Staplehurst

Staplehurst Kent UK Derailment 09-06-1865, app. 14:15.

(P-Way error leading to derailment and train falling off a bridge).

To accompany the Baulking at Bridges blog I have decided to publish a sample chapter from my accident book “An unexpected end to the Journey“, which describes the Staplehurst accident referred to in that blog post.

The type of accident.

This is a typical instance of an accident triggered by faulty preparation and consequent bad execution of engineering work on the railway, although it should be made clear that this accident happened at the beginning of the steep learning curve toward reasonable safety that the railway was engaged in at the time. Nevertheless, even today such engineering work incidents and accidents tend to show a similarity with regard to a certain lack of thoroughness during preparation and whilst on the job. Many end up more like a farce; others are serious accidents (see Brühlin Germany, Carcassonnein France, Ohinewai in New Zealand and Stavorenin The Netherlands). The three latter incidents took place after the change of the millennium, yet all those mentioned bear that same unmistakable hallmark of failing thoroughness that also colours this very early accident in the county of Kent, UK. In a way it proves that an organisation can make rules for everything, yet that in the course of the daily grind it still is down to the individual to prove the innate understanding of what is at play and muster the insight and discipline to keep everything in one piece. Or, conversely, let hurry (often with the best of intentions, make no mistake), disinterest, boredom or distraction prevail and allow the kind of errors to occur that cause damage and perhaps injury or death. This particular incident is a sad example of one the latter and as such it stood at the cradle of many of the rules and regulations that surround the organisation of railway engineering work possessions at present. That this accident, in which out of 80 first-class and 35 second-class passengers 10 people (7 female and 3 male) died and 40 were to a worse or lesser degree injured but survived their ordeal, gained such notoriety and could lead to many improvements is because the famous writer Charles Dickens, returning from Paris with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother (plus the manuscript of his book Our Mutual Friend) was on board this Tidal boat train when it crashed. Dickens not only wrote about it, but also proved man enough to, after establishing his companions were alright, get out of the wreckage to try and give succour to those worse affected by the accident than himself. The shock of the actual occurrence, but most of all what he witnessed down at the wreck-site (due to the wholesale destruction of a number of coaches there was severe mutilation of some of the victims, two badly affected people dying whilst he attempted to help them), mentally overwhelmed him and he neither fully recovered from the shock nor felt truly well again. Five years later, at 58 years of age, he died from a stroke. Nowadays many would blame untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, or something quite similar to shellshock with its inevitable mental depression, for his death. Of the traincrew the driver and fireman as well as the first guard were uninjured, the second guard was lightly and the third guard more seriously injured.

The accident location.

The accident happened on a bridge across a small river, the Beult, between the stations of Headcorn and Staplehurst in the Southeastern English county of Kent. Whilst the Beult normally is barely more than a sluggish and weed-strewn rivulet, after heavy rainfall or during thaw of good quantities of snow it can come in spate and flood the nearby countryside. For that reason adequate flood yards (hams) are maintained either side of the riverbed and as a consequence the rail bridge near Staplehurst is quite a bit longer than the width of the river in its normal state would warrant. The Beult Bridge at the time had 8 openings of 21 ft (6.36 m), its total length being 168 ft (51 m). The abutments and 3 ft (0.90 m) wide masonry piers carried cast-iron trough girders, in the troughs of which wooden baulks were fitted that carried and held the track as normal with cast-iron chairs and wooden keys. The track is situated at only 10 ft (3.3 m) above the normal water level. Outside the track-carrying girders there were lighter cast iron girders that carried the cess walkways, which consisted of a layer of crushed chalk covering corrugated iron sheeting riveted on to the girders. Between the Up and Down tracks a similar arrangement was used as a centre walkway. No further guidance features for a derailed train were provided and crossing the bridge could be hazardous for pedestrians as no railings were fitted. The track is very straight and as good as level along this part of the route, so already in the 1860’s speeds of 50 mph (80 km/h) were an everyday occurrence for express passenger trains at this location. To that end the track maintenance was rather intense and as a consequence the accident report mentions that the track was in a very good state. Given later accidents on the Southeastern tracks whereby the state of the track was mentioned as one of the reasons for the occurrence (Sevenoaks, Hither Green), the conclusion must be that Southern track maintenance had lost some of this initial finesse through the later years.

