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If thoughts of railway accidents are forced into your psyche you will probably immediately refer to the received scenes of chaos and carnage that have unfolded on TV news bulletins. The pictures and news reports from train crashes such as at Potters Bar, Hertfordshire; Selby, North Yorkshire; Hatfield, Hertfordshire and Ladbroke Grove, London prove particularly harrowing.
According to BBC News' Chronology of train crashes the UK's worst recorded train crash occurred on May 22, 1915 when a wooden troop train collided with a passenger train at Quintinshill near Gretna Green, Scotland. More than 200 people were killed.
I suppose images of man-made carnage of that era are not too hard to conjure as this was the time of the mass slaughter of men on the battle fields of the Great War, combined with the advancing era of photo journalism. Grainy pictures of the smoking wreckage at Quintinshill can be found on the internet and offer small insight into the misery that must have ensued.
The Staplehurst rail crash occurred in Kent, England on 9th June 1865, seriously injuring 49 people and killing ten and it's a little harder to colour the scene of a Victorian train crash in one's mind's eye.
Personally, I find envisaging ladies in crinolines amongst the wreck of a steam locomotive railway accident quite hard (Jane Austen costume dramas don't go in for a lot of personal injury moments), but it is the recollection of a literary giant that has made this particular incident notable and has left a moving legacy of personal testimony for all to see.
The novelist Charles Dickens was returning from France when the train he was traveling on ran disastrously into engineering works. The track was being renovated where the rails ran over a low cast iron bridge crossing the river Beult. The timing of the train, the Folkestone Boat Express, was governed by the tides in the area and the arrival of ships in port.
The foreman at the railworks had mistakenly read a book of tide times that he had been issued with, and consequently two rails were missing as the locomotive approached. Part of the train managed to cross over the timber baulks that supported the rails, but they eventually gave way and most of the carriages fell into the small brook that lay under the viaduct.
Dickens wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am a little shaken, not by the beating and dragging of the carriage in which I was, but by the hard work afterwards in getting out the dying and dead, which was most horrible.
"Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think he must have been flung clean out of his carriage) with such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn't bear to look at him. I poured some water over his face, and gave him some to drink, and gave him some brandy, and laid him down on the grass, and he said, "I am gone", and died afterwards.
"Then I stumbled over a lady lying on her back against a little pollard tree, with the blood streaming over her face (which was lead colour) in a number of distinct little streams from the head. I asked her if she could swallow a little brandy, and she just nodded, and I gave her some and left her for somebody else. The next time I passed her, she was dead."
At the time of the railway accident Dickens was carrying with him a manuscript of his novel "Our Mutual Friend" which he rescued from his carriage. In the postscript of the story the narrator makes reference to rescuing people from a railway accident over a viaduct.
Consequently, it is said that the incident had a profound psychological effect on Dickens. His ghost story, "The SignalMan", though loosely based on the Clayton Tunnel Crash in 1861, was almost certainly influenced by his experiences at Staplehurst.
Most interesting is the 1865 accident investigation report produced after the accident by Captain F.H. Rich of the Royal Engineers. In it he writes:
"Before concluding this report, I think it right to call attention to the circumstance, that this melancholy disaster has occurred on a perfectly straight and nearly level part of the South-Eastern Railway, where the permanent way is kept in excellent order. It has happened to a train which had a good proportion of break power, was drawn by a first-class engine, and made up in a proper manner, with communication between guards and driver.
"In all human probability this train would have reached London safely, (even though the road was broken at the Beult viaduct) had the rules of the South-Eastern company been adhered to. The provisions in these rules, for always using fog signals when rails are taken up, is an additional precaution, not generally adopted by Railway Companies."
And so, the manners and moods of the day have been captured to represent the unrepresentable. Unfortunately, in this age of obscenely quick media response to railway accidents, wars and global tragedies, this is stuff we are all too familiar with.
