The Permanent Way
The early railway engineers, driving west and north from London were largely working on a blank canvas and were forced to experiment with different materials on which to lay the iron rails. They needed a material that was free draining, that bound together rather than being dispersed when pressure was applied, and that was inherently inhospitable to native plants which might undermine the permanent-way through root growth.
By the time they got to Oxford the engineers building the railways had discovered that the best material for building an embankment was limestone gravel mixed or layered with slag from the furnaces and waste clinker from the coking-ovens and iron smelters of the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult to imagine a better environment for Oxford Ragwort to colonise. The ballast was very like the volcanic clinker that cloaked the upper slopes of the plant’s mountain home. Furthermore the air along the tracks was full of poisonous fumes belched from the passing steam locomotives and the whole scene was lit with a glow from the locomotives’ fireboxes as though from stones on fire in an abyssal furnace. Etna, come to Oxfordshire.
As if this environment was not enough to facilitate the spread of Oxford Ragwort, the slipstream from the passing trains lifted great clouds of fluffy seeds and transported them from station to station along the line. Assisted by man, it had taken one hundred and fifty years for senecio squalidus to travel the sixty miles from Chipping Sodbury to the City of Oxford, but assisted by the railways it took the plant less than a century to colonise the whole of the British Isles including the Scottish outer isles.
ii. The Race to The North
In the decades immediately after the arrival of the Railways at Oxford, the number of rail passengers in Britain increased rapidly. As the number of passengers grew, the competition for their business became fiercer. The locomotives became bigger and faster. The trains got longer and heavier. The number of lines and services multiplied. The network grew and grew.
Within forty years there were two, competing, long-haul services from London to Scotland. The West Coast Main Line service from London Euston to Edinburgh Prince’s Street Station via Carlisle and Perth and the East Coast Main Line service from London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverly Station via York and Newcastle upon Tyne.
The Royal Highlander service was the star of the west coast route and The Flying Scotsman ~ the service not the locomotive ~ the flag carrier on the east coast. At 539.7 miles the west coast route was sixteen and a half miles longer than the east coast route at 523.2 miles.
In the late 1880s the owner-operators of the East Coast Main Line and the West Coast Main Line services were running an informal but fiercely fought and widely publicised nightly race. "The Race to the North".
The directors and senior executives of the two train-operating companies denied that The Race to the North existed. They needed to sustain this denial in order to avoid being accused of irresponsibility and recklessly endangering the lives of employees and customers alike. Despite the denial the race took place in full sight and bookmakers on both sides of the Atlantic offered odds on the result of each night’s race. Journalists filed reports on the race by telegraph from London, York, Crewe, Tebay, Carlisle, and Edinburgh. Newspapers all over the world including the New York Herald printed the results of the races. On 23 August 1895 The Glasgow Herald devoted three thousand words to the previous night’s race.
Four days earlier three London journalists had made the journey from Kings Cross to Edinburgh at the invitation of the operators of the East Coast Main Line service. At Portobello, three miles to the east of Edinburgh city centre, the line describes a series of tight bends where the official speed-limit was 15 miles per hour. On this night, as they approached Portobello the journalists, travelling in a specially equipped carriage thoughtfully furnished by the rail company with comfortable seats and refreshments, stood-up to read the speed-dials fixed to the wall of the carriage. They had just enough time to note that the train was travelling at more than 81 miles per hour before the train encountered the Portobello bends and all three hacks were thrown violently to the floor of the carriage.
Most trains were equipped with a single brake-van managed by one train-guard at the rear of the train. On this trip, however, thinking to impress the journalists with the speed of the journey but to stop short of killing everyone on the train, the management had provided two, heavily over-ballasted, brake-vans. The journalists who had been upended at Portobello struggled back to their feet just in time to confirm that the train was still travelling at 64 miles per hour as it entered Edinburgh Waverley station, upon which the guards of both brake vans slammed on the brakes and hurled the journalists back onto the floor of the carriage.
iii. The Trains
The steam train which was beginning to provide affordable travel for ordinary people now provided free entertainment for the lowest classes who had little leisure time and hardly enough money for bread never mind circuses.
