A COMMUTER who parked his car across a level crossing at his local station when told his morning train was too long to stop there escaped a jail sentence yesterday.
Simon Taylor, 47, blocked the tracks with his Renault Kangoo in an attempt to halt the 06.40 service to London Victoria last September. A judge told him other rail users would appreciate his sense of frustration.
But he said his actions had been “stupid and egotistical”, and he could not have known whether he was endangering life.
Taylor had got up at 5am to catch the London service and his patience snapped when told the “wrong sort of train” had been sent — it was unable to stop at the village because it was too long. He was given an 80-hour community punishment order, and made to pay £250 compensation to Network Rail, plus £100 towards the case’s costs. His one-man protest at the impromptu timetable change led a signalman to radio the train driver to halt and caused a six-minute stand-off at Berwick Station, East Sussex.
Taylor, a property manager, who last month admitted a charge of obstructing an engine using a railway line contrary to the 1861 Malicious Damages Act, said after the case at Hove Crown Court that he would appeal.
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“I was treated by (the railway service) South Central in a cavalier, contemptuous and discourteous manner,” he said. “I had no intention of causing any injury to anyone. I reacted in the way many other commuters may have reacted but . . . I should not have reacted that way.” Taylor, from Polegate, East Sussex, who lost his job in April because of stress, claimed that he had parked on the crossing by mistake.
The claim was rejected by Judge Austin Issard-Davies.The judge told him: “Everybody who travels regularly by train will have shared at some time the frustration you felt that morning . . . which led you deliberately to leave your car on the level crossing.”