Date set for inquest into bus stop death crash
A men’s health charity based at Huddersfield Railway Station has won a decommissioned Pacer train carriage in a national competition.
Platform 1, which has outgrown its existing old train carriage home, will use the Pacer for a much-needed expansion.
After starting with just four members they now help around 440 men from across Kirklees, offering them a place to make friends, learn new skills and find support for a variety of issues.
That is why, when the Department for Transport announced they would award three retired Pacer carriages to deserving charities and organisations across the North, they jumped at the chance to apply.
Legendary music producer and train enthusiast Pete Waterman was tasked with judging who should get the carriages and stopped in to Platform 1 to give them the good news.
Platform 1 project leader Gez Walsh confessed he wasn’t sure who the former Pop Idol judge was when he walked in alongside BBC cameras.
“The One Show had come down, supposedly just to interview us,” he explained.
“Then this guy came bounding in. I have to be honest I didn’t know who he was, I was going to ask him to leave.”
Luckily Gez’s colleague Bob Morse was first to speak asking: “It’s Pete Waterman, how come we’ve got a legend in our midst?”
Mr Waterman then delivered the good news that Platform 1 had won the competition and would be getting a new carriage.
“It’s absolutely brilliant,” said Gez. “We’re going to make it a training carriage. It will have a kitchen where we will be able to learn cooking - we have some qualified people coming down to teach.
“We’ve needed to expand for about eight or nine months now, the numbers go up every week.
“It just shows the demand for a charity like this in Kirklees.”
When the carriage arrives it will be stripped inside but fitted with electricity.
Gez said the only problem now is figuring out how to get it into place.
He said: “You come back to reality and you think, oh god how are we going to get it in.
“The station has a roof all the way along so it won’t be easy to get it over the wall.
“At Platform 1 you always think there’s a solution to every problem though. The pub next door have said we shouldn’t have a problem getting it in.”
Gez added: “We’d like to thank everybody that has supported us, the Examiner, Kirklees Council. The people of Kirklees are absolutely fantastic.”
A date has been set for the inquest into the death of Katelyn Dawson who was killed in a horror smash at a bus stop.
Katelyn, 15, died after a BMW mounted the pavement and ploughed into the bus stop on Wakefield Road in Moldgreen in January 2018.
After a lengthy police investigation the Crown Prosecution Service decided that while the driver, Richard Brooke, was driving dangerously he was not criminally responsible. He was suffering from a condition called “insane automatism” at the time.
The defence of insane automatism applies where a person suffers some malfunctioning of his body or mind due to an illness or medical episode.
Katelyn’s parents, Colin and Angela, hope the inquest – due to take place at Bradford Coroner’s Court from May 11-13 – will help them move on.
In a statement the couple said: “We are relieved that the inquest has been scheduled for May.
“We have many unanswered questions relating to Katelyn’s death, and we are hoping that the inquest will go some way to helping us understand what happened on that day.
“It is over two years since Katelyn died, and some people ask why we have not moved on. Until the inquest has been held, it is not possible.
“After the inquest we can at least grieve for our daughter and start to live the rest of our lives without her.”