Shrewsbury rail accident | |
---|---|
Details | |
Date | 15 October 1907 |
Location | Shrewsbury, Shropshire |
Country | England |
Line | Welsh Marches Line |
Incident type | Derailment caused by excessive speed |
Cause | Driver's error |
Statistics | |
Trains | 1 |
Deaths | 18 |
Injured | 33 |
List of UK rail accidents by year |
The Shrewsbury rail accident occurred on 15 October 1907. An overnight sleeping-car and mail train from Manchester to the West of England derailed on the sharply curved approach to Shrewsbury station, killing 18 people and injuring 33. The accident was concluded to be due to excessive speed on a dangerous curve.
Those killed were the engine driver and fireman, two guards, eleven passengers, and three Post Office sorters working in the Mail train. Thirty-three other people were reported injured. [1]
Speed was estimated at 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) on a curve limited to 10 miles per hour (16 km/h). The train left Crewe at 01:20, having had extra carriages added (originating in Glasgow, York and Liverpool) to form a heavy, 15-carriage train, hauled by LNWR Experiment class 4-6-0 No. 2052 Stephenson. [2]
The accident was the last in a series of three derailments due to excessive speed at night in a 16-month period. The others were at Salisbury and Grantham (both in 1906). All three resulted in deaths, including the footplate crews; the cause in each case was recorded as 'driver error', but there has been much speculation since.[ citation needed ]
The day after the accident an official enquiry began, coinciding with an inquest into the driver and fireman. It was held in Shrewsbury and was attended by the President of the Board of Trade, David Lloyd George. It lasted three days, and the report was published on 12 February. No fault was found with the engine's brakes and reliability. After a detailed hearing into the health and sobriety of the driver, the finding was that alcohol and drugs were not present in his body from post-mortem examination and he had not suffered a seizure. [3]
The report concluded the most likely explanation of the Shrewsbury crash was that the driver had dozed off briefly, missing the signal, and therefore had not braked in time on the downhill entry to Shrewsbury. [4] The fireman was believed to have failed to recognize the driver's excessive speed until too late.
An anonymous poem about the disaster was printed in the Shrewsbury Chronicle newspaper. It had been written by a young Meole Brace woman, Mary Meredith, after she read an account of the accident. (She was better known after her marriage as novelist Mary Webb). Her brother had submitted her poem to the newspaper without her knowledge. It drew appreciative letters to the paper and it is now believed to be Webb's first published writing. [1]
The Abergele rail disaster, which took place near Abergele, North Wales, in August 1868, was the worst railway disaster in Great Britain up till then.
The Waterfall rail accident was a train accident that occurred on 31 January 2003 near Waterfall, New South Wales, Australia. The train derailed, killing seven people aboard, including the train driver. The accident is famously remembered by systems engineers due to the poorly designed safety systems.
In rail transport, a derailment occurs when a rail vehicle such as a train comes off its rails. Although many derailments are minor, all result in temporary disruption of the proper operation of the railway system and they are a potentially serious hazard.
The town of Morpeth in Northumberland, England, has what is reputed to be the tightest curve of any main railway line in Britain. The track turns approximately 98° from a northwesterly to an easterly direction immediately west of Morpeth Station on an otherwise fast section of the East Coast Main Line railway. This was a major factor in three serious derailments between 1969 and 1994. The curve has a permanent speed restriction of 50 miles per hour (80 km/h).
The Nuneaton rail crash occurred on 6 June 1975, on the West Coast Main Line just south of Nuneaton railway station in Warwickshire, England, United Kingdom.
The Amagasaki derailment occurred in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, on 25 April 2005 at 09:19 local time, just after the local rush hour. It occurred when a seven-car commuter train came off the tracks on West Japan Railway Company's Fukuchiyama Line in just before Amagasaki on its way for Dōshisha-mae via the JR Tōzai Line and the Gakkentoshi Line, and the front two cars rammed into an apartment building. The first car slid into the first-floor parking garage and as a result took days to remove, while the second slammed into the corner of the building, being crushed into an L-shaped against it by the weight of the remaining cars. Of the roughly 700 passengers on board at the time of the crash, 106 passengers, in addition to the driver, were killed and 562 others injured. Most survivors and witnesses claimed that the train appeared to have been travelling too fast. The incident was Japan's most serious since the 1963 Tsurumi rail accident.
The Sutton Coldfield train crash took place at about 16:13 on 23 January 1955 in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, when an express passenger train traveling from York to Bristol, derailed due to excessive speed on a sharp curve.
The Salisbury rail crash occurred on 1 July 1906, when a boat train from Plymouth to London failed to negotiate a sharp bend at more than twice the speed limit, and crashed into another train, killing 28 people. It is believed that the driver was trying to demonstrate the speed of the service, in competition with a rival railway company.
The Camp Mountain rail accident occurred at approximately 9:48 am on 5 May 1947 when a crowded picnic train derailed on a sharp left-hand curve between Ferny Grove and Camp Mountain stations on the now-closed Dayboro railway line, approximately 15 km (9.3 mi) northwest of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, Australia.
Over the latter years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries, Penistone in Yorkshire gained a name as an accident black-spot on Britain's railway network; indeed, it could be said to hold the title of the worst accident black-spot in the country. The main line through the town was the Woodhead route of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway between Sheffield Victoria and Manchester, London Road. The line was heavily graded with a summit some 400 yards inside the eastern portal of the Woodhead tunnel.
The Polmont rail accident, also known as the Polmont rail disaster, occurred on 30 July 1984 to the west of Polmont, near Falkirk, in Scotland. A westbound push-pull express train travelling from Edinburgh to Glasgow struck a cow which had gained access to the track through a damaged fence from a field near Polmont railway station, causing all six carriages and the locomotive of the train to derail. 13 people were killed and 61 others were injured, 17 of them seriously. The accident led to a debate about the safety of push-pull trains on British Rail.
The Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash was a major disaster which occurred on the Great Western Railway. It involved the derailment of a long passenger train at Shipton-on-Cherwell, near Kidlington, Oxfordshire, England, on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1874, and was one of the worst disasters on the Great Western Railway.
The Hyde railway disaster occurred on 4 June 1943 near the small settlement of Hyde, Otago, New Zealand, on a bend of the Otago Central Railway. At the time, it was New Zealand's worst railway accident; of the 113 passengers on board, 21 were killed and a further 47 were injured. However, just over 10 years later, the Tangiwai disaster took 151 lives on 24 December 1953. The Hyde disaster remains as the second-worst railway accident in New Zealand's history.
There have been a number of train accidents on the railway network of Victoria, Australia. Some of these are listed below.
The railways of New South Wales, Australia have had many incidents and accidents since their formation in 1831. There are close to 1000 names associated with rail-related deaths in NSW on the walls of the Australian Railway Monument in Werris Creek. Those killed were all employees of various NSW railways. The details below include deaths of employees and the general public.
The Grantham rail accident occurred on 19 September 1906. An evening Sleeping-Car and Mail train of the Great Northern Railway, running from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley hauled by Ivatt 'Atlantic' No 276 derailed, killing 14. The accident was never explained; the train ran through Grantham station, where it was scheduled to stop, and derailed on a set of points on a sharp curve at the end of the platform, which at the time had been set for a freight train. No reason was ever established as to why the train did not stop as scheduled, or obey the Caution and Danger signals.
The Settle rail crash was a railway accident that occurred at Langcliffe near Settle, England, on the night of 21 January 1960 in which two trains collided, killing five people and injuring eight more.
This is a list of significant railway accidents in Queensland, Australia.