Death crash trial driver accused
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A LORRY DRIVER aged 22 was accused at Dumfries Sheriff Court on Monday of causing the death of 10 people in Scotland's worst ever holiday coach crash on A74 in June.
Paul Colclough, from Newnham, near Gloucester, pleaded not guilty to causing the deaths of the coach driver and nine passengers from Brighton by driving a lorry dangerously and recklessly at an excessive speed; failing to keep it under proper control; and crossing the central reservation and colliding with the coach. He also pleaded not guilty to an alternative charge of careless driving.
The court was told by 30year-old company secretary and director of the Barbur Transport firm which owned the lorry, Mrs Pauline Burnett from Gloucester, that Colclough had uplifted a load of oranges at Cardiff dock for Glasgow and she had seen him in the yard at Gloucester at about 4.30 p.m. on the day before the crash ready to set out.
He telephoned from Glasgow next morning at 9.40 am. when he was given instructions to set off for County Durham. But a police constable who examined Colclough's log book said it showed the driver as having finished work the previous evening at 5.30—and also indicated he had left Glasgow at 10.30 on the morning of the crash. And the accident took place just 35 minutes later, 55 miles away.
The constable said: "It would be an impossibility for a lorry to have reached the scene at the particular time if it had left Glasgow at 10.30."
The trial continues.