The train involved.

The locomotive detailed to haul the Tidal boat train that day was 2-2-2 (1A1) number 199. The machine had two running axles, a leading one with 4 ft 9 ins (1.5 m) wheels and a trailing one with 4 ft wheels (1.20 m), inbetween of which there was a single driven axle with wheels of 7-foot (2,12 m) diameter that was driven by two 17-inch cylinders with a stroke of 22-inch. The locomotive without tender weighed in at approximately 32 imperial tons and had a wheelbase of 16 ft 6 ins, slightly more than 5 metres. It was a locomotive that adhered to the concept that machines with a single driven axle had the freedom of motion (due to avoiding the inevitable loss of traction energy through friction in the bearings between coupling rods) that made them ideal runners for express work, although even by the time of this accident this notion had already begun to erode in favour of machines with more driven axles. The 2-2-2 (1A1) axle notation in fact makes them so-called Patentees, although they were already fitted with a later type of larger boiler that generally became known as the long-boiler. The machines were designed by James l’Anson Cudworth, Locomotive Superintendent of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway, and 16 of them, known as the mail singles, were put into service in two batches between 1861 and 1866. Their demise followed uncommonly soon for machines of that era, between 1882 and 1890 after a working life of only 21 to 25 years, which usually indicates that they were not experienced as an unqualified success. Otherwise they would have been modernised, upgraded in present day terms, and lived for at least another 20 years or more.

Its tender was a six-wheel (3-axle) unit instead of the at the time more usual 4-wheeler. It had a wheelbase of14 ft, 4.25 metres, and was allowed to be loaded to approximately 24 imperial tons.

The Tidal boat train that day consisted of 14 vehicles, all of them four-wheelers on two axles; as yet no six-wheel or bogie vehicles were included, which indicates that the ride must have been rather rocky despite the good track.

From the locomotive with its tender there were a leading guard’s van, one second class carriage, seven first class carriages, two second class carriages and three vans. Notice the location of the second-class carriages and the guard’s vans; in case of a collision they would be in the more vulnerable position at the extremities of the train. From the leading guard’s van there was a “communication cord” to signal messages to the driver on the locomotive footplate by working the locomotive whistle, whilst the driver equally used this whistle to signal messages to his guards, e.g. about applying their brakes. Three guards accompanied this train. The man in the leading brake van had both the normal wheel-operated parking brake at his disposition and a Cremar’s patent quick-acting spring-operated emergency brake that operated on his brake-van and two following passenger vehicles. The other two guards had the normal horizontal wheel-operated parking brake on their vans, quite a job to apply these as I experienced when regularly berthing locomotive-hauled Mk1 passenger rolling stock at Stewarts Lane Depot in Battersea, London with exactly such a hand wheel.

The guard’s vans had glazed observatories with a view of the road ahead (otherwise known as birdcages) where the guards were required to sit and scan the road for signals and problems. Thus, five out of 14 vehicles were braked; we now touch the issue of braking power on a mid-19^thCentury train. During his investigation into this accident Colonel Rich comes to the conclusion that with five braked vehicles and a tender brake (the locomotive itself had no brake whatever, but could have its motion reversed which applied a sort of dynamic braking power to the train) there was sufficient braking power. With which he probably was right looking at the time of writing of his words. But in that time the locomotives were quickly getting faster (60 mph, 100 km/h, was becoming a commonly travelled speed by then) and more powerful. Yet no comparable effort went into devising technology to stop the mass of a train anywhere near quickly from such speeds, especially in case things went wrong. Westinghouse with his automatic air pressure brake and to a lesser extent Smith with his automatic vacuum brake were yet to come forward.

The permanent way work involved.