The locomotives that pulled the trains were the biggest, noisiest, fastest, most thrilling machines that ordinary people might ever come across in their daily lives. Close up the spectacle was awe-inspiring. The cabs of the huge machines were lit by the fierce glow from the open mouth of the firebox. The locomotives spouted long trailing banners of steam, smoke and fiery sparks. Express trains roared through the stations at over sixty miles an hour. The men on the footplate, the driver and the fireman, could easily be seen, for the cabs were open sided.
To the men and women who watched them and the children who envied them, the men who rode upon the backs of these fire breathing mythic beasts were immortals, each one a super-hero living life in the fastest lane then available.
As the fame of the Race to the North grew, large crowds turned out at stations along the route, thronging the platforms and foot-bridges to cheer the trains on their way. The crowds gathered even when, as was often the case, the trains passed through in the early hours of the morning. In the early years of the race the locomotives and the crews were changed at Carlisle. Hundreds of men, women and children gathered on both the “up” and “down” platforms at two o’clock in the morning to see the two huge locomotives being changed. A task that was accomplished in less than 2½ minutes.
Before 1887 the Race to the North started in London and ended in Edinburgh. The two competing services arrived at different Edinburgh stations. Edinburgh Waverley and Edinburgh Prince’s Street. Reporters from London newspapers could be seen galloping their horses the length of Prince’s Street to report on the arrival of both competing trains.
By 1895, however, the race had extended beyond Edinburgh to Aberdeen. This added hugely to the excitement. The early miles of the race still took place between trains on widely separated tracks. But now, as the trains drew close to Aberdeen, the two tracks ran within sight of each other across a flat plain. Often, after five hundred miles and fourteen hours of racing, the huge steam locomotives would burst out onto the flat before Kinnaber junction only seconds apart.
Running light having used up the tons of coal and water they carried and at full steam they could now be seen together racing neck-and-neck across the plain, panting great puffs of smoke, straining for a half-minute advantage. That half minute was crucial for once they reached the signal box at Kinnaber Junction the services shared the same track into Aberdeen Central. Getting to Kinnaber Junction second meant getting to the finishing line last.
The West Coast Mainline operators came up with a cunning scheme to delay the East Coast Mainline services at Kinnaber Junction. The published and scheduled time for the arrival of the West Coast service at the Kinnaber signal-box was shown several minutes in advance of the time that the train would actually arrive. So by the time the East Coast service arrived the Kinnaber signalman, consulting the schedule, had already accepted the approaching West Coast train and set the signals against the East Coast train which often had to stop and watch the West Coast train overtake and go straight through to Aberdeen
In 1855 the fastest journey from London to Aberdeen took 17½ hours. By 1889 this had reduced to 13 hours. The new, bigger, more powerful locomotives could do the whole trip without being changed. This reduction in journey time was achieved even as the trains became both longer and heavier in order to carry greater numbers in greater comfort.
So violent was the transit of these trains that the men of the line-maintenance crew at Cupar in Fifeshire, where the line describes a long curve, were called out every night after the train had passed to correct the lay of the rails. The centripetal forces generated by the drivers keeping the ever-heavier trains pressing-on around the curve, without slowing as recommended, forced the railway line many inches out of true.
In July 1896 a West Coast overnight express took the Preston curve too fast and derailed. One person was killed and the train was wrecked. To reassure the public, agreement was reached between the owners of the two services to slow the runs from London to Aberdeen. An informal agreement to stop a race that had never existed.
As the century turned, however, the Race to the North reappeared in a different guise. The two services competed to take the World speed record. As the technology improved the record was passed back and forth between the two competing operators. The risks were understood. Attempts on the record were crewed by volunteers.
