Britain's Railway Disasters

Fatal Accidents from the 1830s to the Present Day

Michael Foley

• Publisher: Wharncliffe Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526766564
• eBook ISBN: 9781473831865
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Passengers on the early railways took their lives in their hands every time they got on board a train. It was so dangerous that they could buy an insurance policy with their ticket. There seemed to be an acceptance that the level danger was tolerable in return for the speed of travel that was now available to them.British Railway Disasters looks at the most serious railway accidents from the origins of the development of the train up to the present day. Seriousness is judged on the number of those who died. Information gleaned from various newspaper reports is compared with official reports on the accidents.The book will appeal to all those with a fascination for rail transport as well as those with a love of history.Michael Foley examines the social context of how injuries and deaths on the railways were seen in the early days, as well as how claims in the courts became more common, leading to a series of medical investigations as to how travelling and crashing at high speed affected the human body

CHAPTER 1

RAILWAY HISTORY

Ithink most people would, if asked, think of the nineteenth century as being the time of the beginning of the railways but the actual idea of running trucks on rails comes from a much earlier period. Rails were used to carry trucks in mines in Europe in the sixteenth century. The first British use of rails in mines came in the seventeenth century, with the trucks being pulled by horses or the miners themselves. The rails were made from wood rather than metal.

As most mines in Britain were in the north of the country this was where the majority of these early railways were situated. Railways were also used in other industries and a number of these were in the south. In the eighteenth century a small-scale stone quarry in Bath was transformed into a major commercial venture with the addition of a wooden railway to carry the stone. There was also an early railway at the chalk works at Purfleet in Essex in the eighteenth century.

The introduction of steam power for railways had its origins in the late eighteenth century. In 1784 Scottish inventor William Murdoch had built a steam road locomotive. The first working steam railway locomotive followed in 1804. It was built by Richard Trevithick and pulled a train from the Pen-y-Darren ironworks to Abercynon in Wales. Trevithick worked in the north of England after this, closer to most of the mines, and built other steam locomotives.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century there were numerous wooden railways in Britain. None of these carried passengers. In 1801 an Act was passed in Parliament for a line to be built from London to Portsmouth by the Surrey Railway Company. However, only a short section was built – from Wandsworth to Croydon. The trucks were horse-drawn and carried goods rather than passengers.

It is claimed that the Middleton Railway is the world’s oldest continuously working railway. Coal had been dug at Middleton since the thirteenth century but was normally moved by water. In 1757 a wagonway was built towards Leeds. The following year an Act of Parliament ratified the railway. It was horse-drawn but the wooden lines were replaced with metal in the early nineteenth century.

In 1812 the Middleton became one of the first commercial railways to use steam locomotives. The first engine was the Salamanca, designed by Fenton, Murray and Wood, and it was the first commercial steam locomotive to operate successfully. Despite this the line was later returned to horse power after accidents occurred.

By the early nineteenth century there were a number of other small railways but the one that is often thought of as the first railway, the Stockton to Darlington, was actually the first passenger line to use steam engines. Although it was originally planned as a horse-drawn railway, George Stephenson persuaded the owners to use steam engines and it opened for business in 1825.

A very old engine from the Stockton to Darlington Railway – one of the very earliest engines used on the railway.

The railway had been originally built to connect a number of coal mines with Stockton and was at the time the world’s longest railway. It was also the world’s first publicly subscribed passenger railway and used horse-drawn vehicles as well as steam.

When the Manchester to Liverpool line was built in the mid 1820s the company directors were unsure about how to power it. One idea was for a stationary steam engine to pull the trucks by cable. After deciding to opt for mobile engines to pull the trucks, the company ran a competition to find a suitable steam engine.

In October 1829 The Times ran a story on the competition, which took place that month. In April 1828 the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway had offered a prize of £500 for the best locomotive engine. The venue was Kendrick’s Cross, which was 9 miles from Liverpool and one of the flattest parts of the line. A booth was erected for spectators and a band played to keep them amused. The crowd was estimated at around 15,000. The directors of the company arrived in a train pulled by Mr Stephenson’s engine, which may have given him an advantage in the competition over other inventors.

The locomotives displayed on the first day were the Novelty, by Braithwaite and Ericson of London, the Sans Pareil, by Mr Ackworth of Darlington, and the Rocket, by Mr Robert Stephenson of Newcastle upon Tyne. Perhaps the most unusual engine entered for the competition was the Cycloped, by Mr Brandreth of Liverpool, which was worked by two horses. This was on a treadmill basis and only reached a speed of 4 miles per hour. More engines had been entered into the competition but did not turn up.

The report in The Times went on to state that the Rocket impressed everyone by travelling at 24 miles an hour with no carriages and then at 17 miles per hour pulling a load weighing – including its own weight – 17 tons. The Novelty was apparently even faster, travelling at 30 miles an hour and making everyone frightened for the safety of those on board. Humans were not used to travelling at such speeds! There were several other tests that the engines had to perform and it was the Rocket that was to be the winner.

Coal was still to play an even bigger part in the growth of railways. The use of tracks had been developed at coal mines but the need for coal in centres of the Industrial Revolution meant that better forms of carrying it to places like London were needed. Travel by sea, which was how most coal reached London, was slow, as was getting the coal from the mines to the sea.

The success of the Manchester to Liverpool line, especially its passenger business, was the spur to encourage further expansion of this new form of travel. By the mid-nineteenth century a number of passenger railways had come into existence around the country.

One of the original engines used in the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. There was no protection for the driver on these early engines.