In the in the main line from Folkestone to London, East of Staplehurst station, all the longitudinal timber baulks that carry the rails on three bridges there had to be renewed in a ten-week period. For that reason a crew of 4 carpenters, a general labourer and 3 platelayers (track gangers) had been assembled under a foreman of platelayers, a Mr. John Benge. Mr Benge is described in Col. Rich’s accident report as an experienced, steady and intelligent man (he and his foreman carpenter were proficient in reading and calculating, to mention but one thing, and that wasn’t all that common amongst the labouring population of those days) who had been with the South Eastern Railway for 10 years and had acted as foreman for almost three years. Under his management they took out and renewed the rail-carrying timber baulks on the three bridges, one after the other, for ten weeks long. Such timber bridge baulks (nowadays fabricated from pressure-treated tropical hardwood, but then from local hardwood that was only surface-treated against rot and therefore prone to relatively fast decay in Britain’s often moist and mildewy climate) are fastened in various ways on to the steel of the bridge, in line with the rails they are to carry, after which the normal cast-iron rail chairs are fitted with heavy coach bolts (tirefonds) on to these baulks and subsequently the rail (of the bull-head type) are placed and secured with wooden or spring-steel “keys” into these chairs. This track, and this way of supporting it on bridges, can still be seen in this country, incidentally. In my early days of working as a guard on the tracks of the former South Eastern Railway near London I well remember seeing exactly this kind of work on bridges around London Bridge and Charing Cross stations. This type of track keyed into cast steel chairs, incidentally, is known in the UK as “bull-head” track, an older name is “double-head” track. An advantage of this rail type over the presently generally applied “flat-bottom” or Vignoles rail is that the absence of the flat bottom flange makes the narrower profile of rail somewhat easier to fit in the sharp curves that are so abundant on the Southern Railway as well as on the London Underground network. In France this type of track still can be found to this day, whilst in e.g. The Netherlands it was also used at some time in history.

The bridge timber renewal work sequences on the South Eastern Main Line consisted of the carpenters first carefully measuring the dimensions of the new baulks and then making the new wood fit into the place of the worn baulk and drill the holes for the rail chairs. All that work was done away from the track. Then, when the new baulk was fully ready to be placed, the platelayers would unfasten and lift the necessary rail lengths (these did not correspond with the baulk lengths, incidentally, usually more rail lengths than one had to be removed) and then take off the rail chairs, after which the carpenters could take out and remove the worn baulk and drop and fasten the new one in its place. Finally the platelayers quickly refitted the rail chairs on top in the pre-drilled holes and inserted and fastened the rail with wooden keys again. This was rather a logical (and comparatively fast) way of working, eminently useful for short possessions that did not interrupt traffic. During the ten weeks of replacing the baulks on three bridges the work had been so well timed, in fact, that only thrice approaching trains had to be stopped: twice a ballast train and once a light locomotive, neither of which was running at the permitted line speed. At no time had one of the faster running booked passenger or freight trains been stopped out of course, which is important, as this would very likely have shown up the errors in the safety arrangements that now were at the root of this accident. Or more to the point; the accident would then probably have happened to another train.

Preparations and safety.

Given that at the time there was no possibility of direct verbal or other communication between the signallers and the remote track gang on the bridges, it will be appreciated that this smart work in between the passing trains was only possible because the foreman, Mr Benge, was thoroughly familiar with the time-constraints that the timetable imposed on him to do his work. And therewith only he was fully responsible for the safety surrounding the work that his gang did. There was an issue in the timetable of which Mr. Benge was only too well aware: due to the shallow harbour at Folkestone the ferry from France could only dock at certain states of the tide and as a consequence the connecting boat train to London was timed differently every day. It was therefore of paramount importance that the planner of the engineering work, i.e. Mr. Benge, made sure from the special timetable that he knew when that boat train, for a long time known as the “Tidal”, was due to come through at his engineering site. He no doubt was also well aware that his employers would not take kindly to seeing this premium train full of first class travellers and foreigners stopped, especially not for what they considered no good reason such as overrunning engineering possessions. On the 9^ththe track gang was working on the final three baulks out of all the 32 of this job and before breakfast that morning they had already replaced one baulk, there were only two more to go to finish the entire job. During that breakfast, in the company of his gang, Mr. Benge was seen working things out and was busy checking his timetable and calculating the moments when the last two baulks on the Staplehurst Beult Bridge could be dealt with. With the Tidal working timetable in his hand, as his gangers told the inquiry, he came to the conclusion that the Up Tidal today would not be at Headcorn until 17:20 and that he had decided to replace the very last baulk, for which two lengths of rail had to be removed, in that traffic interval between a regular Up train due at Staplehurst at 14:34 and a Down train due at 16:15. So, later during the morning and early afternoon the second-last baulk was dealt with and then at half past two work started on the last one after the Headcorn Up Section signal, at danger after the passage of the 14:34 Up service, cleared again (open block working!). 

