AN unqualified driver who led police on an 80mph chase through narrow residential streets before going onto a railway line to escape was behind bars last night.

A judge told "thoroughly ordinarily decent" Jack Plews: "Young men of this area need to know when the blue light comes on, you stop, otherwise you go to prison."

Plews, 22, was jailed for ten months and banned from the roads for 17 months for what his barrister described as "one aberrative act hitherto unknown in his life".

Duncan McReddie, mitigating, had urged Judge Sean Morris, at Teesside Crown Court, to impose a suspended sentence so it would not put Plews's job as a groundworker at risk.

Mr McReddie said he had built up a career since leaving school at 16, had never been in trouble before, and bought the £130 Renault Clio do do up and sell.

Plews is said to have panicked when police tried to pull him over in Norton, near Stockton, in the early hours of May 31, and took off in the red hatchback.

Officers searched neighbouring streets on the estate until they found him parked up in Centenary Crescent, but Plews reversed the full length of the road to escape.

A near-20-minute pursuit followed during which the uninsured driver went through red lights, on the wrong side of the road and the opposite around roundabouts.

Judge Morris told Plews he put at risk the lives of the police officers, other motorists, anyone out on the streets, and, potentially, a train driver.

"There could have been all sorts of mayhem," said the judge. "It was a deliberate decision of yours to drive onto the railway line. Anyone who drives like this goes away.

"You don't know if there are any freight trains hurtling down that line . . . How do you know there was not some drunken party just finishing, and a couple of teenage kids stumbled in front of you? You would have been up for manslaughter.

"When you get to the wings, you tell them that people who drive and flee away from the police, this is what happens. Young men and cars and police chases equals prison."

Plews, of Hemden Way, Thornaby, pleaded guilty to charges of dangerous driving, endangering the safety of railway passengers, having no licence and no insurance.

When he was interviewed after police quickly got the car off the line, he said he had been "stupid", said Rachel Masters, prosecuting.

Mr McReddie said: "He has spent six years building a life, buys a car for £130 in the hope he can enhance it and make a few more, goes out in it when he shouldn't, sees the police, he panics and he runs.

"The reason he wants to learn to drive is to enhance his employment. That very employment will be greatly damaged by the fact of this conviction, but more so if an immediate term of imprisonment is imposed, because it will clearly be lost to him."