Passengers stranded on motorway overnight after British Megabus driver arrested
Tuesday, August 12, 2014 @ 12:58 PM
A BRITISH coach driver was arrested and 62 passengers left stranded overnight at a police checkpoint in Girona when it was found that another person's tachograph card had been inserted in the vehicle.
Some of the travellers booked into hotels for the night when they realised they would not be going anywhere, but around eight of them stayed on board the coach overnight and were given lifts to the railway station in Girona city the next morning by police.
Low-cost travel company Megabus.com, part of the UK-based corporation Stagecoach, was transporting the 62 passengers from Barcelona to London via Toulouse and Paris when it was pulled over during a random check on the AP-7 motorway in Maçanet de la Selva (Girona province) at 17.00hrs on Sunday.
Police found that the British driver, who was the only one on board, had used a colleague's tachograph card to make it look as though he had been on the road far less time.
Megabus.com had not provided a relief driver to share the job of what would typically involve 24 hours in a car and much more by coach, meaning the arrested man had been on the road all the way from London to the Costa Brava by the time he was caught.
While he was being questioned and charged, travellers faced a seven-hour wait before most of them decided to seek hotel rooms at around midnight.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com