As it turned out in retrospect, Mr. Benge had made a very serious, but also very common, mistake; a mistake that still is made by many who look up timetables all over the world. Mr. Benge had looked up the timetable page for the Tidal on the 10^th, the next day. On the 9^th, the day that the accident would happen, the Tidal was in fact booked through Headcorn at about two hours earlier at 15:15, right in the middle of the time that Mr. Benge had given himself to clear the work on that very last baulk.

His leading carpenter had obtained a copy of the Tidal boat train working timetable and could, and in the light of what happened perhaps should (in the way more officers than one used to shoot the sun and stars to calculate the position on a ship) have additionally checked the accuracy of Mr. Benge’s arrangement. But one day the foreman carpenter had accidentally left his copy laying on the track, where a passing train ran over and shredded it. As at present he was detailed to work under the foreman platelayer, who had his own copy anyway, he had not seen the use of asking for another. That, then, had been the first possible chance to correct Mr. Benge’s mistake and so avoid the accident altogether. Mr. Benge’s second and in fact main tool to avoid mishap consisted of his lookout / flagman, a Mr John Wiles (see also Vaughan, Mississippi, USA). As yet no other signs or other indications to advertise the engineering possession ahead to the traincrew (seeOhinewai) existed. It was Mr. Wiles’s important job to protect the worksite against unexpectedly approaching trains and to protect these trains against mishap from track under repair. The rulebook stated that this “signal”man had to position himself at 1,000 yards (914 m) -or more as necessary in case of curves or downhill gradients- away from the worksite toward the oncoming traffic, in this case toward Headcorn station. He had to carry a red flag (or red showing lantern at night) and five detonators, also known as fog signals or torpedoes in North America. These bits of standard railway safety equipment, we still use them in the UK, are to be mounted on the rail top with lead straps and will explode with a very loud report when a locomotive wheels rolls over them. As soon as the locomotive crew hears them they must stop the train and ascertain why they were stopped, and they must not move the train again before they are fully informed about what is going on and what they are allowed to do. Mr. Wiles should have fitted these five detonators on the railhead, one such device every 250 yards (228.5 m) and then two of them near his protection position at 10 yards (9.14 m) apart, whilst walking the track to the 1,000-yard protection position. His flagman’s red flag or lantern was the main visual warning to stop an approaching train, whilst the exploding detonators added a second tier of danger warning to the traincrew plus giving a measure of the distance to the danger site and communicating a clear obligation to the driver and guards to stop. This set of visual and auditory warnings, plus the thousand or more yards of braking distance allowed for, would nominally have been sufficient to stop any train before coming on to the work site. On the day of the accident, however, the accident inquiry heard that Mr Benge gave his flagman the necessary red flag but only two detonators, with the instruction to use them only when the weather turned foggy. Why he did this has not been kept for posterity, but from reading about the way many railway companies on an international basis tried to protect their budgets I can well see that some SE&CR superiors had given Mr. Benge a few useful hints about ways to bolster his blossoming career, such as not using expensive materials when it wasn’t obviously necessary. In any case, as a result Mr. Wiles walked to his protection location without placing the detonators as required. Which in all likelihood was no different from all the other days that he had done this job, as such things aren’t usually changed from day to day. The British English railway expression for such an occurrence is a Rules Breach, incidentally. Mr. Wiles walked to a point that he had used on every day that he had done this job at the Staplehurst Beult bridge. It was a location that was ten telegraph poles away from the worksite on the bridge. He was in fact using a well established, but equally well-known inaccurate, railwayman’s way to measure distance. Because, apart from the fact that he didn’t know that due to the soft ground the telegraph poles had been placed at somewhat shorter distances than normal along this stretch of line, he would still not have been at 1,000 yards distance as even normally poles weren’t standing a full 100 yards (90 m) apart. For these two reasons he ended up, according to two external witnesses (farm workers in a neighbouring field), not far past a farmer’s occupation level crossing, called Slowman’s crossing, at 440 yards (402.16 m) from the bridge worksite. Colonel Rich estimates that Mr. Wiles was in total only 554 yards (457 m) away from the worksite, which is about half the distance that he should have gone and thus in US terms any approaching fast trains were short-flagged (see Vaughan). In the previous weeks at Staplehurst viaduct Mr. Wiles had to stop only three slow moving non-timetabled trains and in all three cases no mishap had occurred, obviously due to the low speed involved. Whether any detonators actually exploded at those instances has not been recorded.

