ONE of the worst railway disasters in British history occurred at 11.08pm on June 27, 1928, at Darlington’s Bank Top station, when a goods train heading to Northallerton burst through a couple of signals and came to rest straddling the down track of the East Coast Main Line with an excursion train speeding towards it.
In the compartments of the second and third carriages of the express were 18 members of the Hetton-le-Hole Mothers’ Union, chatting happily as they returned from their annual day out at the beach in Scarborough.
In their last milliseconds the ladies would have felt the express lurch dramatically as the driver, D McNulty, applied his brakes, but it was impossible to avoid impact.
Doing 45mph, his 123-ton engine ploughed into the timber-thin waggons of the goods train, smashing four of them to smithereens.
The blow caused a violent ripple to explode down the excursion train. It lifted the second carriage slightly off the track so its steel underframe sliced through the wooden compartments in which the ladies were sitting. They were concertina’d into carnage – only three of the 18 survived.
The total death toll of the Darlington railway disaster was 25.
The string of fatal events was set in train at 9.30pm when driver RJ Bell left Newcastle with a 'semi-fast' passenger service for Bank Top.
Mr Bell, 32, was 16 years a railwaymen, five as a driver, with an unblemished track record. But he usually shunted in the Newcastle yard and he had only once before driven on the main line to Darlington.
He arrived at Bank Top at 10.45pm, 11 minutes late, set down his passengers in the north end of the station, and with the help of his assistant shunter, James Morland, went to the south end where there were seven goods vans waiting to be collected and taken to Northallerton and York.
Mr Morland connected them all up and, at 11.01am, Mr Bell saw Signals 8 and 11 were 'calling on', authorising him to proceed out of the station. His path would then take him across the down track (for trains heading north) of the East Coast Main Line to join the up track heading south.
Then he saw Signal 14 was set at danger, telling him to stop immediately.
But he believed the 'calling on' signals took precedence and gave him permission to move forward at about six or seven miles an hour.
At the rear of the train, Shunter Morland realised the peril of the situation. He put his hand on the emergency brake but did not pull it – he was probably transfixed for the moment in terror, although he later said he feared he might cause the train to break up.
READ MORE: DEATH BY RUNAWAY TRAIN IN THE HOPETOWN PAINTSHOP
As he moved towards the main line, Driver Bell then came to Signal 18, also set at danger stop, yet still he believed he 'had the boards' and pressed on.
Now Mr Morland reacted. He pulled hard on his brake and the goods train slowed to a stop.
In the South Signal Box – an extremely busy box with 140 levers – Signalman Thomas Walls heard clicking noises as the goods train edged through points that were set against it. His 39 years of experience told him this was wrong, and although he couldn’t immediately identify the cause of his alarm, he threw all his signals to danger.
Driver Drury, who was due to speed past Bank Top without stopping, saw the signals change just as he saw the lights of the goods train in front of him. It had come to rest strung out across his track and, for all his last millisecond braking, impact was inevitable.
Driver Bell also saw what was about to happen and with a degree of foresight, his last action was to release the brake so his train was not a rock solid wall when the excursion ploughed into it.
The excursion, pulled by LNER Raven Class No 2164 which had been made in Darlington’s North Road shops, had 11 carriages, was 635ft long and weighed 441 tons. Those parts of the flimsy goods train it did not destroy it dragged 165 yards north, scattering the tracks with debris, before, exhausted, it toppled onto Platform 4, its carriages telescoped into one another behind it.
The staff at Bank Top responded with admirable speed, putting their disaster training into effect. Within 25 minutes there were motor ambulances on hand to take the injured to Greenbank Hospital and journalists from The Northern Echo who, when they were relieved of their initial tasks of breaking into the wreckage and carrying out those hurt, turned to describing the scene.
“Women pinned in the telescoped carriages moaned in their agony while they waited until freed from heavy pieces of wreckage by rescuers, who toiled unceasingly,” said the report. “One gruesome sight was that of a man’s body lying on the top of one of the carriages. Another which horrified the crowd of onlookers was that of a leg, obviously of a young woman.”
Although the headline says eight were killed, the stop press box added at 4.55am updates the total to “not fewer than 22”. It also names the first four women from Hetton-le-Hole whose bodies had been identified in the mortuary, then adds alarmingly: “In a fifth woman’s purse was found a bill head giving the address 84, Station Road, Hetton.”
Poor Hetton! It was as if the mining village on the edge of Sunderland had suffered a pit disaster in reverse, ripping gaping holes in its families with all the victims women rather than men. In one street alone – Four Lane Ends – four husbands became widowers.
Mrs Smith, the wife of the vicar, was one of the three of the Mothers’ Union party to survive, although in the early hours of Thursday morning the motor ambulance took her to Greenbank Hospital for 175 stitches in her lacerated leg.
Over the course of the weekend her husband conducted 11 funerals, with crowds of 60,000 lining the streets 12 deep to watch the seeming endless funeral processions arrive and then leave St Nicholas’ Church.
The Darlington railway disaster accounted for 20 women, four men and one schoolboy, and left 45 people injured – many with life-changing affects.
It could have been much worse, though.
The first carriage was an old third class vehicle and was lit by gas (the other ten carriages had electric lights). By good luck, the gas pipe did not rupture – if it had, it would have caused an explosion which would only have magnified the carnage.
Colonel JW Pringle conducted an inquiry on behalf of the Ministry of Transport who concluded that “responsibility rests upon driver R J Bell, who passed Nos 18 and 14 home signals for Darlington South Junction at danger”.
Rather than this being due to negligence, it was down to his lack of signalling knowledge, and the colonel urged the railway company to improve its training.
Shunter Morland was also criticised. The colonel said “he might have prevented the collision had he taken the initiative” and applied the emergency brake after the first signal had been passed.
The colonel, in his conclusions, also raised whether all-steel carriages should be made in future rather than ones with femmer wooden sides. They were being tried in the US and France but, warned the colonel, in the UK “there exists a large amount of coaching stock in good condition and fit for service, which it would be impossible to scrap for a number of years”.
Even so far into the 20th Century, the lives of railway passengers were cheap and the interests of the great railway companies, like LNER, were held to be much more important.
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