Richardson's 'surge'
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• Norton Canes lorry driver Derek Richardson has been fined £300 and ordered to pay £100 prosecution costs after being convicted of two charges of falsifying tachograph charts by Lichfield Magistrates.
Richardson is one of 13 drivers, employed by Tanker Road Services, being accused of falsifying charts. His case is being dealt with first in the nature of a test case. The company faces charges of failing to produce tachograph records and of using vehicles with unsealed tachographs.
Barbara Stubbs, prosecuting, said that traffic examiners, who, together with police, raided the Tanker Road Services yard last November and found that the seals on the electronic tachograph in Richardson's vehicle were missing.
Supervising traffic examiner Donald Fisher said the seals prevented the plug in the back of the tachograph head being pulled out. If the plug was pulled out, the tachograph would report the vehicle as being stationary when in fact it was being driven.
Richardson's charts for 13 October 1986 showed the vehicle to be stationary 10 minutes before it was booked into the Purfleet factory of Van den Bergh and Jurgens and until the time it was booked out. His charts for 15 October showed that driving started at 12:54 hours when the vehicle immediately accelerated up to 100km/h, and then maintained a steady speed. That could only have happened on the motorway. In his opinion the plug had been pulled out so that the chart showed rest before being reinserted later.
Richardson denied that he had interfered with the tachograph. The vehicle concerned was not the vehicle he had normally driven, he said and the tachograph had become defective two days later; it having to be repaired.
In reply to Stubbs, Richardson said that he could not explain the sudden surge of speed on the chart for 15 October. He thought there might have been an electrical surge. He could not say why there were no records of the repair of the tachograph.