The cost of creating these new lines depended on the area they covered. Building some of the more difficult lines often led to the collapse of the company building them.

The introduction of viaducts and tunnels was another development of the new lines. Those that ran across the flattest routes were the least expensive to build but wherever the new lines appeared, along with them came crowds of railway navvies who would often invade quiet small villages until the line there was built and then they would move on along the tracks.

It has always been believed that the majority of these navvies were Irish but recent research has shown that many were English. Several of them were the same men who had built the canals. They would set up their own small towns with makeshift shacks. Many would spend their wages on alcohol and eventually they had to be given food tokens to ensure they would eat. They would often find themselves in debt to the companies that employed them.

The expansion of the railways in the nineteenth century was incredible, with around 1,500 miles of line laid in 1840, expanding to 6,000 miles by 1850 and 14,000 by 1875. The 1840s became known as the time of ‘railway mania’, a time of prosperity in the country. The Industrial Revolution was booming and many people had money to invest, including a growing middle class. Investment in railways seemed a safe option. Money was poured into railway companies and nearly 300 Acts of Parliament were passed to set up new companies in 1846. Many of these lines were never built because the companies went bankrupt or were bought out by larger organizations. Some companies that did build lines found they were unable to make a profit and by 1846 railway mania was over.

The largest railway companies began to take over the smaller ones and the railways became concentrated in the hands of a few companies. What railway mania had achieved, apart from causing many investors to lose their money, was to greatly expand the country’s railway system. The biggest difference this made to the population was the speed with which travel could be undertaken. Destinations that had taken days to reach by stagecoach could now be reached within hours. An unforeseen benefit of the development of the railway network was that the sense of time became uniformly regulated across the country. Before this, different areas had worked to different times.

The new system was not without its drawbacks, however. The problem was, of course, that a number of different companies were running lines in different areas. Some concentrated their business into small, localized areas; others had lines that covered large parts of the country. Often different lines covered the same routes.

It was not the whole population who benefited from the expansion of the railways. The poor could rarely afford to travel on trains. It was only with the later introduction of cheap excursions that many more people could experience rail travel. The better off who did travel by train in the early days were often not happy with the price of fares, a commercial traveller’s association even complaining about them.

By the mid-nineteenth century railway companies in Britain numbered in the hundreds, the smaller ones being taken over by larger companies throughout the century. Although the country was still covered by an enormous number of lines there was still no unified means of travelling from one area to another due to the lines being operated by so many separate companies. Even the gauge of the lines of each company was different. A standard gauge was agreed by Parliament in the middle of the century, but the Great Western Railway retained its wider gauge on some routes until 1892.

A unifying point for the railways came during the First World War when the Railway Executive Committee took control. This was made up of the managers of the main railway companies, who organized the system to carry the materials and men needed for the war effort. This also led to the restriction on different companies running on the same routes as the system became more streamlined.

The end of the war saw a return to the different rail companies competing with each other – often on the same routes, which led to a decrease in profits. The decline in coal exports also resulted in falling profits. The Railways Act of 1921 went some way towards dealing with these problems, when more than 100 companies were formed into four large groups: the London and North Eastern (LNER), London Midland and Scottish (LMS), Southern Railways (SR), and the Great Western (GWR). This was how things stayed until after the Second World War.

Once again, the government took over the railways when war began in 1939. Although the companies were guaranteed a level of payment, the damage due to bombing and lack of investment during the war years led to serious problems. The post-war Labour government was the final nail in the coffin for the private railways; the system was nationalized and British Rail was born.

According to this card this engine dates from 1840, which shows the rapid progress from the earlier engines. There is still little protection for the crew.

Although the railways did begin to make a profit after the war, by the late 1950s and early 1960s many local lines were poorly used and were eventually shut down by the famous Beeching Cuts. A number of rural areas lost their railway routes that had originated in the nineteenth century.

There was an about-turn in the 1990s, when the railways were privatized. The tracks became the responsibility of Railtrack. The freight service was sold off and the passenger service was divided between twenty-five franchises. But privatization has not been without its problems. After a number of difficulties, Railtrack was taken over by Network Rail in 2002. And the granting of contracts to the companies running the railways has not been without controversy – the events in 2012 involving Virgin Trains being one of the more ridiculous, when Virgin lost the West Coast franchise and were then re-awarded it due to shortcomings in the Department of Transport bidding process.

Despite these changes to the modern railway system, there do seem to be fewer serious accidents nowadays than there have been in the past, although when they do occur they can be very serious. Several studies have shown the numbers of those hurt or killed in rail accidents is only a very small proportion of the numbers that travel – which is little or no comfort to those who are involved in them.

CHAPTER 2

THE EFFECTS OF RAIL TRAVEL ON THE PERSON

In the early days of railways, there was a great deal of interest amongst those in the medical profession in the effects of rail travel on the person, especially in how the body reacted to accidents at high speed. People had never travelled at speeds such as those now possible in a train.

One of the early writers on the subject was John Eric Erichsen, later, Sir John. Erichsen was an emin...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Railway History
• Chapter 2 The Effects of Railway Travel on the person
• Chapter 3 Early Fatalities
• Chapter 4 1840 to 1850
• Chapter 5 1850 to 1860
• Chapter 6 1860 to 1870
• Chapter 7 1870 to 1880
• Chapter 8 1880 to 1890
• Chapter 9 1890 to 1900
• Chapter 10 1900 to 1914
• Chapter 11 The First World War
• Chapter 12 1918 to 1939
• Chapter 13 The Second World War
• Chapter 14 1945 to the Present Day
• Chapter 15 Conclusion
• Bibliography