Railway signalling (BE), also called railroad signaling (AE), is a system used to control the movement of railway traffic. Trains move on fixed rails, making them uniquely susceptible to collision. This susceptibility is exacerbated by the enormous weight and inertia of a train, which makes it difficult to quickly stop when encountering an obstacle. In the UK, the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 introduced a series of requirements on matters such as the implementation of interlocked block signalling and other safety measures as a direct result of the Armagh rail disaster in that year.
The Hawes Junction rail crash occurred at 5.49 am on 24 December 1910, just north of the Lunds viaduct between Hawes Junction and Aisgill on the Midland Railway's Settle and Carlisle main line in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was caused when a busy signalman, Alfred Sutton, forgot about a pair of light engines waiting at his down (northbound) starting signal to return to their shed at Carlisle. They were still waiting there when the signalman set the road for the down Scotch express. When the signal cleared, the light engines set off in front of the express into the same block section. Since the light engines were travelling at low speed from a stand at Hawes Junction, and the following express was travelling at high speed, a collision was inevitable. The express caught the light engines just after Moorcock Tunnel near Aisgill summit in Mallerstang and was almost wholly derailed.
The Glenbrook rail accident occurred on 2 December 1999 at 8:22 am on a curve east of Glenbrook railway station on the CityRail network between Glenbrook and Lapstone, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia. Seven passengers were killed and 51 passengers were taken to hospital with injuries when a CityRail electric interurban train collided with the rear wagon of the long-haul Perth-to-Sydney Indian Pacific.
"Mugby Junction" is a set of short stories written in 1866 by Charles Dickens and collaborators Charles Collins, Amelia B. Edwards, Andrew Halliday, and Hesba Stretton. It was first published in a Christmas edition of the magazine All the Year Round. Dickens penned a majority of the issue, including the frame narrative in which "the Gentleman for Nowhere," who has spent his life cloistered in the firm Barbox Brothers & Co., makes use of his new-found freedom in retirement to explore the rail lines that connect with Mugby Junction. Dickens's collaborators each contributed an individual story to the collection.
Absolute block signalling is a British signalling scheme designed to ensure the safe operation of a railway by allowing only one train to occupy a defined section of track (block) at a time. This system was used on double or multiple lines where use of each line is assigned a direction of travel before the introduction of Track circuits, and is still used on lines which lack track circuiting.
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 Winwick rail crash took place at Winwick Junction, near Warrington on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, on 28 September 1934. Two trains collided, resulting in 11 deaths and 19 injured.
The Clayton Tunnel rail crash occurred on Sunday 25 August 1861, five miles (8 km) from Brighton on the south coast of England. At the time it was the worst accident on the British railway system. A train ran into the back of another inside the tunnel, killing 23 and injuring 176 passengers.
The Ais Gill rail accident occurred on the Settle–Carlisle line in Northwest England on 2 September 1913. Two long trains were both ascending a steep gradient with some difficulty, because their engines generated barely enough power to carry the load. When the first train stopped to build-up steam pressure, the driver and fireman of the second train were distracted by maintenance routines, and failed to observe the warning signals. The collision wrecked several carriages, which were then engulfed by flammable gas, killing 16 people and injuring 38.
"The Signal-Man" is a first-person horror/mystery story by Charles Dickens, first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round.
In railway signalling, a treadle is a mechanical or electrical device that detects that a train wheel has passed a particular location. They are used where a track circuit requires reinforcing with additional information about a train's location, such as around an automatic level crossing, or in an annunciator circuit, which sounds a warning that a train has passed an exact point. They also serve as a critical backup in the case of track circuit failure. The important difference between a treadle and a track circuit is that while a track circuit detects a train over a distance as long as several kilometres, a treadle provides detection at a single fixed location.
Clayton Tunnel is a railway tunnel located near the villages of Clayton and Pyecombe in West Sussex, between Hassocks and Preston Park railway stations on the Brighton Main Line. This tunnel is notable for its turreted and castellated north portal with a single-storey cottage on the top, as well as for being the site of a serious accident in 1861 which was influential in the adoption of a robust signalling system in the UK and elsewhere.
The Abbots Ripton rail disaster occurred on 21 January 1876 at Abbots Ripton, then in the county of Huntingdonshire, England, on the Great Northern Railway main line, previously thought to be exemplary for railway safety. In the accident, the Special Scotch Express train from Edinburgh to London was involved in a collision, during a blizzard, with a coal train. An express travelling in the other direction then ran into the wreckage. The initial accident was caused by:
A Ghost Story for Christmas is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived sporadically by the BBC since 2005. With one exception, the original instalments were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and the films were all shot on 16 mm colour film. The remit behind the series was to provide a television adaptation of a classic ghost story, in line with the oral tradition of telling supernatural tales at Christmas.
The Knowle and Dorridge rail crash was a fatal rail crash that occurred at Dorridge railway station in the West Midlands, England, on 15 August 1963. Three people died in the crash after a signalman's error routed a small freight train into the path of an express passenger train which slowed but could not stop before colliding with it.
On 28 June 1857, two trains collided just east of Lewisham railway station in London, killing 11 and injuring 30 more. The 14-carriage 9:15pm from Strood, which was running 15 minutes late, pulled up 200 yards short of Lewisham station at a red signal. The guard took a red lamp to the rear of the train to warn the 9:30 train following. When he heard the approaching train he ran towards it blowing his whistle and waving the lamp. It appears that he was not seen by the driver and the standing train was struck at a speed of around 20 mph (30 km/h), destroying the brake van and rear carriage.
Bernard Lloyd was a Welsh actor noted for his television roles. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and he performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The Welwyn Tunnel rail crash took place in Welwyn North Tunnel, north of Welwyn station on the Great Northern Railway, on 9 June 1866. According to L T C Rolt, "from the point of view of damage to engines and rolling stock it was one of the most destructive in railway history."
The Glasgow Queen Street railway accident occurred on 12 October 1928, in the tunnel adjacent to Glasgow Queen Street railway station on the Glasgow to Edinburgh line of the London & North Eastern Railway. A train climbing the steep 1 in 42–44 gradient through the tunnel slipped to a standstill and rolled back, colliding with an empty local train which was shunting. Three passengers were killed and 52 injured, and three train crew were also injured. Full details are in the Railway Inspectorate accident report; the investigation was carried out by Colonel A.C. Trench.
On the evening of 26 December 1962, cold weather and snow in and around Crewe had caused points to become frozen and trains were being detained at signals. About midway between Winsford and Crewe, the 13:30 Glasgow Central to London Euston Mid-Day Scot, hauled by an English Electric type 4 diesel, D215, with 13 coaches and 500 passengers, was stopped at a signal but the driver found the telephone to Coppenhall Junction, the next signal box ahead, out of order. Seeing the next signal ahead he decided to proceed down towards it and use the telephone there, but too fast. In the darkness he failed to notice the 16:45 express from Liverpool Lime Street to Birmingham New Street, hauled by an electric locomotive with eight coaches with 300 passengers, standing on the line ahead and collided with it at about 20 mph (32 km/h).
