Train Travel

When Diane did her Tag post, she mentioned the steam trains at the bottom of her grandmother's garden. It reminded me of a couple of events in my neighbourhood that happened 10 years apart.

In December 1957 a steam train that had missed warning lights in fog crashed into the back of a stationary electric train between St John's and Lewisham stations. The steam train crashed into a pier and collapsed the bridge on to another rail bridge below, where a third train was due any moment. Luckily the driver managed to stop the third train. In total 90 people died.



Ten years later, in November 1967, I was out with my boyfriend, my friend and her boyfriend, and her boyfriend's brother with his girlfriend, in a van. As we parked outside a Wimpy Bar to get some burgers, we realised that an non-stop stream of emergency vehicles was going past us. The van driver decided to follow them. After a while we got diverted away from where the problem was, but someone said they knew there was a railway line down there. We went home knowing we had been very close to something catastrophic. As a result I felt sort of "attached" to this disaster, as if I had actually been there.

A train had come off the rails only a mile or so from the previous crash, and 49 people died. One of the passengers who had a lucky escape was none other than Robin Gibb. (The van driver was called Wally Gunthorpe!)

Many years later, while dismantling a road bridge over the aforementioned St John's station, two workmen died when they made the mistake of removing two supporting keystones from the bridge and it collapsed, crushing them. It's not really a lucky corner of the woods, is it?

I still regularly drive under the bridge that was rebuilt after the first crash, and it always makes me sad.