In 1937 the East Coast service operators held the record. London Midland Scottish on the west coast route however were offering the Coronation Scot, London to Glasgow service with a specially developed, streamlined Pacific Class locomotive. Thinking to make an attempt on the record they loaded a special train with members of the press.
Two miles south of Crewe station the train was clocked at 114 mph. LM&S had it, the world speed record. The train, however, was unable to slow down sufficiently for the series of crossover points at the approach to Crewe station. Miraculously the train stayed upright and on the tracks but the points had to be rebuilt. The violence of motion as the decelerating train hit the points at 57mph (the speed limit was 20) scared the living daylights out of everyone on board and London Midland Scottish never made another attempt at the world speed record.
v. The Royal Highlander
At seven o’clock on the evening of Wednesday twenty-fourth October 1928 the Royal Highlander Express, operated by the London Midland & Scottish Railway Company, could be found taking-on passengers at platform 7 of London Euston Station.
At the time the Royal Highlander service ~ London to Inverness by way of Carlisle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen ~ was the longest through-train service in Great Britain. Passengers could board the train in London and more than five-hundred miles and fourteen hours later disembark in Inverness. The Royal Highlander service could carry more people, in greater comfort, at faster speeds, for longer journeys than any other form of transport available at the time.
The train that stood at platform 7 that October evening was double-headed, that is pulled by two huge locomotives coupled together in tandem. These locomotives were made of cast-iron and solid steel. Fully loaded each locomotive weighed well over 140 tons
Together the engines pulled twelve coaches. The total weight of the entire set that night was around five hundred and fifty-five tons and the overall length was about eight hundred and thirty feet. Equal to the length of two full-sized soccer pitches laid end to end.
A locomotive and train taking a bend at speed does not “want” to go around the corner and does its very best to go straight-on. The rails, of course, guide them round the bend. As this locomotive is pulling a train weighing many hundreds of tons at more than sixty miles an hour the stresses on the rails, the structure of the permanent way, the rolling stock, and all the parts of the locomotive itself are unimaginable. The dimensions of every component in this massive and complex vehicle are necessarily huge and heavy.
To help the train go round the bend the four wheels at the front of the locomotive, each more than one metre in diameter, are mounted on solid steel axles which are themselves mounted on a steel frame known as a bogie. The bogie pivots freely on a single, massive, central, vertical steel column so that the wheels can follow the rails around the bends and reduce the stress of persuading the locomotive and the carriages to follow.
A second set of wheels, the main driving wheels, two of them on each of the locomotive are placed behind the four front wheels. These wheels, more than two metres in diameter, are set on steel axles as thick as a man’s thigh and are powered by steam.
These driving wheels are coupled together by massive, steel, horizontal beams known as coupling rods. One coupling rod on each side of the locomotive joining and driving the main wheels on that side of the train. These coupling rods were made famous by Buster Keaton in his movie The General. Keaton sits on a coupling rod of the stationery train - the General of the title - and as the train moves off Keaton moves forward while going up and down, neatly demonstrating how the coupling rods worked while getting a laugh.
Immediately above the rear pair of main wheels is the footplate. A steel platform on which the engine driver and the fireman stand. An open-sided solid steel cab, that gives some shelter to the driver and the fireman is placed over the footplate.
The back of the cab is open and allows the fireman access to a tender. This large wagon is almost as long as the locomotive itself and carries enough coal and water to feed the firebox and the boiler for the journey.
The tender is built of steel plate and the axels and wheel assemblies milled from solid steel for it too must negotiate the bends, at speed, while carrying, say, ten tons of coal and more or less twenty tons of water.
The driver stands in the front left-hand corner of the cab from where he can, with his right hand, reach the levers that control the locomotive. From here he can see the track ahead and also see the signals that will manage the train’s journey north. And here he stays for most of the journey doing his best to keep out of the way of the fireman.
The fireman moves back and forth in the centre of the footplate shovelling the coal from the tender behind into the open door of the firebox that heats the water that produces the steam that drives the locomotive that pulls the train. The driver has seniority, but the two men are a team and like a pair of working horses they must lean into the harness together.
