Driver Lane says that the brake blocks were rubbing against the engine wheels, and thus prevented the engine from hauling the train up the incline to Nantybwch. If this were the case, which however is very doubtful, he should have done one of two things: either he should have divided the train and taken half of it forward, leaving the remaining wagons carefully secured on the incline, with a red light attached to the leading wagon for his guidance as to their position, when he returned to fetch them; or he should have sent his fireman to the nearest station, in this instance Nantybwch, for assistance. For some unexplained reason he did neither of these things, but elected to follow a course of his own, and that a most dangerous one. After telling his brakesman to secure the train, he caused the engine to be uncoupled and took it forward to a convenient spot, where he scotched  the wheels with stones, and then proceeded to disconnect the ‘pull rods’ of the brake block from the brake gear for the purpose of adjusting the blocks, and setting them further from the wheels.

To show the risks which Lane was incurring, it may be pointed out that while he was doing this, no brakes at all were then available for preventing the engine from running away down hill in the event of any failure of the stones to act as scotches. When Lane had done what he thought necessary to the brakes he allowed the engine to drop by gravity

back to the train, after telling the brakesman to go back to his van for the purpose of releasing the brakes as soon as the engine was once more coupled on. But Lane had omitted to see that a light had been placed on the front wagon when he left his train, and owing to the darkness of the night he was unable to see the exact position of the wagons. It might have been expected that under such circumstances he would have sent his fireman with a hand lamp to stand by the wagons, so as to indicate their position and enable him to come up to them slowly and cautiously. But Lane ignored the simple precaution, and in setting his engine back on to the wagons misjudged the position of the latter, and struck them with sufficient force to set them in motion and cause them to run away down the hill.

Brakesman Meale acquiesced in all that the driver did. He says that before the engine was uncoupled he screwed on his hand brake, put a sprag  in one of the wheels of the wagon next his van, and pinned down  the brakes of two other wagons, making a total of 14 wheels braked and spragged out of the 40 wheels on the train, and these he considered sufficient. They were as a fact just sufficient to hold the train when at rest, but no allowance was made by Meale for the effect of the blow which would be given to the wagons when the engine came against them to be coupled on.