THE deaths on the track at Tebay have prompted calls for a public inquiry and could lead to criminal prosecutions.

British Transport Police and the Health and Safety Executive are jointly investigating the incident and say they will be presenting their findings to the Criminal Prosecution Service to decide who, if anyone, should be prosecuted.

Investigations will focus on how a maintenance trolley at Scout Green began to move and why the compulsory automatic braking system apparently failed to stop it.

Braking systems have been required on all such vehicles following a similar incident with a runaway wagon at Culgaith, on the Settle to Carlisle line east of Penrith in January 2003.

No-one was injured at Culgaith, but Network Rail's internal investigation decided, in the interests of safety, that all such road/rail trolleys must be fitted with a brake designed to come on automatically when the vehicles are decoupled.

Network Rail said it understood the trolley in question at Tebay had been fitted with the braking system.

For whatever reason, that system failed at Scout Green with tragic consequences.

All such trolleys have now been withdrawn from service until investigations are complete.

The RMT claims the trolleys are "cheap and nasty" and that the braking systems installed after Culgaith frequently failed.

The RMT's Andy Boyack said the system failed at Scout Green on Sunday morning forcing workers to use two-inch blocks of wood placed under the wheels to keep the trolley in place on the track.

According to him, the vehicle - laden with 15-tonnes of 20-feet long track sections - had been jolted during unloading, splintered the wooden chock-blocks and trundled down the one-in-74 gradient towards the workers on the line at Tebay.

To make matters worse, he said, five different companies were working at Scout Green but no-one was aware of the other workers down the line. Control was alerted to the runaway trailer, but no-one knew to warn the men at Tebay.

"With so many different contractors and sub contactors working on the line it is hard to communicate properly and work safely and efficiently. This is the way things are in the rail industry since privatisation," said Mr Boyack.

Bob Crow, Secretary General of the RMT, said the number of separate contractors could have led to a "disjointed approach to safety management".

The union has written to the Government demanding a full public inquiry into the Tebay tragedy.

But Penrith and the Border MP David Maclean says a public inquiry would be too slow, too costly and that the current investigations would be sufficient as long as their findings were made public.

"It was a freak accident. Nothing like this has happened for many, many years. I hope that between them the police and the HSE will have a speedy inquiry to find out why the trailer decoupled and why the brakes apparently failed. It was an awful tragedy but quite unique and unlikely to happen again."

He also said it was "political mischief-making" to blame privatisation.

Mr Boyack responded: "It's a shocking thing for anyone to bring politics into it. This is something where we have had a real tragedy, the RMT are only looking out for the health and safety of our members at work."