The lead locomotive, engine No.14435, hauling the Royal Highlander out of London Euston on that October evening was a Dunalastair. It had been built in 1897 at the St Rollox Railway Works in Glasgow. The Dunalastairs were far more powerful than the locomotives they replaced. The new design had been commissioned specifically to make double-heading unnecessary. They had much bigger boilers and produced more steam and at a higher pressure.
However while the Dunalastairs could sustain higher speeds for longer and pull heavier loads up steeper gradients and so make good on the promise of faster journey times they still needed two, coupled, locomotives to keep to the published timetable. So in 1914, only seventeen years after it was first built, engine No. 14435 was rebuilt with the addition of super-heaters which gave it even more power. All to no avail. The Royal Highlander still needed two engines double-headed to keep to the timetable and get to Inverness on time.
The second of the locomotives pulling the Royal Highlander that evening, engine No.1176, was a much newer design, one of seventy-five ordered in 1925 by London Midland Scottish from the Vulcan Foundry at Newton Le Willows near Liverpool.
-:-
Now it is seven-thirty in Euston station. The guards on platform No 7 blow their whistles and their flags uncurl with a snap above their heads and the high-pressure steam which has been escaping from a valve as big as a man’s heart on top of the engine boiler is trapped and applied to the pistons. Both locomotives give a series of mighty coughs and the eight big drive wheels, each taller than the men standing on the platform, appear to hunch down, like a Rugby scrum getting set, and slowly the wheels begin to turn and the train starts to roll forward.
The driver of the pilot engine, the first in line, leans head-and-shoulders from his cab ten feet above the rails and looking back gives a short blast on his steam whistle. The driver of the train engine, second in line, leans from his cab and raises his hand in salute. This train is not taking part in a race, nor is it trying to break a record. It is, nevertheless in a deadly serious commercial competition with the Flying Scotsman on the east coast mainline.
On this night, the Royal Highlander of 24 October 1928 has an appointment at the far end of the line, an appointment set by the owners and management of London Midland Scottish, and race or no race, if it is to keep that appointment, the men who control the locomotives must push their giant machines to their limit.
vi. The Block System
The safety of the passengers and crew of every train running on the network that Wednesday evening depended on a simple traffic-handling system and protocol called the block system.
The entire rail network was divided into sections called blocks. The movements of the traffic in each block was controlled by one or more signalmen in a signal-box at one end of the block. A train approaching a block was offered by the signalman controlling the block in which the train was currently running, to the signalman in the next signal-box along the line. If his section was clear of traffic and obstruction, the second signalman accepted the offer of the train, and both the offering and the accepting signalmen set their trackside signals to allow the train to leave the current block and enter the next block.
If for some reason it was not safe for a train to enter the next block - a train in front had broken down or was running late for example - the signalman in the receiving block would not accept the offer of the oncoming train and the signals in both blocks would be set to slow or stop the oncoming train and so prevent it entering the new block and colliding with the obstruction ahead.
Communication between the signalmen in the signal boxes along the line was by telephone and electrically operated bells and status indicators. The life-critical information was transmitted from box to box via the simplest hard-wired electrical circuit that ran beside the tracks from signal box to signal box.
vii. Border Crossing
Seven hours after leaving Euston station, at about two o’clock in the morning, three hundred and fifty miles to the north the Royal Highlander pulls into Carlisle Citadel Station and the train crew is changed. The London to Carlisle crew has been on duty for seven or eight hours and the fireman on each train has shovelled six or seven tons of coal, from the inclined floor of the tender into the firebox of the engine. Two new drivers and two new firemen will take the service forward from Carlisle to Inverness.
The new train crews, Carlisle men, clocked on duty at 00:55 that morning only to be told that the Royal Highlander was running late. It was a cold, dark, wet night and the crewmen went to the canteen to keep warm while they waited. On their way to a nice coal fire and a cup of hot tea the four crew-men walked past a freight train getting up steam.