A third issue that could have avoided, or mitigated the severity of, the accident would have been printed notices, or bulletins, which inform signallers, the train drivers, firemen and train guards about the ongoing engineering possessions and so alert them to a potential source of danger and delay at well defined locations along the line ahead. Internationally these notices or bulletins are nowadays issued to all front line operational railway staff, who usually have to sign for receipt (see also BrühlandOhinewai). They detail alterations to the rulebook, signalling and permanent way and give information about locations, dates and times of engineering work, applicable temporary speed restrictions and all further issues of interest to maintain safe traffic. In Britain they appear on a Weekly and Monthly basis and although a few times drivers got caught out on not reading them because of mishaps that could have been avoided, on the whole train drivers take those engineering notices rather seriously indeed. The South Eastern & Chatham Railway did in fact issue printed engineering notices to their front line staff, but only when there were “protracted repairs”. These were repairs, as it turned out, where the possessions would occupy the line long enough for the booked train service to have to be altered. Ten weeks of blitz possessions between the booked trains, quickly opening up and relaying the track to carry out major repairs on bridges, did not fall into this definition and therefore the local inspector of the permanent way did not inform his company manager. And therefore that gentleman did not apply for appearance of the work in printed notices. In fact, to his amazement Colonel Rich found that the company manager concerned was wholly unaware that these important track engineering works between trains were going on at all. A measure of incredulity in that carefully worded 19^thCentury English glimmers through in the accident report here.

The Log.

Although the timetable for this train specified 14:38 as time of departure, on the ninth of June the Tidal boat train had left Folkestone Harbour at some time between 14:36 and 14:39, depending on whose watch was consulted, to begin the steep climb up to Folkestone East Junction with the main line from Dover. This is where the train reversed direction and where the Cudworth Single Driver Mail locomotive took over from the team of locomotives that had pushed and pulled the train up the ascent. 

Folkestone Harbour station is now closed, unfortunately, and the sight of a train coming out of the station, crossing the revolving bridge between the inner and outer harbour areas and then climb away on the ascent to higher ground is lost to us. Specials such as the privately owned UK Orient Express very occasionally were hauled by steam traction along this branch line and steam locomotives on their hands and knees to get a train on its way up to East Junction certainly was a spectacle to behold and to listen to. But even electric or diesel hauled trains were well worth the effort to visit and see them tackle this ascent.

Things went smooth as usual. At 15:11 the speeding Tidal passed Headcorn station, according to Col. Rich, which was in fact about two minutes behind schedule. Another two minutes later, at 15:13 (Col Rich’s report erroneously mentions 2.13 pm here, incidentally) she was at the Beult Bridge near Headcorn. Given that Headcorn (a fact also mentioned in Col. Rich’s report) is two miles distant from the bridge, it suggests a speed rather closer to a mile a minute (60 mph or 92 km/h) than the 50 mph (80 km/h) train speed that Col. Rich mentions elsewhere in his report. The locomotive certainly was capable of such speed.

At that moment two sections of the off-side (right-hand, six-foot side) rail in the direction of travel had been taken out and 13 ft of the old timber baulk had just been removed. The remainder of that baulk was still fastened in the trough girder, awaiting removal and replacement with the prepared baulk that was waiting close by. The engineering crew was powerless to intervene and could only watch things go badly wrong.

