i. The Knave of Clubs

A Board of Trade inquiry into the causes of what became known as the Dinwoodie Disaster was convened within twelve hours of the accident. Alan Mount who at the time was an Inspecting Officer for Railways at the Ministry of Transport, was chosen to head the inquiry. Seven months later, in May 1929, Mount would be appointed Chief Inspecting Officer for Railways a post he would hold for twenty years until his retirement in 1949.

At the time of the inquiry into the Dinwoodie Disaster Mount was in the home straight of the race for the top job and everything that would come with it. We may be forgiven for supposing that he was doing his best not to rock the boat or tread on the toes of anyone who might, at the last minute, challenge or stop his progress 

In October 1928, with nearly ten years in the job, Alan Mount was already the man you turned to, to lead an inquiry into a major railway accident. He shaped and managed the investigation, allocating resources, deciding the lines of inquiry to be followed and who would be called to answer for their actions. He assembled the arguments for and against,  picking and choosing from the sometimes conflicting explanations of what had actually happened. He acted for both the defence and the prosecution and then he was the jury considering the evidence and finally he was the judge, presenting his judgement to the Ministry who would pass sentence if, of course, a sentence was indicated.

On a first reading of his report we will admire his sparse and muscular prose, his patience, his diligence in pursuit of the truth and his humanity. Then we will read his report again, and again, and then once more. And when we have finished our close reading, we will rethink our opinion of Alan Mount and call for a re-trial.

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alan Henry Lawrence Mount CB. CBE. is a bit of a mystery. There are tens of thousands of words written by him in the public record and these bear witness to the milestones in his professional life. But the man himself and his life outside of railway accident investigation is almost totally unrecorded and off the record.

There are eleven photographs of him in the National Portrait Gallery and one short line of biography. The curators at St Martin’s Place know nothing about him. There are porn stars they know more about. Or perhaps they do know and are just not sharing.

Mount was educated at Bradfield College, near Reading, then as now at the top of the B list of British public schools. Today the school’s list of notable alumni makes no mention of him among the many Knighted civil-servants the school claims to have set upon their course to greatness. The list does however find space for Tony Hancock “a comedian”. My requests for information from the school have gone unanswered.

Our interest is piqued by this lack of information about a man who achieved so much. We try our best not to read too much into the information we do not have.

Mount was born at Reading in 1881 to Reginald Crook Mount, a Corn Merchant, and his wife Agnes Annie Clark. Reggie Mount must have been both successful and vigorous for he married three times and fathered seven children in a space of nine years. None of which can be done without energy and money. Alan was his first child and the eldest of three brothers.

On 9 January 1892 the Mayor and Mayoress of Reading hosted a fancy-dress party for 240 children at the Reading Town Halls. Master Alan Mount attended in a costume representing the Knave of Clubs while Master Sydney Mount went as the Knave of Diamonds and Master Oscar Mount as the Knave of Hearts. Alan Mount would have been eleven years old.

If the children were presented to the Mayor and Mayoress in alphabetical order, as the Reading Observer reported the proceedings, the Mount boys would have followed Miss Mary G Morris dressed as a Persian Girl and preceded Miss Marguerite H Martin dressed as Margarita from Faust. If Mary and Marguerite were familiar with The Tarot they would have known that the Knave of Clubs, dealt head up, signifies a good friend and sincere lover, enterprising, skilful and brave. Though also a flatterer and so slightly suspect.

There is a short biography of Mount in Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History. Much of it may well be correct but most of it cannot be verified and some of it is wrong. After Bradfield, Grace’s Guide tells us, Mount did three years at Coopers Hill, the Royal Indian Engineering College ~ RIEC ~ a British college of Civil Engineering founded in 1872 and run by the India Office, a Whitehall Department.

Cooper’s Hill trained civil engineers for service in the Indian Public Works Department. Mount did well there, he was awarded a Fellowship. On October 1st 1902 he was Commissioned into the Royal Engineers. He then did two years at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, and after that, one year on secondment to the Midland Railway Company in Derby. Coincidentally the Midland Railway would become London Midland Scottish co-sponsors of The Race to the North and owner operators of The Royal Highlander that came to grief between Whamfrey and Dinwoodie in October 1928.

