The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) investigation found that both companies were aware of the risks associated with allowing workers to walk along the track in front of a RRV, which is used for lifting, digging or levelling track, but had failed to put a safe system of work in place before the incident happened in the early hours of 4 June 2016.
Snaresbrook Crown Court was told on 3 December that 36-year-old worker Adrian Rascarache was crushed between the RRV and the platform edge at Whitechapel station. The vehicle had been fitted with a bucket, which restricted the driver's view.
The ORR found that both companies had decided not to adopt a procedure called "send and receive", which eliminates the need for people to walk between machines because this was considered a slower method of working.
The rail regulator also found that on the night that Rascarache sustained his life-changing injuries, the workers were not given the required safety briefings before starting their shift. The signing-in procedure had been deliberately bypassed.
Balfour Beatty Rail, which was fined £333,000 and London Underground, which must pay £100,000, both pleaded guilty to breaching s 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The two companies must each pay £30,000 costs.
Balfour Beatty Rail told IOSH Magazine that it has "since taken appropriate corrective action to take the lessons learnt from this incident and shared them across our business".
