The day we nearly caught the train...

‘Iknew it was a runaway,”

said railwayman Robert Perry, whose house overlooked the subway.

“The noise was indescribable.”

When he’d heard it, he’d rushed to his door, seen the trucks burst through the brick wall and then remembered that his ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was due to be walking through the subway that very minute, having nipped to get him an aspirin from the shop.

“We realised that our bairn must be near there as she was coming back home,” he said.

By now, the Hopetown Cut in Darlington was filled with debris and dust, and was filling up with gurgling oil pouring from a broken tanker. Anyone caught underneath would not have stood a chance.

The guard, Thomas Bell, from Consett, jumped into the subway. He’d endured a runaway ride from hell at the end of the 30 wagons which had broken away from a train travelling from Shildon to Darlington.

He could not see a child’s body, but such was the wreckage, he could not see much.

They must have been frantic minutes for Mr Perry and his wife on the north side of the subway in Whessoe Road.

They did not know that Elizabeth was safe. She’d been at the southern entrance to the subway and had seen the lead wagon smash through the parapet above her head, and then she’d turned and fled.

Looking at the damage caused by the runaway train from the other side of the Hopetown Cut.

A good Samaritan had found her in a distressed state, put her on a trolleybus and sent her round North Road to Whessoe Road, where she arrived to her parents’ delight, “a little distressed by her grim experience but otherwise unhurt”. She was lucky, as was an entire shift at the North Road railway workshops. The accident happened at 6.05pm on November 2, 1951. An hour earlier, the subway would have been full of men making their way home to the Hopetown terraces.

So the real hero of the day was the quick-thinking signalman, Joseph Moffat, in the Hopetown box. He’d received word of the 500-ton breakaway from the Charity Junction signalbox on the northern edge of Darlington.

“A railwayman of considerable experience”, Mr Moffat had run 150 yards to a set of points and had set them so that the runaway train did not career through North Road station and onto the East Coast Main Line, but instead went thundering and screeching down the siding and into the parapet wall.

Looking at the damage caused by the runaway train from the other side of the Hopetown Cut

William Ridley, another railwayman who lived opposite the subway, said: “The whole house shook and the table was dancing.” ‘IWAS a 17-year-old apprentice at the time and I helped build that wall back up,” says Laurie Degnan, of Darlington, in response to Memories 117 when a picture of the runaway train smash appeared on the front cover.

Laurie, now 79, is very well known as a boxer – Ward Degnans gym in King Street still bears his name – but he started off as a railway bricklayer, learning his trade under Alf Hutley.

“I’ve been bricklaying all my life but I’ve never seen anyone like Alf,” says Laurie.

“He had hands like a pianist.”

Elizabeth Perry, ten, who cheated death by seconds, with her mother whom the Northern Despatch newspaper referred to only as Mrs Robert Perry

With Laurie helping, Alf rebuilt both sides of the Hopetown Cut parapet. “He did all that overhand,”

says Alf, his voice brimming with admiration.

“He had no scaffolding, he just did it leaning over, and using engineering bricks which are very heavy.”