This freight train was the Carlisle to Dundee, down train. Trains running away from the Capital ~ London in this case ~ are said to be on the down line, and those running towards the Capital or on the up line. This train was a daily, express freight service, that left Carlisle each weekday morning at 1:20am. The train was hauled by locomotive No.14631 sixty-two feet in length and weighing 116¼ tons. Longer and heavier than either of the two locomotives pulling the Highlander.
The whole goods train is 257 yards in length with a loaded weight of 440½ tons. It is made up of thirty-three goods vans and a six wheeled, twenty-ton, brake van. The brake van weighs twenty tons because it is made of steel and it carries around ten tons of steel ballast. The ballast is thick flat sheets of steel covering the floor of the brake-van to distribute the load evenly and also to set the weight of the ballast as low as possible on the frame. All done to ensure the maximum braking effect when the brakes are applied.
viii. For the Want of a Pin
14631, the freight train locomotive, had been sent for repairs the previous day. On the Tuesday it had been noted that the coupling rod on the left side of the locomotive was over-heating, and the engine had been sent to the workshop at the Kingmoor loco sheds ~ just north of Carlisle Citadel station ~ so that the coupling rods could be taken down and examined on the Wednesday afternoon.
In the course of his work, Thomas Bell the fitter who did the work on engine number 14631, had to disconnect the driving gear lubricator. The lubricator pumped a measured amount of engine grease into the coupling rod mechanism with every revolution of the wheels.
On completion of his work on the coupling rod Thomas Bell reconnected the driving gear lubricator using, according to his own account, the same pins, bolts and nuts which he had removed from the assembly in the first place.
Bell clocked-off work at 4:45pm and locomotive No14631 was put back into service that evening and was immediately listed to pull the freight express to Dundee, leaving Carlisle at 01:20 on Thursday morning.
The freight train left Carlisle five minutes late at 1:25am. The two crews waiting to join the Royal Highlander were still drinking tea in the canteen as the freight train left. The freight train was due at Beattock at 2.31 where, according to practice and the timetable, it would pull onto a siding to let the Royal Highlander overtake.
The goods train had passed the Dinwoodie, down, starter-signal ~ the signal that allowed or prevented north-bound trains entering into the Dinwoodie-Wamphray block ~ when William Oliver the driver of the freight train heard a loud banging on the left side of his engine. He pulled up to see if he could identify the cause of the noise. The section of track at the point where the freight train had pulled up ran along a ten-foot-high embankment, built of cinder and furnace clinker, that carried the track above the level of the fields on either side.
William Oliver found that the operating bar of the lubricator pump, which should have been secured to the vertical lever of the lubricator by a small nut and bolt, had broken free at one end and was spinning round and flailing against the side of the locomotive’s boiler. The bolt and nut that secured the operating bar to the vertical lever, which should have been secured by a split pin, had fallen out.
Thomas Bell the fitter would later insist that the nut and bolt that he removed when he was taking down the coupling rod assembly did not have a split pin and that the bolt was not, in fact, drilled to accommodate such a pin. Bell knew that a split-pin was usually provided to secure the nut and he could easily have drilled a hole and added the necessary pin or got another nut and bolt with a pin attached and simply replaced it. But he didn’t. By his own account he replaced everything exactly as he had found it.
Now the missing bolt had caused a minor problem. William Oliver the driver of the freight train decided to disconnect the bar, the work of only a few moments, and continue the journey to the Beattock siding where running repairs could be made while the Royal Highlander was allowed to pass by.
The freight train had come to a halt in the Wamphray block section at 2.45am and the Royal Highlander was not due at Wamphray until 2:59am fourteen minutes later. Furthermore Oliver knew that the signalmen in the Lockerbie Central and Dinwoodie signal boxes could slow or stop the Highlander in its tracks should it be necessary. Oliver asked Chisholm, the freight train fireman, to hold the lamp so that he could see what he was doing and started work on the faulty lubricator pump assembly.
