There are certain trains that you should never catch. You won't spot them specially marked in any timetable, nor will their doomed status be flagged on any station departure board. But climb aboard and you may never reach your destination, nor indeed any other destination. Two such trains collided in thick fog in southeast London on the evening of Wednesday 4th December 1957. Ninety passengers and crew lost their lives that night, just east of St John's station, in what is still Britain's third worst railway disaster.
It had been a foggy day across southeast England, and by evening all the rail services to Kent were seriously disrupted. Commuters piled aboard delayed trains in an attempt to get home, and one by one each locomotive headed off towards the commuter belt. But the misty conditions, combined with unscheduled timetabling, led to a series of unfortunate mistakes being made. The over-worked signalman at Parks Bridge Junction, just west of Lewisham town centre, accidentally muddled the order of two eastbound trains. He thought the first train was heading to Hayes, whereas the Hayes train was actually second behind a Hastings-bound service. Both trains queued unnecessarily in the fog, protected to the rear by a red signal. But a red signal is only of any use if somebody spots it in time, and the next train driver didn't.
Driver William Trew left Cannon Street station at 6:08pm, on the footplate of a steam engine heading for Ramsgate. His train was a whole hour and a quarter late, and it's likely that he was trying to make up some lost time. Trew steamed through New Cross at 35mph, then rushed onwards through the cutting towards St John's. Two amber signals to the right of the track should have warned him to slow down, but he saw neither out of his tiny window through the thickening fog. A red signal at the far end of the St John's platform therefore came as a complete surprise and, with just 138 yards of clear track remaining, a crash was inevitable.
There are certain carriages that you should never sit in. They're not labelled on the window, and they're not always the obvious ones at the front or rear, but you should never ever climb inside. For the Hayes train, stood waiting on the embankment, the carriage to avoid turned out to be number eight. Carriage ten, at the rear, survived mostly intact because the brakes were on. Carriage nine was shunted forwards and upwards, again mostly intact. But carriage eight had the misfortune to end up directly underneath carriage nine and was almost completely crushed and destroyed.
The carnage in the Ramsgate train was even worse. Trew's engine stayed on the rails but the coal truck behind shot off to the left, smashing into a nearby bridge support. Unfortunately this bridge carried a second railway line, running diagonally over the tracks. Collision with the tender caused the entire central section to collapse, girders and all, flattening the front two and a half carriages of the train below. If only the crash had occurred a few feet further on, just past the bridge, scores of lives might have been saved.
There was one particular lucky escape, however. The driver of a Dartford-bound train chugging towards the overbridge managed to spot the twisted girders ahead just in time, and drew his train to a halt before it toppled down onto the tracks below. But that was the only bright spot. By the time local residents had raised the alarm and the emergency services had pulled survivors from the wreckage, ninety commuters were dead and 176 seriously injured. No other UK rail disaster in the last 50 years has had so high a death toll.
Stand on the lonely island platform at St John's station today (as a handful of irregular commuters still do) and the crash site can still be seen [photo]. You have to walk right to the eastern tip of the platform to be able to view the tracks where the collision happened (over there, beneath the "temporary" replacement overbridge erected two weeks after the crash). Every couple of minutes another sleek white train rushes through this very complicated junction, but there's far less danger nowadays because each is equipped with AWS cab signalling (rolled out nationwide as a direct consequence of this particular incident). Watch them speed by - only a handful of services are actually timetabled to stop at St John's to pick up passengers. Maybe that's why there's no memorial plaque anywhere on the station (councillors decided to erect one on the front of the Lewisham ticket office instead, which is on the wrong line altogether). But there are many people in the area, and across northern Kent, for whom this is a location tinged with great sadness and emotion.
There are certain stations that we should never forget.
There are certain trains that you should never catch. You won't spot them specially marked in any timetable, nor will their doomed status be flagged on any station departure board. But climb aboard and you may never reach your destination, nor indeed any other destination. Two such trains collided in thick fog in southeast London on the evening of Wednesday 4th December 1957. Ninety passengers and crew lost their lives that night, just east of St John's station, in what is still Britain's third worst railway disaster.
Driver William Trew left Cannon Street station at 6:08pm, on the footplate of a steam engine heading for Ramsgate. His train was a whole hour and a quarter late, and it's likely that he was trying to make up some lost time. Trew steamed through New Cross at 35mph, then rushed onwards through the cutting towards St John's. Two amber signals to the right of the track should have warned him to slow down, but he saw neither out of his tiny window through the thickening fog. A red signal at the far end of the St John's platform therefore came as a complete surprise and, with just 138 yards of clear track remaining, a crash was inevitable.
There was one particular lucky escape, however. The driver of a Dartford-bound train chugging towards the overbridge managed to spot the twisted girders ahead just in time, and drew his train to a halt before it toppled down onto the tracks below. But that was the only bright spot. By the time local residents had raised the alarm and the emergency services had pulled survivors from the wreckage, ninety commuters were dead and 176 seriously injured. No other UK rail disaster in the last 50 years has had so high a death toll.