After six years continuous education and training Mount was not only a highly qualified railway engineer and a trained soldier but he had also built a wide and valuable network of contacts, supporters and friends

ii. The Great Game

Mount was sent to India in November 1905. Before he departed he married Margaret Sybil Hunt. He was twenty-five, she was nearly 30. Given the age difference she and her parents must have been quite relieved. Margaret was from a good family. In the circles that she moved in, the oldest son stood first in line for the title, the house and the debts. Second sons by tradition pursued a military life. Third sons either took holy orders or went to the bad. Occasionally, for both the Devil’s and our entertainment some enterprising third sons managed to combine both.

Alan Mount, however, was the oldest son, with a profession and no debts. He was already making his way and though his family were in trade and had bought their own furniture it was already clear that he was marked for greatness. He was not in India as a box-wallah hoping to rustle up a fortune, he was there as an asset and an ornament of the Empire on which the sun never set.

In 1907, Margaret Sybil presented him with a son, Alan Reginald D’Arcy Mount. She would have returned to England for the birth. Mount would not have been able to accompany her for he was by then far too busy at work in the very heart of the biggest geopolitical upheaval in the world at that time.

On his arrival in India in 1905 Mount had been sent to the North West Frontier where the Russian Empire and the British Empire faced each across the mountains of Afghanistan which even then was disputed territory.

For more than a hundred years, while the Russians built a huge Empire in Central Asia ~ the Empire that Vladimir Putin would like to re-establish today ~ the Russians worried that the British would march through the Khyber Pass and help themselves to the rich pickings in Persia and beyond. The British of course already had a vast empire and were worried that the Russians might march through the Khyber Pass and down the road into India to steal The Jewel in the Crown.

The Railways on the North West Frontier were very there to serve the military and strategic needs of the two competing empires. The Afghan border was one of the most militarised frontiers in the world. There were no tourists and no one went there unless on military business. In 1899 the North Western State Railway had over six-hundred steam locomotives, more than two-thousand coaches and ten-thousand three-hundred and twelve goods wagons. All these were there to service the needs of the forces coming, going and remaining on “the roof of the world.”

Heroic feats of engineering were commonplace. One section of the Khyber Pass line, not opened until 1925, from Jamrud to Landi Kotal reached a height of four thousand feet and in a distance of only thirty-two miles included thirty-four tunnels, ninety-two bridges and culverts and a long zig-zag ascending an otherwise insurmountably steep slope between Landi Kotal and Landi Khana.

Now everything was changing. In 1905, just as Mount arrived the railways serving the needs of Empire in the northwest of India were being radically reorganised. Some lines were to be closed, some development projects cancelled. The Great Game was over, abandoned in favour of what would soon become known as The Great War.

On August 31, 1907 Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Russian Emperor, and Alexander Isvolsky, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs met in St. Petersburg  to sign The Anglo-Russian Convention. The Russian Empire and British Empire henceforth would be allies in opposing the German Empire who had struck an alliance of their own with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Anglo-Russian Convention recognized that Afghanistan and southern Iran would be in the British sphere of influence. Central Asia and northern Iran were to be in the Russian sphere of influence. Both parties recognized Tibet as a neutral country.

Iran ~ the Persia of old ~ sat across the route from anywhere to everywhere of interest in eastern and central Asia and had always been strategically important. Now, with the discovery of apparently inexhaustible oil reserves having a piece of Iran was not so much desirable but essential. Nothing changes. As I write these words, June 17th 2025, Israel and America are trying to bully and bomb their way to control of Iran.

The war that was all too obviously on the way would be fought, for the first time, from mechanised platforms driven by internal-combustion engines. Cars, lorries, tanks, ships, aeroplanes and trains. The diplomatic gunboats that projected the power of Empire around the world would soon be running on fuel oil. The more than, six hundred steam engines specially built for the North West Frontier made steam with fuel oil not coal.

Mount was a railway engineer, a soldier and a young man at the start of a career. The posting to the North West Frontier at this time in history presented Mount with an extraordinary opportunity and he seems to have seized it with both hands.

iii. A Good War

Mount must have been good at his job. In 1910 he was appointed to design and build the necessary light railways for the great Imperial Durbar, the Delhi Durbar of 1911. George Frederick Ernest Albert, the King Emperor and his wife Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, Mary of Teck, (her friends called her May) the Queen Consort and Empress of India would ride together on Alan Mount’s little railway.

