A MAN has been jailed after sitting on a railway track as a train approached then invading its cab and threatening its driver to move the train or be “cut”.

The engine driver was going slowly on the East Coast main line near Copmanthorpe because a signaller had warned him of possible trespassers on the line, Rob Galley, prosecuting, told York Crown Court.

He locked himself in his cab when Benjamin Jamie Milner got up from between the rails and started to wave his arms.

Milner, 31, managed to break into the cab and told the railwayman: “If you don’t move this train, I am going to cut you.”

The driver managed to calm him down until police arrived. They had tracked Milner from a house nearby where he had just fought with his brother.

“Any offence like this is extremely dangerous,” Recorder Colin Burn said. “It could have been dangerous to the emergency services who may have had to be called to attend, it may have been very dangerous to you had the train not received a warning to go slow.”

He said of the two-year maximum sentence: “It was no doubt fixed by Parliament when trains were somewhat slower than they are now and there was much less traffic on the railways.”

The incident at 4.50am on September 17 delayed the freight train by 55 minutes.

Milner, formerly of Barons Crescent, Copmanthorpe, was jailed for nine months after admitting obstructing a train and a public order offence. The sentence included six months previously suspended for glassing a man in a private flat and what Mr Galley described as a “scuffle with a doorman in a public house”.

Ruth Cranidge, mitigating, said Milner had a drink problem.