Rail firm fined £1m over train passenger's death

A major rail operator has been fined £1m for breaching health and safety law when a young woman suffered a fatal injury after placing her head outside a droplight window.

Bethan Roper, 28, was killed on a Great Western Railway (GWR) train near Twerton in Bath on 1 December 2018 when her head struck a tree branch.

Regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) prosecuted GWR on the grounds it was aware of the issue of droplight windows, and had not yet implemented steps identified in a risk assessment undertaken two months before Ms Roper's death.

GWR was fined and also ordered to pay £78,000 after pleading guilty to two counts of breaching health and safety law.

Richard Hines, ORR's chief inspector of railways, said: "Our thoughts remain with the family and friends of Bethan Roper.

"Her death was a preventable tragedy that highlights the need for train operators to proactively manage risks and act swiftly when safety recommendations are made to keep their passengers safe."

Ms Roper, from Penarth in Wales, worked for the Welsh Refugee Council, was a Unite union convener and also chaired the Cardiff West branch of Socialist Party Wales.

She had been returning home from a Christmas shopping trip in Bath and was intoxicated when she boarded the train, an inquest held in 2021 heard.

Investigators told the inquest a yellow warning label above the window bearing the words 'Caution do not lean out of window when train is moving' was an insufficient deterrent.

Ms Roper's death echoed a similar incident in 2016 in which a passenger died near Balham, south London, resulting in the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) issuing safety recommendations in May 2017.

GWR did not produce a written risk assessment until September 2017, but that assessment found droplight windows to be one of the most significant passenger safety risks.

The ORR found the assessment to be insufficient and wrote to GWR about its concerns.

However the assessment was not revised, and the actions GWR had set out to reduce the risk were not implemented before the fatal accident of 2018, the ORR said.

Since Ms Roper's death, measures have been introduced across the rail industry to prevent passengers leaning out of droplight windows.

Trains with such windows have since been withdrawn from service or fitted with engineering controls to prevent windows being opened while trains are moving.

The ORR said it welcomed actions taken by GWR and the wider industry to reduce risk.