Alan Mount was subsequently awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for this service but there is no mention of him in the existing lists of those who were awarded the medal.

At the 1911 Durbar it was announced that the capital of India would move from Calcutta (Kolkota) to Delhi. Six months later Mount was appointed Executive Engineer to the Planning Committee for the new capital. He was 31 years old.

Before he could take up his new post, however, he was sent on a tour of inspection looking at railways in Germany, Belgium and France. This was said to be so that he could better advise on the building of railways in India. He was away for the best part of two years. It is difficult to imagine exactly what a man of Mount’s education, training and experience could have learned in two years swanning round France, Germany and Belgium that would have been helpful in planning or building the lines and stations that would serve the new Capital City of the sub-continent.

Mount was a soldier and had spent two years at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham and seven years in India much of the time in the front-line on the North West Frontier. His masters must have seen just how useful a knowledgeable and resolute young man with a military training might prove in a world that was less than two years away from the outbreak of the war to end all wars. Alan Mount’s grand tour of Germany, Belgium and France - the countries that were already, in 1912, understood to be the likely theatre of the coming war - looks very like a military intelligence gathering exercise.

MI5 and MI6 had been created only a couple of years before. Overseas intelligence gathering by MI6 began in 1912 the very same year that Mount was sent to Germany. Mount was recalled to India in late 1913. The first Army Intelligence Corps was formed in Britain in August 1914 and immediately moved its officers to France. Within a few weeks Alan Mount did the same. He was seconded to the Railway Directorate. He was first the Assistant Director of Railway Construction at G.H.Q. France and then, in 1917, made Deputy Chief Construction Engineer for Broad-Gauge Railways reporting to the Director-General of Transportation. He was four times mentioned in dispatches, was awarded a Brevet Majority and the C.B.E., and was given, by the French, the Legion d'Honneur. He was granted the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in July 1922.

In 2015 it was possible to find, on the web, two obituaries for Mount published in obscure specialist publications. One clearly relied upon the other. Neither provided any useful information. There were also a handful of identical three-line announcements of his death in regional newspapers. But that is where the paper trail ends. There are no obituaries, no tributes glowing or otherwise in national newspapers. This is not to say that there were none at the time but for now we are confronted with a silence so total that it cannot be ignored. Mount served his country man and boy, was Knighted for his efforts and was inscribed in the French Legion d’Honneur. It seems astonishing to us that such a life was so little celebrated at its end.

In 1919 Alan Mount returned to England, was placed on the Army reserve-list and appointed as an Inspecting Officer for Railways at the Ministry of Transport. Ten years later he was promoted to Chief Inspecting Officer and twelve years after that in 1941 he was Knighted. He resigned his post as Chief Inspecting Officer of Railways in 1949. He was sixty-nine years old.

Alan Mount was made Chief Inspecting Officer in 1929 but he must have been a serious player in the years before that. In 1939 he was Chairman of the Pacific Locomotive Committee which investigated the series of derailments of Indian locomotives which had been supplied by British locomotive manufacturers. His recommendations after the derailment at Potters Bar in 1946 led to the redesigning and rebuilding of the entire station. In 1949 at the age of sixty-nine he was still in the top seat. Thirty years at or close to the top but, as far as we know, he did nothing other than write reports on railway accidents.

Mount seems hidden in plain sight whereas his family are invisible. We know nothing of his life outside of the Ministry of Transport. The National Archives reveal nothing. There is no record anywhere of him taking any part in society. No seats on boards of trustees. No charitable work. No memberships of sports clubs as sportsman or supporter. No books or memoirs. No crimes or misdemeanours of record. No fond memories in other people’s memoirs. No spells as treasure of the Bee Keepers Association or as Chairman of the Board of Governor’s at his old school or his son’s school. For thirty years he is both ubiquitous and totally absent.

