Five men are on trial for manslaughter over the crash

Karen Moore had to clutch a handrail as her carriage slid on its side in the 2000 crash in which four people died.

"I was thinking about my little boy and thinking I might never see him again. I just felt 'I've got to hold on, got to hold on'," the sales director said.

She was testifying at the Old Bailey trial of five rail managers accused of manslaughter - charges they all deny.

In tears, Ms Moore told the jury: "At that point the train came to a stop and I looked over my shoulder and I could just see this pile of bodies on top of me."

Susan Stephenson, a solicitor in a carriage on the train, said she "heard a noise I'd never heard before or since... It seemed absolutely certain it was very serious."

'Final moments'

She too tried to hold on as the train derailed and slid along "very quickly".

She said her sensation was that "these were my final moments."

"I just really felt it was a question of where it came from, whether the impact came from the front or the side of the carriage."

Mrs Stephenson escaped from the wreckage with just an injured wrist.

Four people died in the next carriage, the buffet car, which was bent in two.

The lawyer for one of the managers said the men were working in an under-funded and neglected industry.

They inherited this awful system and they tried to make it work for the benefit of the travelling public but they did not invent it Jonathan Goldberg QC

They were "honourable men doing their duty" and it would be unfair to make them scapegoats for a "system failure", Jonathan Goldberg QC told the Old Bailey on Monday.

He was defending Balfour Beatty civil engineer Nicholas Jeffries, 53.

Those on trial with Mr Jefferies are Anthony Walker, 46, who like him worked for Balfour Beatty Rail Maintenance, and Alistair Cook, 50, Sean Fugill, 50, and Keith Lea, 53, of Railtrack, which owned the East Coast Mainline.

"These five men worked in an under-funded, under-invested railway industry, which had been neglected by governments of all parties for over 40 years and which had recently undergone a botched and unworkable privatisation," Mr Goldberg said.

'System failure'

"It was a system and organisation failure and not a failure by five individuals.

"You cannot just divorce Hatfield from the then unresolved problems of privatisation when British Rail was split up into 100-plus different companies and the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing."

Balfour Beatty faces a corporate manslaughter charge and Network Rail health and safety charges, which are denied.

Steve Arthur, 46, from Pease Pottage, West Sussex; Peter Monkhouse, 50, of Headingley, Leeds; Leslie Gray, 43, of Tuxford, Nottingham; and Robert James Alcorn, 37, of Auckland, New Zealand were killed in the derailment.