Lookout / Flagman John Wiles sprung into action on hearing and seeing the fast approaching train and waved his flag, which was picked up by the driver who immediately shut-off steam and signalled the request for brake application to his guards with his whistle. Despite presumably being seated in the observation rooms in their vans and looking forward, as the regulations told them to do, the guards, especially the man in the leading brake van, nevertheless had not noticed the clearly visible red-flag waving lookout for reasons that have not been recorded. As an unfortunate result the guards set to work applying the normal brakes with the cumbersome big handwheel as for a regular stop, a job that eats away precious seconds, instead of the first man immediately applying the spring-actuated Cremar’s Patent Emergency Brake on the three leading vehicles in one short moment and then applying the heavy handbrake. The fireman on the locomotive screwed down his handbrake on the tender whilst the driver reversed the steam distribution motion and then applied “counter” steam. The net result was that only at about 250 yards from the bridge the brakes were working at their maximum power and that the train was not going to stop before the by now clearly visible worksite. 

The speed with which the braking locomotive took the hole in the track at the far end of the bridge (30 mph -50 km/h- according to Col. Rich, but looking at various issues quite substantially higher in my humble opinion) must have been high enough for the right-hand wheels to more or less fly the first section of missing track and timber, as she left no marks in a few still available wooden parts. Only past the hole of the already removed part of the baulk did those telltale flange-scores appear in the remaining part of the baulk, indicating that the machine had tipped to the left and landed there. On landing at its right hand side the locomotive pushed its left hand wheeltreads over the top of the rail off the rail, which was forced out of the chairs towards the left, and then the top flanges of the cast-iron girder trough in which the baulks were fitted probably acted as check-rails do nowadays, which prevented her from going off the bridge. The locomotive managed to go onwards more or less in a straight line that way and safely cross the remainder of the bridge on to land again, where she came to a stop in the ballast at 28 yards past the Staplehurst-end bridge abutment, her right-hand wheels in the four-foot and her left hand wheels in the cess. She was comparatively lightly damaged; the worst was that the steam distribution rods (seized in the reverse position, proving that the driver did his job as described) and her axles were found to be bent and partially seized, which must have made rather an awkward job out of her removal.

The tender remained coupled to the locomotive but was standing across the Up line along which she had travelled. Its middle axle was broken following some heavy impact and the coupling and buffing gear as well as its braking gear were seriously damaged, further indication of heavy impact. Colonel Rich estimates that that broken middle axle in fact had hit the oncoming rail or still mounted baulk, suggesting that the flying and then derailed but upright locomotive kept the nose of the tender up in a proper airplane landing attitude whilst the nose-diving first van behind the tender pushed the trailing end of the tender down. The first van had broken away after that impact, another indicator of just how heavy the blow was suffered by the tender, but remained within the parameters of the track of the Up line. It was this heavy blow that the tender dealt to the bridge structure that ultimately caused the accident to become as terrible as it turned out, because the left-hand cast-iron bridge girder under it snapped and collapsed to the left under the following train, tipping the vehicles on top off the track and so causing the others to be pulled off. The lot landed upside-down or on their side on to the land and into the water below. Only this first van now was holding up the capsized first passenger carriage (second class) of which the leading axle was propped up on the embankment and the rear axle suspended over the riverbed. In turn the leading first class carriage hung, still attached to this second-class carriage, but with is trailing end resting on the ground next to the riverbed. This was the vehicle that Charles Dickens and his accompanying ladies occupied. The next first-class vehicle laid upside down next to the river, the following five in various states of destruction, upside down or on their sides, in the river and its accompanying mud. The following vehicle was a second-class vehicle on its side half in the river; the next second-class vehicle had its leading end on dry land at river level but, as the coupling had held, hung suspended from the bridge abutment at the Headcorn side. This is the scene we can see on the well-known lithograph of this accident, where in fact many of the lesser-damaged vehicles have already been removed. Of the trailing vans the next two were on their wheels, derailed in the ballast, whilst the last four vehicles were still standing unscathed in the track.