Alan Mount came home in 1919 a year or so short of his fortieth birthday. Before that he had lived a life of adventure. He was an energetic, confident, active, forceful man with technical skills sufficient to warrant appointment as Executive Engineer for the building of a city. After 1919 he was, suddenly, a dull as ditch-water bureaucrat. As far as we know, for thirty years, he went to work each day, then went home climbed into a box and lay unmoving and unnoticed until it was time to go to work again. This sudden change from man of action to model bureaucrat seems unlikely. Furthermore while his work at the ministry was important and well done, on its own it hardly seems full and proper occupation for such a man. What, we wonder, did he do with his “spare” time and energy?

It is a clear that Alan Mount’s work, on the North West Frontier and elsewhere in India in the years between 1905 and 1912 included an element of “military intelligence”. We cannot prove but we do not doubt that he had a military intelligence brief between 1912 and 1914 and that for a couple of years he was directed by and reported to an intelligence officer. During the first World War his work would have produced “intelligence” that would no doubt have been shared with the “intelligence services”. After the war he would have been regarded as a potentially useful asset, an occasional source of information, a provider of analysis on topics and issues and places that fell within his professional competences.

If, however, Mount had been active in intelligence between 1919 and 1949 we might expect that some information about his work would have surfaced by now. He was a natural and in 1912 the founding fathers of MI6 must have recognised his potential and counted themselves lucky to find him when they did. And yet, it seems, that they promptly let him go once the war was over.

The people of Britain were lucky to have him in post for the years in which the railway grew into the mighty juggernaut it became.  He saved lives, lots of lives, and yet who among us remember him today. 

At the end of his working life Mount took to publicly chastising the Government for not investing enough in the Railways and not planning and delivering the Railway that he, Alan Mount, recommended. There is a hint in the threadbare record that Mount did not willingly resign his post at sixty-nine ~ a year before he was scheduled to retire ~ but was pushed out for publicly speaking out against the Government. It is tempting to think that this was the reason why the establishment failed and continues to fail to note or celebrate his life and contribution. 

It was Mount’s character not his occupation, we suppose, that accounts for the thunderous silence that surrounds him. We are left with a picture of a man who, while admirable in many ways, is difficult to deal with. This and his secret life before 1919 colours our understanding of his character and his position in society, and this will be more than useful, in our understanding of and judgements his handling of the Dinwoodie Inquiry. 

iv. Solomon at the Board of Trade

Mount submitted his report on 14th December 1928 less than two months after the accident. The report includes narrative, evidence, witness statements, argument, and judgement. Thirteen thousand words with a further five pages of appendixes.

“I have the honour to report” he wrote, “for the information of the Ministry of Transport, in accordance with the Order of 25th October the result of my Inquiry into the circumstances of the accident which occurred on that date”.

The first thing that Alan Mount does is summarily dismiss any idea that the four railwaymen, the Carlisle men, in charge of the Royal Highlander locomotives were in some way responsible for the accident or not fit for the job.

“The evidence of Mr E. L. Booth the District Locomotive Superintendent who was intimately acquainted with them” Mount writes, “shows that they were men of high character with good records and all were fit in every way for duty.”

Mount also examines the actions and performance of the other members of the Royal Highlander crew. The guards and the stewards. All are found to be innocent of wrong- doing and at least satisfactory in the performance of their duties.

Mount then turned his forensic eye upon Colin Bell the fitter at Carlisle, Kingmoor who, charged with the maintenance work on the freight train locomotive, failed to secure the bolt with a split pin.

Mount is obsessed by the missing bolt. Bell is steadfast in his insistence that he reassembled everything using the components he had removed in the first place. But even if this was true, Mount says, Bell should have taken steps to drill a hole and fit it with a split-pin, or replaced the bolt with another already drilled and with a pin attached.

Mount commissioned a close search for the missing lubricator-arm nut and bolt. Hundreds of men on hands and knees scrutinised a mile of cinder ballast and the ditches and muddy fields around Dinwoodie. But the bolt could not be found. Mount was not satisfied and made further extensive inquiries.

“It is to be noted” he writes, “that this particular locomotive was one of a considerable number of this type at Carlisle and this engine was the only one which was not, as Bell has claimed, fitted properly in this respect.” Moreover, Mount says, none of the other examining fitters that he questioned at other stations up and down the line had ever come across an incidence of the bolt in question being supplied or fitted without the retaining split-pin. In short, we understand Mount to say, Colin Bell is lying and found guilty even though, Mount says, his guilt cannot be proved.