After a couple of minutes WG Nicholson the freight train guard in the guard’s van at the rear of the goods train, lit his lamp, put on his jacket and climbed down onto the cinder trackside path ~ known as the cess ~ and began to walk forward to the front of the train. Standing orders stated that in the circumstances that Nicholson found himself in the guard should go forward, ascertain the nature of the problem and if necessary, ensure that any trains coming in the opposite direction were warned of any obstruction on their side of the tracks.
Chisholm the freight-train fireman was holding the lamp for driver Oliver to do the running repair. He saw the light of Nicholson’s lamp as he climbed down from the guard’s van onto the cess and later testified that it took Nicholson five or six minutes to walk forward the 247 yards. It was dark and blustery and Nicholson had to proceed with care in order not to lose his footing and tumble down the ten-foot embankment.
When Nicholson reached the front of the train, driver Oliver explained what had happened, what he had planned to do and then added that it was proving more difficult to make the temporary repair than he had thought it would. This exchange took a further minute or so.
According to Driver Oliver, Nicholson the guard then said,
I am afraid that The Tourist (the Royal Highlander) won’t be far away. I had better run away and protect the train
If a train was threatened with collision from behind standing orders ordained that the guard must take his lamp, his whistle and a couple of explosive detonators and run three-quarters of a mile in the direction of the oncoming train to place the detonators on the track. The detonators would explode when the wheels of the oncoming train passed over them. The noise of the detonators exploding would be loud enough to warn the train crew of a problem ahead and they would execute an emergency stop.
As he turned to go, Nicholson the guard checked his watch. It was 2:53am. If it was on time The Royal Highlander was now only five or six minutes behind them. He began to run.
Nicholson would later relate that running and falling and running and falling it took him a couple of minutes to get back to the brake van. He climbed up into the van, got two detonators from the desk and climbed back down.
I was only in my van for a few seconds. As I left the van and climbed down to the track-side I heard the Express. I commenced to run and had got a few paces when I saw its lights. My impression was that the train was then passing through Dinwoodie Station. I knew at any rate that it was not past the starting signal. I was looking for him to pull up at the starting signal. I kept running back and I placed two detonators on the line but I could not clip them on properly and I kept running on waving my red lamp and blowing my whistle but the Express kept on coming and as the lead engine was upon me I got myself up against the wire fence on the cess side.
At 2:59 on Thursday the 25th October 1928 the Royal Highlander passenger express having only minutes before crossed the border into Scotland and passing through Lockerbie station entered the Dinwoodie-Wamphray block section under full-steam and, travelling at well over sixty miles an hour, ran into the rear of the stationery freight train.
The Highlander was, in effect, a five-hundred and fifty-five-ton missile on rails. The business end of the missile weighing more than two hundred tons was composed of two huge, pressurised boilers full of red-hot coals and hundreds of gallons of boiling water and super-heated steam. Evidence given at the Board of Trade inquiry after what became known as the Dinwoodie Disaster showed that in the dark and given no warning the crews of The Royal Highlander Express had no opportunity to apply the brakes.
The first thing the lead locomotive of the Royal Highlander encountered at the moment of impact was the six wheeled, twenty ton, steel on steel brake van of the freight train. The pilot engine went straight through the brake van at about floor level. Pieces of steel from the brake-van were found scattered in the fields at the bottom of the cinder embankment on both sides of the line at the point of first impact.
The flat, heavy, sheet-steel ballast, laid on the floor of the brake-van, was perfectly designed, made and positioned to act as a horizontal guillotine. In the first second after impact the leading engine had its bogie and front four wheels completely sliced off. Though it seems impossible the fifteen-inch diameter, solid-steel, vertical centre-shaft that connected the front wheel assembly to the rest of the engine ~ a component that was necessarily massively strong ~ was sheered, chopped in two, by the shape and force of the impact. The shaft and the bogey were found in pieces in the wreckage.
