To give you some background to the reason that they are unlikely to prosecute and even if they do, why they have little to no chance of succeeding:
Minor parking was deliberately shifted out of the criminal courts by Parliament in the Road Traffic Act 1991. From 1993, London boroughs and then councils elsewhere began “decriminalised parking enforcement” so routine parking mistakes were handled as civil contraventions, not crimes. By around 1995 this model had spread nationally. The reasons were simple: criminal courts were clogged with trivial parking cases; the criminal standard and procedures were disproportionate for minor infringements; local authorities needed a faster, fairer system focused on compliance not convictions; and appeal rights were set up to be administrative (adjudicators) rather than criminal. That is why today a yellow PCN on-street is civil, with no criminal record, handled by council processes and independent tribunals. The later Traffic Management Act 2004 kept and expanded this civil model.
Against that backdrop, trying to prosecute a trivial “outside the bay line” at a railway car park as a criminal byelaw offence is using the wrong tool. A byelaw prosecution demands proof beyond reasonable doubt and must be laid within six months. If the operator does not know who was driving, they often try to pivot to “owner” liability under byelaw 14(4). But there is no public register of owners and the DVLA V5C explicitly says it is not proof of ownership, so equating keeper with owner is weak. For a nose-over-line case causing no obstruction, the de minimis principle also bites: the law does not concern itself with trifles, and criminal court time is better spent elsewhere.
Policy-wise, the Department for Transport expects routine private parking on railway land to be managed through civil parking charge regimes, not criminal Penalty Notices, precisely to align with the national shift begun by the 1991 Act. Civil routes are proportionate, give proper appeal stages, and avoid branding ordinary motorists as offenders for minor mistakes.
Bottom line: this is a stupid prosecution because it ignores Parliament’s choice in 1991 to decriminalise minor parking, fights the case in the wrong forum with a higher burden of proof, rests on shaky “owner” assumptions, and treats a trivial, de minimis bay encroachment like a crime instead of a civil compliance issue.