Mount’s obsessive and over meticulous search for the bolt looks very like a piece of misdirection. Bell was “guilty” by his own admission. No proof was necessary. He knew the bolt with split pin was required and should have rectified the problem. He admitted as much. If in doubt, he should have consulted his supervisor. It seems, however, that there was no supervisor or if there was there was no requirement in LMS company procedures for signing off Bell’s work even though, as proved tragically to be the case in this instance, lives depended on it.

Mount does not question why Bell’s work was not overseen. Instead, astonishingly, he declares there is no alternative but to accept Bell’s evidence at face value and allow that Bell was guilty of nothing more than a minor mis-judgement.

Any intervention of a supervisor would have presented Bell with an opportunity to report the problem. If he had reported his concern the problem could have been rectified. This, however, would have led to a delay in the return-to-service of the locomotive in question. The promptness with which locomotive No.14631 was returned to service suggests that there were some logistical pressures to do so.

Mount is making a great fuss over a piece of irrelevant lost evidence and then being inexplicably lenient with Bell. We cannot avoid the suspicion that he is doing so for fear that any deeper inquiry would implicate both the management of the London Midland Scottish railway company, the very same company that Mount had spent a year seconded to in 1904, and the Railways Inspectorate, Mount’s own employer.

The actions of the driver and fireman in stopping the freight train are approved. Mount, however, found the guard of the freight train to be dilatory in execution of his duties and a liar to boot. Nicholson clearly waited for far too long before he climbed down and went forward to ascertain the cause of his train coming to a standstill. He was quick enough to understand the danger once he had gone forward but by then it was too late. He should have carried his explosive charges forward with him in case he had to place them on the up-line forward of the position of the stationery freight train if there was a need to warn south bound trains.

If he had the charges with him, in his jacket pocket, Mount feels, he would have saved time in running back to warn the oncoming express. As it was, Nicholson had to collect the charges from his van on the way back from his visit to the front of the train. He says he ran as far as he could towards Dinwoodie station managing to place but not secure the explosive charges on the line in the path of the oncoming express.

Mount set another group of men to comb the permanent way and the fields on either side for the casings. They were nowhere to be found. Nicholson’s explanation that he was unable to clip the charges onto the line is, Mount feels, an after-the-fact attempt to explain why the spent charges could not be found. It seems to Mount almost certain that Nicholson did not have the charges with him.

Later in the inquiry two spent explosive charges were discovered more or less where Nicholson said he had placed them. But their heavily rusted condition gives rise to the suspicion that they were charges that had been used elsewhere and on a previous occasion. This in turn gives rise to the suspicion that there is a conspiracy between Nicholson and his colleagues to provide some evidence that supports the idea that he was at least close to being competent and efficient.

Mount spends some time ruminating on the rusty, spent, explosive-charge casings. They had supposedly been stored in the dry security of the guards-van, desk draw. The whole narrative around the explosive-charge casings seems fabricated. Nevertheless Mount lets it go accepting the assurances of some of Nicholson’s colleagues, that the casings could have rusted to such a degree after only a few hours exposure. Mount was an experienced and highly skilled engineer. He could, furthermore, have called on the most competent minds available in Great Britain to have the likely rate of rusting verified.

It seems clear that this was another part of the investigation that Mount wanted to gloss over. Standing orders required the guard to be in two places at once. He had to deal with the safety of southbound trains approaching the breakdown site on the up line and he had to secure the safety of his own train from being hit by following trains northbound on the downline. Given the length of the goods train, the dark and stormy night and the narrowness of the cess – the track side path - it was impossible for Nicholson to complete all of the tasks he was required to do even if he had jumped from his van the moment the goods train came to a halt and sprinted like an Olympic athlete up and down the track.

At the end of his report Mount appends a couple of pages of recommendations. Every single material action undertaken by Nicholson on the night of the accident as laid down in the standing orders is recommended by Mount, in the report, for review and change. Some of the technology likewise is recommended, by Mount, for upgrading. In short if there was a fatal flaw it was a flaw in the standing orders and/or in the provision of communications equipment connecting locomotive and guard’s van.

