A woman who drove on to a railway line after being told to by her satellite navigation system made “a bad but honest mistake,” police have said.
The woman who drove on to the track near Eastbourne, blocking the Hastings to Brighton lines, has not been named.
She was waiting at a level crossing at Norman’s Bay, Sussex, in January, when the device told her to turn left.
Pc Christine Holyoake, from British Transport Police, said the 52-year-old Surrey driver would not be charged.
Case closed
The woman from Dorking was investigated for obstructing the railway and driving without due care.
Police said they looked into the matter and investigated possible faults with the sat-nav device but found no fault. They also took into consideration the fact that it was dark.
Officers decided it had been a mistake and that a prosecution was not in the public interest. The matter is now closed, they said.
I had a Hertz “Neverlost” specifically direct me to go the wrong way into a freeway exit. Fortunately I knew that area and did not make the turn. Then to add insult to (non)injury - “Neverlost” told me I had missed the turn and started giving me directions to turn around! I turned it off.
The GPS can get a person in trouble. The Dorking woman made a common mistake. She was watching the screen instead of closely watching the roadway. Great that no one was hurt.
If she was blond at 52 years old it was probably mostly out of a bottle,
2, don’t believe everything you hear, i.e the veracity of processed voice. It’s only GPS, not God, and
3, she’s lucky she wasn’t killed. There may not have been a train due, but that route is electrified on the third rail system so a higher power was looking out for her. If she had got out and contacted the third rail, 660volts DC would probably have been fatal; it is in most cases. The story is nowhere near as funny as it first looks.
I had another interesting GPS experience this afternoon. I headed out to Little Mountain on the east side of the Salt Lake - where the SP line crosses the Bear River bay before starting on the Great Salt Lake Causeway at Saline UT. My GPS was convinced that I was 35 miles south of Wendover NV. I finally turned it off and restarted the system. We finally agreed on my location.
ps - all I saw was a east bound UP manifest with a lot of ethanol cars.