giles Mooney KC at Deka Chambers.
RAIB Investigations, Coroners’ Constrained
Powers, and Why Families Must Still Press
Beginning at Sandilands
We come to this subject not as theorists but as the
barristers who sat with bereaved families through
the inquest into the worst tram disaster in this
country for more than a century. On the morning of
9 November 2016, a tram derailed at the Sandilands
curve in Croydon, having entered a sharp bend
at roughly three-and-a-half times the permitted
speed. Seven people died and more than 昀椀fty were
injured, several seriously. Representing the families,
we watched an inquest that, for all its length, was
hemmed in from the outset.
Introduction
The recent collision between two trains at Bedford
is a sober reminder of how suddenly lives can be lost
on the railway, and of the machinery that swings into
action when they are. Whenever there is a serious
railway accident, the Rail Accident Investigation
Branch investigates and, in time, publishes a report
on what it considers to have caused the accident and
how a recurrence might be avoided. That report
will be the work of acknowledged experts, and it
will rightly carry great weight. But it will also, if
recent history is any guide, come to dominate any
inquest that follows and to narrow what a coroner is
permitted to examine.
The Rail Accident Investigation Branch had reported
in 2017 that the most likely cause of the accident
was a temporary loss of awareness, a possible
“micro-sleep”, on the part of a driver who had an
otherwise unblemished record and had driven
that same stretch hundreds of times. The RAIB’s
chief inspector told the inquest jury the crash was
“absolutely” the product of excessive speed. That
much was not seriously in dispute. What was in
dispute was everything that sat behind the moment
of derailment: the systemic failures, the inadequacy
of the operator’s risk assessments against known
human factors, and, most pointedly, an incident
ten days earlier in which a tram had taken the very
same bend at dangerous speed and very nearly
overturned, an incident that had not been properly
investigated.
This article is about that consequence: about the
limited powers the courts have so far held that
coroners have to question or reject the conclusions
of the RAIB and its sister body the Air Accidents
Investigation Branch; about why, in our view, those
conclusions should still be tested rather than taken
on trust; and about why the inquest remains vital
ground for the families who will later bring civil
claims, where the deference shown to these reports
falls away. We write not in the abstract, but from
experience.
EXPERT WITNESS JOURNAL
79
AUGUST
JUNE 2026