Mount finds Nicholson dilatory, confused and mendacious. He is lying, he was most likely dozing in his van when the freight train pulled up. Mount listened to Nicholson’s account of his own performance and then ordered a reconstruction. A few days after the accident Nicholson was brought to the accident site and forced to repeat his actions as he had described them. Running back and forth up and down the cess timed with a stop watch. It was clear that he could not have done what he said he did. Nicholson is lying and conspiring to pervert the course of “justice”. Mount who is investigator, jury and judge, however, does nothing but administer a rebuke. Nicholson’s failure to protect the train was,  Mounts says, a contributing factor to the cause of the accident.

In fact London Midland Scottish, hand in glove with the Railway Inspectorate were guilty of faulty process design, conflicting standing orders and failure to provide appropriate equipment.

On the night of the accident, signalman Scott in the Wamphray signal box fell asleep. When signalman Anderson at the Dinwoodie signal box, rang the bell to “offer” the approaching Royal Highlander to Scott, he was asleep. Anderson tried again and then called Scott on the telephone link. Scott woke-up confused and accepted the oncoming Express. Scott was unaware that the goods train had entered his block and then failed to exit it because he had been asleep. Talking to Anderson he tried to bluster his way out of trouble, effectively giving false information up and down the line. If he had admitted at once that he had been asleep and did not know if his block was empty it might have been possible to throw all the signals and stop the Highlander in its tracks. 

The inquiry revealed that Scott, the sleeping signalman, had been suffering from longstanding problems at home. His wife had been ill and bed-bound for ten weeks after the birth of a child. Scott had been doing full shifts, some of them twelve hours long, and then going home and doing almost all the housework including looking after two children under five and a ten-week old baby. When he was on nights his sleep during the day was disturbed by his frail wife waking him up to attend to her needs and those of the family.

Anderson the signalman in the next signal box knew of Scott’s problems and had been aware that Scott was falling asleep at his post from time to time. Anderson did and said nothing in an understandable but misplaced sense of loyalty to Scott. Given the tightness of the Railway community and the way in which their everyday lives were intertwined it is certain that others, including Scott’s immediate superiors knew of his circumstances. But they did nothing.

Having ignored or made light of the contribution to the causes and outcomes of the accident that had been made by the other parties to the tragedy Mount seized on Scott as a convenient and perfectly formed scapegoat.

He reports in detail on Scott’s circumstances, home life and work patterns which had included some periods of twelve-hour shifts and three periods of night shifts during the ten-week period of his wife’s illness. Mount recognises that Scott’s catastrophic failure on the night of the accident was not a sudden breakdown but a slow accumulation of exhaustion. The proof, if proof is needed, was the report by signalman Anderson that Scott had been caught napping during the weeks prior to the accident. Scott had been occasionally called upon to do twelve hour shifts when the normal shift, agreed with the Union, was eight hours. Nevertheless, Mount says,

(Scott) was certainly not unfit physically for duty and there was no reason to suspect that he was otherwise, this being his fourth night shift during the illness of his wife.

Mount reasons that as Scott had completed three separate periods of night shifts during the ten-week period prior to the night of the accident it follows that he was fit to undertake yet another. A better example of false reasoning would be difficult to imagine.

Some fallacies are introduced into an argument to mislead or misdirect and some are included through stupidity or carelessness. Mount was neither stupid nor careless but maintains that there was no reason to suspect that Scott was unfit for duty when in fact there was every reason to suspect that he was unfit.

It is clear that Mount is trying to persuade the reader that London Midland Scottish should be held blameless. In fact Scott was not fit to do the night shifts and the LMS management should have known it. Mount moves on from this strange lapse in his powers of reasoning without drawing breath and, in the very next line in his report, offers up Scott for execution.

I cannot entirely disregard, Mount writes, the extenuating plea that domestic misfortunes may have been a contributory factor in the serious mistake which (Scott) made, but having regard to the course which he promptly pursued, he cannot, in my opinion, be relieved in any way of full responsibility for this accident.

