Court of Appeal
| Published date | 01 January 1967 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002201836703100105 |
| Date | 01 January 1967 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Court of Appeal
ENDANGERING SAFETY ON RAILWAYS
R. v.
Pearce
ANY person who, by any unlawful act, or by any wilful
omission or neglect, endangers or causes to be en-
dangered the safety of any person conveyed by or in or upon
a railway commits an offence against
the
Offences Against the
Person Act 1861, s. 34.
The
Court (Lord Parker, C.J., Winn,
L.J., and Widgery, J.) was called upon to interpret the wording
of this enactment in R. v.
Pearce
(1966, 3
All
E.R. 618).
There
was no previous relevant authority on the point except
the assize case of R. v. Bowray (1846, 10 Jur.
211).
The
appellant, who had been convicted of this offence, at
I I p.m. one night cut three spans of copper wire linking two
railway signal-boxes. He thus rendered the railway's block
signalling system unusable.
The
signalman on duty at
the
signal-box carried out an alternative system of control by hand
signals.
This
involved his stopping each train, leaving the box
and giving personally instructions to the engine driver and
guard.
It
so happened when this event occurred
that
the
signalman on duty was a very experienced man who had had
the
experience of a similar breakdown in
the
previous week.
No accident occurred as a result of
the
appellant's act. His
ground of appeal was that there had been no danger in fact, as
events had happened, so that the offence of endangering had
not been committed.
The
Court rejected this argument and
upheld the conviction.
The
Court thought that it was not helpful in cases of this
kind to
try
to analyse danger into two categories of potential
and
actual danger.
The
function of the
jury
was to decide
whether the facts proved could properly be described as
endangering, or causing to be endangered,
the
safety of a
passenger.
It
seemed to the Court that
the
disruption of the
automatic signalling system with the built-in safeguard which
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