LNER train driver stops at Huntingdon after hearing screams of knifeman on board
Driver Andrew Johnson halted an LNER service at Huntingdon after hearing screams of a knifeman stabbing passengers. Ten people were stabbed on the November 1 train.
LNER driver made split-second call to stop train after knifeman alert
The driver of an LNER service on which ten passengers were stabbed has told Cambridge Crown Court he had "probably about 10 seconds" to divert the train to a slow line and bring it to a halt at Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the Evening Standard reports.
Andrew Johnson was at the controls of the London King's Cross-bound service on 1 November last year when an alarm indicated someone was attempting to open a passenger door. The train was travelling at 122mph near Abbots Ripton at the time.
Johnson told the court he initially had five seconds to override the alarm, checked a camera feed, and "could see the door but no one was there at that time". He said had he not intervened, the alarm would have brought the train to a stop on its own — but across a mile to a mile-and-a-half of track, leaving the service unable to restart.
After attempting to reach whoever had triggered the alarm over a loudspeaker and receiving no response, he said he assumed it was someone "messing around" on a Saturday night. It was only during a subsequent conversation with a member of on-board staff that the situation became clear.
"I heard someone screaming 'there's a knifeman stabbing people'," Johnson told the court. He described the scream as "terrifying", arriving through a door microphone that remained active during what he called a "kind of a three-way conversation" between himself, the staff member at the rear of the train, and the microphone feed.
Johnson said the next available stop on the slow line was Huntingdon and acted on instinct. "Obviously I've been driving that line for a long time," he told prosecutor Christopher Paxton KC, adding that "it just came instinctively, I never really thought about it."
An in-built safety feature meant the train would stop automatically if he left his seat, he said, leaving him "absolutely glued to that seat". "My mind was completely focused on one thing and that was getting the train to Huntingdon," he told the court.
Once the train had stopped, Johnson sheltered an elderly woman inside his cab.
The service had originated at Doncaster and departed Peterborough before the attack began. Its next scheduled stop had been Stevenage, a journey of around 30 minutes across nine coaches.
The defendant, Anthony Williams, 33, denies attempting to murder all ten people stabbed on board the train. He also denies the attempted murders of three people in Peterborough on 31 October, and of a 17-year-old at Pontoon Dock DLR station in London in the early hours of 1 November.
Judge Mr Justice Calver has directed jurors that whether Williams carried out the attacks is not in dispute — the question for the jury is whether he intended to kill.
Passenger James Tomlinson, in a video-recorded police interview played to the court on Tuesday, said a man was "shouting 'I've got a knife, I'm not afraid to use it, we're all going to die today'". He added: "It was a deep voice and you could tell he meant it."
A second passenger, Alice Ward, described in a video interview seeing a "conga of people running through" the carriage before someone shouted that a person had been stabbed in the next coach. She said a staff member emerged carrying two pans and urged passengers to "stick together".
Ward said the knifeman "looked completely deranged" and was holding what appeared to be a bottle of cherry tonic. She said he was "shouting a lot, something along the lines of 'why are you trying to kill me' — but obviously that wasn't the case".
Source: Evening Standard