The driver of a London-bound train on which 10 people were stabbed told a court he heard someone screaming through a door microphone that a knifeman was attacking people, and he had “probably about 10 seconds” to move the train to the slow line to stop at Huntingdon.
Andrew Johnson, who was behind the controls of the LNER service, brought the train to an unscheduled stop at Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire on November 1 last year.
He told Cambridge Crown Court the service was travelling at 122mph around Abbots Ripton when an alarm went off “which indicated someone was trying to open one of the passenger doors”.
He said he had five seconds to override the alarm and looked on a camera and “could see the door but no one was there at that time”.
Mr Johnson said if he did nothing to override the alarm “it would bring the train to a stop – it would take a mile, mile-and-a-half but I wouldn’t be able to get going again”.
He said after trying to speak to whoever activated the alarm over a loudspeaker and getting no reply, “I thought Saturday night, someone’s messing around”.
But later, while speaking to a member of staff “asking her to reset it”, I heard someone screaming ‘there’s a knifeman stabbing people’”.
He said it had been a “kind of a three-way conversation” between the member of on-board staff at the back of the train and the door microphone which was still active.
He said the scream was “terrifying”.
Mr Johnson said the next station on the slow line was Huntingdon and he decided to move the train from the fast line to the slow line, having “probably about 10 seconds” to take the decision to do so.
Asked by prosecutor Christopher Paxton KC why he chose the slow line, Mr Johnson said: “Obviously I’ve been driving that line for a long time.”
He said that “it just came instinctively, I never really thought about it”.
The driver said an in-built safety feature meant “if I leave my seat the train stops”, so he was “absolutely glued to that seat”.
“My mind was completely focused on one thing and that was getting the train to Huntingdon,” he said.
He said once the train had stopped he sheltered an elderly woman in his cab.
The service for London King’s Cross had started at Doncaster and left Peterborough before the incident started and its next scheduled stop had been Stevenage.
The train had nine coaches, and the journey from Peterborough to Stevenage was due to take 30 minutes.
Anthony Williams, 33, denies attempting to murder 10 people on the LNER train.
He also denies the attempted murders of three people in Peterborough on October 31 and of a 17-year-old boy at Pontoon Dock DLR station in London in the early hours of November 1.
Judge Mr Justice Calver earlier told jurors at Cambridge Crown Court that whether Williams carried out the attacks is not in question, but they must consider whether he intended to kill.
James Tomlinson, a passenger on the train, said in a video-recorded police interview played to jurors on Tuesday that there was a “guy shouting ‘I’ve got a knife, I’m not afraid to use it, we’re all going to die today’”.
“It was a deep voice and you could tell he meant it,” said Mr Tomlinson.
“There was no turn back.”
In a video interview another passenger, Alice Ward, described seeing a “conga of people running through” the carriage before she heard someone shout “he’s got a knife, someone’s been stabbed in the next carriage”.
She said: “The gentleman that was serving the food came out with two pans and said ‘we need to stick together’.”
Ms Ward said the knifeman “looked completely deranged” and “had a bottle of like a cherry tonic, Magnum”.
She said he was “shouting a lot, something along the lines of ‘why are you trying to kill me’ but obviously that wasn’t the case”.
The trial continues.
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