The first visible vehicle is one of the shored-up luggage vans with the conductor lookout, the birdcage, clearly visible. The diagonally leaning vehicle supposedly is the one Dickens climbed out of.

The tally was that seven carriages were completely destroyed from falling off the bridge into the riverbed and from damage caused by rescuers with axes and jimmies when they attempted to extricate occupants. The damage to the vehicles that had not crash-landed below but remained suspended from or on the track was things like damaged draw and buffing gear and crunched ends and sides, all repairable issues.

The bridge and the track at the accident site had fared badly as well. In the Up Line the left hand trough-girder under the rail had broken and collapsed into the riverbed, whilst the derailing locomotive and the overturning train had largely taken out the cess-girder with its footway as well. As a result the left hand rail in the Up Line had been torn away and from the end of the bridge to where the locomotive had come to a stop the track had been bent and the chairs broken. Apart from the girder directly under the train the second and third outside girders had been broken and the sixth and eight were found to be cracked.

Charles Dickens’ comments.

Dickens lived right through the period when travel in general increased its speed from 10 mph (16 km/h) of the horse-drawn stage coach to the 60 mph (app. 100 km/h) of the train in which he experienced this accident. He grasped the exciting fact that he was witness to how the world was shrinking beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, that something like a trip from London to Paris, which a mere ten years previously would have taken two or three days, was now reduced to slightly more than half a day’s travel, fully independent of the weather, on the co-ordinated train and boat services in France and England and that departure and arrival could be predicted to the minute. And whilst he truly loved that aspect of the changing world, he naturally was profoundly shocked by the sight of what could happen when things went wrong. This is part of what he wrote about the Staplehurst accident:

“I was in the carriage that didn’t go down, but that hung inexplicably suspended in the air over the side of the broken bridge. It was caught upon the turn by some of the ruin of the bridge, and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner“. After Dickens had made his difficult way out of the carriage, standing on its footboard and hanging on to handrails (it should be made clear at this stage that the carriage doors were locked as usual at the time, see the Meudonaccident), he continues: “Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge out at a window, and had no idea that there was a swampy field 15 feet (about 4.5 metres) down below them, and nothing else. The two guards (one with his face cut) were running up and down… quite wildly. I called out to them“. He then sets out to attempt to get people out of the overturned carriages in the field and river below, give succour to the wounded with his brandy flask and his hat full of water, working hours amidst the hurt and the dying. What was happening to him emotionally shines through when he remarks about the sight of a badly hurt and blood-covered man: “he had such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn’t bear to look at him“. But Dickens nevertheless forced himself to clean his face and wound and give him a drink. The man uttered: “I am gone” and died.

His post-accident comment: “No imagination can conceive the ruin of the carriages, or the extraordinary weights under which the people were lying, or the complications into which they were twisted up iron and wood, and mud and water“. Something that unfortunately still can be as true today as it was in the 19th Century.

The inquiry.

Charles Dickens’ writing and commenting on this accident caused an even greater interest in the woes of rail travel than such accidents attracted normally. In that light it is interesting to read Colonel Rich’s comment in his report, as he, fairly unlike the normal way of doing this sort of business in that time, felt reasonably free to not mince his words when blaming the railway company for the damage and the loss of life:

In all human possibility this train would have reached London safely, (even though the road was broken at the Beult viaduct) had the rules of the South-Eastern Company been adhered to. The provisions in those rules, for always using fog signals when rails are taken up, is an additional precaution not generally adopted by Railway Companies.(Col. Rich tells us here that the SE&CR nominally worked with more extensive safety provisions than most other railway operators in Britain).

It appears, however, that for the last ten weeks these rules have been daily disregarded on the line between Staplehurst and Headcorn Stations, and that the Inspector of the Permanent Way, who is supposed to visit every part of the line several times during the week, if he is unable to do so daily, took no notice of such disobedience of the rules, though it does not appear possible for him to have been ignorant of the fact.

After which he expresses his disbelief that no one informs the drivers and guards of trains running through the engineering site of what is going on, in order for them to keep a sharper lookout. How much clearer can one get?