Scott, says Mount, must bear full responsibility for the accident not because he fell asleep but because having woken up and found he did not know the true situation he gave misleading information to conceal his own failure. Alan Mount invites the reader to ignore all the other contributing factors by a number of different individuals and agree that it was Scott’s attempt to conceal his guilt that should be blamed for the accident. Furthermore says Mount as no one else, neither his colleagues nor his employers nor the overseeing authority can be implicated in Scott’s attempt to conceal his guilt, all with the exception of Scott, are to be held blameless.

In this way Mount absolves all of the other players directly involved and so prevents the owners and officers of London Midland Scottish and the Railway Inspectorate and the Board of Trade and heads of the possibility of being summoned to answer difficult and embarrassing questions.

The whole inquiry is a masterpiece of obfuscation and misdirection. London Midland Scottish designed the systems and wrote the standing orders under the supervision of Mount’s colleagues at the Railways Inspectorate. LMS pushed the system they had designed and managed, to its limit and beyond, in the pursuit of commercial success. LMS were careless in designing and managing the maintenance regime allowing the work of Bell the Kingmoor fitter to go-forward un-inspected and in rushing locomotive No 14631 back into the roster for no reason but simple commercial expediency.

The London Midland Scottish management and the Railway Inspectorate including Mount himself were all relying on the block system and the signalmen who were operating it to slow and stop the Highlander. But the block system had failed many times before and would fail again. The system was not proof against human error.  Alan Mount and the LMS management knew it.

If LMS had been called to explain their failings, they would certainly have implicated both Whitehall and the Government. The government was pressing ahead to rebuild Britain’s industrial strength, whatever the cost, after the first world war. One of the Government’s actions in the early 1920s was to force the merger of a large number of smaller railway companies into four larger companies. LMS was the largest of the four and the second largest company of any sort in Britain. The merger was forced through against the wishes of most of the senior management teams and at a great speed. The result was utter chaos as the new super-companies tried to standardise operating procedures across all the merged companies. In 1928 this chaos was still being sorted out.

The actions of Nicholson the goods-train guard ~ failure to protect the train ~ was identified by Mount as a contributory factor. Nicholson may well have been slow off the mark and have failed to take the explosive charges with him when he did respond, but as we have seen London Midland Scottish were responsible for his “failure to protect the train”. If there had been a telephone link between the footplate and the guard’s van the guard would not have had to go forward and could have focussed on protecting the train from the oncoming express. The telephone line that connected the signal boxes ran beside the track on the cess side. Phones or phone line connection points beside the track would have allowed the guard to phone the signalmen and sound the alarm.  Mount understood all this but could not point it out without implicating the operating companies, the regulators and possibly the government.

In the official record, even today, Scott’s actions – falling asleep and giving false information - are given as the cause of the accident and Nicholson’s actions “failure to protect the train” are cited as a contributing factor. Neither of these judgements are honest or fair. Scott’s and Nicholson’s lives were destroyed. The real culprits were never identified. Alan Mount who engineered this travesty of justice was promoted and a decade later Knighted.

Alan Mount was a lifelong servant of the establishment and the state. His ascent was continuous, steady and self-directed from the moment he left school. He was capable, self-serving, clever, a practised deceiver, ruthless, patient and a skilled persuader. He was, it seems, capable of ignoring the directions indicated by his own moral compass and able to fool himself that he was acting for some greater common good.

-o0o-

There is a small gravestone in Putney Vale Cemetery, SW London, marking the grave of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alan Mount and his wife Margaret. Mount died in 1955. Margaret his wife survived him by twenty two years. The inscription recording Mount’s final resting place is barely legible.

The Carlisle men were buried in Stanwix Cemetery on ???? date. The four hearses assembled at the top of Etterby Street where it meets Scotland Road, the north south cardo maximus of the original Roman settlement. It is a mile from there to the cemetery. According to the Cumberland News thirty thousand people lined the route.

There is a monument in the cemetery

"Erected to the memory of four gallant men who lost
their lives in the Dinwoodie railway disaster
- 25th October 1928 - and were interred in this cemetery".

The monument was paid for by public subscription organised by a London newspaper. A few hundred meters to the west of the cemetery what remains of the Kingmore marshalling yards. have been turned into a nature reserve where Oxford Ragwort, senicio squalidus can, of course, be found, large yellow daisies nodding their silken heads as the express trains on The West Coast Mainline connecting London to Glasgow race by.