A LORRY driver whose 39 tonne vehicle overturned onto a car killing the woman driver has denied speeding through changing traffic lights.

Brian Kynaston said that the lights had been on green and he did not know that his consignment of scrap fridges and cars was an unsafe load.

He is accused of causing the death by dangerous driving of Valerie Taylor, 63, of Haslingden Old Road, Rawtenstall, formerly a lecturer at Accrington and Rossendale College.

She died at the scene after her Peugeot was crushed by Kynaston's overturned lorry on November 1 last year.

Liverpool Crown Court has heard that contrary to the Department of Transport's code of safe practice his trailer had been filled with the heavier baled cubed cars on top of the fridges instead of being at the bottom.

Kynaston, 42, said he had not known that the bales weighed 12 tonnes and the fridges eight tonnes.

"If I had known that I would not have gone round the corner at that speed," he said.

He said he had gone through the traffic lights under the fly-over at the bottom of the M62 in Liverpool heading towards Bootle docks in the right hand filter lane.

Kynaston said he had moved from the inside lane as the vehicles in front were stationery or moving very slowly as the lights had just changed and the outside lane was empty.

Questioned by his barrister Steven Swift he said he was doing 35 mph an hour when he went through the lights. He said he checked his mirror to make sure he was clear of the central reservation and noticed the right hand side of the trailer lifting up into the air.

"I looked in the left hand mirror not knowing whether cars were beside me or not and looked in the driver's side mirror again to see what was happening and by then the trailer was gone right up in the air and in a flash it tipped over," he said.

Kynaston, of Dingley Dell, Oswestry, Shropshire, said he did not realise the trailer had fallen onto the Peugeot. He rang his boss to tell him what had happened and he did not see anything beneath the trailer until after a man asked him what he had been carrying.

Cross-examined by David McLachlan, prosecuting, he said he had been unaware of the Department of Transport code about loading the trailers and had thought the load was safe.

He denied he had been travelling too fast and said he could have stopped if the lights had changed against him. He also denied they were on amber or red when he went through them.

(Proceeding)