Comment.

It is too easy to blame John Benge alone for this accident. Colonel Rich clearly points at something that we now would call a corporate culture that didn’t foster and enforce safety.  However silly Mr. Benge’s mistake of not properly checking the date of his timetable page, it is something that to this day makes the difference between things such as a trip to the seaside going smartly or things ending up in a mess. At this particular time in my life I experience on a daily basis how passengers as well as professionals make mistakes with timetables, it is so easily done. Especially in the times of stress to perform that Mr. Benge must have experienced, because I think that Mr. Benge, probably keen to climb the ladder to an inspectorhood or maybe even better, was under considerable stress indeed, to continually impress his superiors in that very Victorian English way. That was very likely the most important issue to him, instead of doggedly going for the safe option. Mr. Wiles? I don’t think that he actually understood why he had to go a thousand yards, that he had an inkling about braking distances of various trains. Like many people haven’t to this day. He just chose a spot that looked good and after all, he had stopped three trains safely from there (see Vaughan). Another issue: Was it really Mr. Benge who literally told Mr. Wiles to only take two detonators and to not put these on the track, or did Mr. Wiles just save himself the trouble of having to carry all that equipment around, having to put them down and pick them up again? But, naturally, he told a different story at the inquest after the accident. On top of which, with this same method of work everything had gone fine for the past ten weeks, which probably counts for similarly executed work on the track during the many previous years. One of the characteristics of work on the railway is that rules are there to be occasionally bent; the railway would not rarely have come to a grinding halt if staff and crews did not resort to unofficial methods. I can recall many instances of doing that myself and have the pictures to show some results of others having done that. Another characteristic is that things normally go just fine. But you are lulled into false sense of security, then start cutting corners to relieve the discipline stress of doing it right all the time, until the moment things do not keep going right and in that case there is absolutely no warning (even Proverbs 1.27 in the Bible has something to say about that: “Calamity comes like the Whirlwind”). If fate, then, is unkind, you’ll find that peace of mind at work shattered in the most horrendous way; see many other chapters in this book. How to tell people to stay vigilant whilst doing those boring jobs? Read about a comparatively recent accident at Holzdorfin Germany. I don’t think Mr. Benge saw his wish for promotion (see what happened with fireman Caldarelli at East Robinson) come true, even though he would never commit this sort of stupidity again and probably would be the best man to fill the job. In aerospace circles it is traditionally found that the safest pilots are those who came through a crash, for exactly the same reason.

As a result of this crash and similar later occurrences the way rail engineering work is organised in a completely different manner now. Obviously, the fact that there are many more services using the line at present and that they tend to travel at higher speeds again adds to the problems for the track engineers who set up ways to do the necessary repairs. To start with, the responsibility for the moment when to start dismantling the track has been taken out of the hands of the people actually doing the job. This is nowadays all part of a highly detailed planning process that took place Weeks or Months, if not Years, before commencement of the actual job. As a result there is a strict timetable that tells everyone concerned exactly and in great detail what to do, and when. Certain flexibility has to be built in; there are machines that break down (Carcassonne) or people that go sick. Trains or (notably) road freight vehicles with the necessary material or tools may not show up. Getting everybody to do just what is wanted (keeping engineering trains in the right order and direction may turn out surprisingly difficult under certain circumstances) is never easy. But the usual result is that the railway is safely closed down, taken under possession and only then is it allowed to take out rail or dismantle signalling and structures. At the proper time everything must be in working order to start up rail traffic again. Does it always work out that way? No, unfortunately not, see Ohinewai and Stavoren. Individual members of the work gangs are still able to commit serious mistakes; machines occasionally break down and stop progress. And many were the times that Monday morning commuters were waiting in vain for trains due to overrunning engineering work, which unfortunately will happen time and again. But planning and organisation mistakes such as Mr. Benge’s are in the great majority of cases no longer the dividing line between life and death anymore. And mistakes are still made, as every track worker, signaller and train driver can tell you from experience, but, comparatively, deaths occur not that often any more and if they happen it is among the track workers rather than the travelling public.