The brake gear of the lead engine was torn away, the driving axle bent and the coupling rods, those massive steel beams that provided a laugh for Buster Keaton, were broken and bent. The front buffer beam and the main frames of the leading locomotive, the massive steel structure onto which the locomotive was built, were doubled back like a paperclip. The frame on the right-hand side was broken almost in two.
The collision hardly slowed the Highlander at all. Shorn of wheels, bogies and axels the huge boiler of the lead engine still full of fire, boiling water and super-heated steam was now arrowing through the goods vans that made up the train ahead of the brake-van.
The second Highlander locomotive, the train engine, passed under the roof and upper parts of the brake-van and the goods vans ahead of it. The smoke-boxes, chimneys, dome shells and driver’s cabs of both engines, all made of steel, were swept away
The massive, solid steel, eight-wheel coal tender of the leading engine, caught between the combined weight of its own engine and the goods train ahead and the second locomotive and passenger train pressing on from behind, came apart.
The bogey and brake gear at the front of the tender were twisted like a corkscrew. The bogie at the rear of the tender was torn in two. The right-hand side of the tender and its wheels were found to the rear of the wreck having been torn bodily away from the tender by the guillotine action of the steel ballast in the goods-train brake-van.
The train engine, the second locomotive in the double-header, was also torn to pieces. The buffer beam and frames over the front bogie were buckled and the bogie itself was twisted and wrecked. The brake gear was torn off by the ballast and wheels of the goods-train brake-van. The left coupling rod was bent and the platform and smoke box on the left-hand side crushed. The driver’s cab, the footplate, and the leading end of the tender of the second locomotive were utterly destroyed ~ the wreckage being tossed aside ~ as the remains of the two locomotives with the train still in tow continued to plough through the goods wagons.
The goods-train engine and the thirty-three steel and wood goods-trucks, weighing over 400 tons, with the brakes applied were pushed forward over two hundred and twenty yards. As the debris built up in front of the Highlander it began to slow and the second locomotive with less damage and driven hard by the three-hundred tons of the following train pushing from behind climbed-up on the pilot engine like a bull getting up on a cow.
Now as the lead locomotive began to slow, the train engine over-ran the lead engine, rearing up until it was almost vertical, emptying the red-hot contents of its firebox onto what remained of the engine and the two men who clung to what remained of the footplate. Ten seconds after the first impact the two great locomotives, lit by a cascade of glowing coals, toppled down the cinder embankment, coming to rest on their sides at right angles to the track.
The driver and fireman of the pilot engine, John Cowper and William Reid, were thrown from the train by the impact so violently that one body was hurled like a javelin and "buried up to the waist in the ground." The bodies of the other two railwaymen, driver James Irving and his fireman were buried under the wreck of the train engine, burned almost beyond recognition by the coals from their own firebox. A newspaper reported that when their bodies were recovered James Irving still had "the stem of his pipe between his teeth."
The driver and fireman of the down freight express to Dundee were first upon the scene. The coals scattered from both fireboxes were still burning. Despite having been thrown off the goods train engine and down the embankment Chisholm, the goods train fireman, found that he still clutched driver Oliver’s lamp in his hand. Some lights in the Express train still shone, for miraculously the carriages of The Royal Highlander though derailed were undamaged and upright.
There was just enough light for Chisholm and Oliver to see that there was no hope for the crews of the Royal Highlander. It was 3.05 on Thursday 25 October 1928
ix. On the Down Line Going North
About an hour after the Royal Highlander Express ran into the back of the Carlisle-Dundee goods train there was a knock at the back door of No 8 Caledonian Buildings in Etterby Street, Stanwix. The Caledonian Buildings were purpose built “railwayman’s cottages”, eight houses each with two rooms upstairs and two rooms down. They had no bathroom but shared a lavatory outside in the yard. They were built by the Caledonian Railway in 1875 for their workers in the railway sheds at Kingmoor or those train crews who regularly had to pick up their locomotives from the Kingmore marshalling yards. Another two blocks of cottages were built in 1891. They were all demolished in the late 1960s.
The houses were close to both the Kingmoor marshalling yards and to Carlisle Citadel Station the two locations where drivers and firemen might regularly be called to start a shift. It was a privilege to live so close to work and at the heart of a small railway community that provided essential support in the days before the Welfare State.
Just after four in the morning George Graham knocked on the back door of No 8. George and his wife Edith lived nearby. George was working a shift at Kingmoor that night. When the news of the accident began to come-in he had spoken briefly to his foreman and set out to run the two miles to his home. He woke Edith and then, leaving her to get dressed and follow him, he ran round to number eight. He knocked softly and just as Edith arrived, the door was opened by Mary, a short, plump, darked-haired woman of about thirty-five, wearing a long, white cotton nightdress and clutching a yellow and red knitted shawl around her shoulders.
There was a short, whispered, conversation in the parlour. They did not sit down. The three standing adults filled the tiny room. Mary stood with her back to the hearth. While George spoke she turned away, opened the flue, riddled the fire, and added some coal to the now glowing embers.
George explained that there had been an accident. There were few details. They knew however that the Royal Highlander was involved and that Robert, Mary’s husband, was a fireman on one of the engines pulling the Highlander that night. George explained that all he knew was there had been an urgent demand to send a train with heavy lifting gear and other emergency equipment down the line to Dinwoodie.
It was agreed that George would get away back to work and Edith would stay with Mary, to help with the children, the bairns. There were two girls and two boys, Dorothy and Cora, David and Joseph, all under the age of ten, asleep upstairs. Someone would come with news, George promised, just as soon as they had anything to tell.
Another neighbour arrived as George left and in the confusion Joseph, the eldest boy, who had stood in the dark on the stairs listening to the adults whispering, slipped out of the house and ran down the lane behind the Buildings.
After a hundred yards the boy squeezed through a hole in the fence that the railwaymen had made and slid down the bank to land with a thud on the cess beside the mainline and the other tracks that connected the Kingmoor yards to the rest of the network.
Running fast, leaping across the tracks, skipping from sleeper to sleeper the boy arrived at the Kingmoor Main signal box no more than thirty minutes after that first, ominously quiet, knock on the yard door. Now the boy knocked just as quietly on the door of the signal-box and spoke briefly to the signalman.
He sat by the fire in the signalman’s chair for the few minutes it took the signalman to identify and stop a train taking a rescue crew to the site of the accident. The signalman, who knew the boy and his father, took him to the door of the signal box and pointed out the rescue train waiting for him. A man in the crew van jumped down and passed the boy up into the waiting arms of another man inside the van.
The benches in the van were full so the railwayman who had lifted the boy up into the van made a space on the floor between his feet and gave the boy a boiled sweet from a brown paper bag. No one spoke as they travelled north and the boy kept to himself whatever questions were forming in his mind, a small silent boy among the large silent men, on the down line, going north.
The rescue workers had already started to dig the bodies of the crewmen from among the wreckage of the Royal Highlander when my father arrived at the accident site. And he was still there an hour later, watching in silence, when the mangled and badly burned body of his own father, Robert Little Tibbetts, fireman on the train engine, was lifted from beneath the coal that had spilled from the firebox of engine number 1176. He was not quite eight-and-a-half years old.
Though he would live a long, remarkable and successful life my father would never be free of that night. Sixty years later, he and I went on a tour of what was left of the sites associated with his life at the time of the accident and the accident itself. Astonishingly, at least to me, the hole in the fence providing a short-cut to Kingmoor was still there. We could only view the location of the accident from a distance but we were close enough to see great patches of golden-yellow flowers ~ Sicilian daisies, Senecio squalidus, Oxford Ragwort ~ which still clothed the embankment just as they had done that night and among which he had stood, a small boy knee deep in flowers, waiting to be called upon to help should he be needed, to lift up his father from the ground where he lay.