Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash

The first emergency response arrived at 8:22 a.m. with the fire brigade, ambulance and police services being assisted by doctors and a medical unit of the United States Air Force, based five miles away at RAF West Ruislip. This included Abbie Sweetwine, an African-American nurse who became known as "The Angel of Platform Six".[12] Help was accepted from the Salvation Army, the Women's Voluntary Service and local residents.[13] The first loaded ambulance left at 8:27 a.m. and by 12:15 p.m. most of the injured had been taken to hospital. The search for survivors continued until 1:30 the following morning.[5]

Rescue workers amongst the wreckage

All six lines running through the station were closed including the undamaged slow lines to allow the injured access to ambulances that left from the goods yard. The slow lines reopened at 5:32 a.m. the following day. The electric lines were used by cranes to remove the Liverpool locomotives and carriages and reopened 4:30 a.m. on 11 October. The fast lines were reopened, with a speed restriction, at 8:00 p.m. on 12 October and a temporary footbridge was opened the same evening.[5]

There were 112 fatalities, including the driver and fireman of the Perth express and the driver of the lead engine of the Liverpool express. Of these 102 perished at the scene, and the remaining 10 died later in hospital from their injuries. Of the 108 passenger fatalities, at least 64 occurred in the local train, 23 in the Perth train, and 7 in the Liverpool train. The remaining 14 were unclear, but some of the fatalities may have been standing on the platform and hit by the derailed locomotives of the Liverpool train. A total of 340 people reported injury: 183 people were given treatment for shock and minor injury at the station and 157 were taken to hospital, of whom 88 were detained.[5]

The Ministry of Transport report on the collision was written by Lt Col GRS Wilson, a senior member of the Railway Inspectorate and published in June 1953. The local train should have been protected by two semaphore home signals; the Up Fast Inner Home about 190 yards (170 m) to its rear, and the Up Fast Outer Home a further 440 yards (400 m) back. A colour distant signal (the Up Fast Distant) would show green if the Outer Home was ‘clear’, or yellow if the Outer Home was at ‘danger’ and was positioned 1,474 yards (1,348 m) before the Up Fast Outer home; this being the full braking distance for an express at 75 miles per hour (120 km/h),[14] the speed limit for this section of track.[3]

Tests showed no signalling equipment faults[15] and the report was able to dismiss the possibility that the signalman had only changed the route after the Perth train had passed the distant signal at caution.[16] The driver of the Perth train had not slowed his train in response to this signal and had then passed two danger signals before colliding with the Tring train.[16] All the evidence suggested that the driver had made no attempt to stop until the very last moment: Eyewitnesses on board the Perth train reported that an emergency brake application was made a few seconds before the collision.[17]

On this section of line, the local 'residential' trains had priority over long-distance expresses at peak time and drivers of late-running expresses would thus often be further delayed, so the Perth express should have been expecting adverse signals.[7] The driver, "a methodical young man" was in good health and there were no signs of a medical emergency or equipment fault that might have distracted the driver from looking for signals.[18] The report discounted the possibility of green colour signals on the adjacent electric lines having been mistaken for the Up Fast Distant, or of signal sighting being seriously impaired by the low sun (9 degrees above the horizon and 17 degrees to the left of the track).[19]

The report noted that while the fog had lifted in the vicinity of Harrow station, with visibility improving to 200–300 yards (180–270 m) witnesses estimated visibility at the Up Fast Distant to be 50–100 yards (46–91 m). At 50 miles per hour (80 km/h), this would be covered in four seconds or less.

In these circumstances I can only suggest that ..the driver.. must have relaxed his concentration on the signals for some unexplained reason, which may have been quite trivial, at any rate during the few seconds for which the Distant signal could have been seen from the engine at the speed he was running in a deceptive patch of denser fog. Having thus missed the Distant he may have continued forward past Headstone Lane station (which was not on his own side), underestimating the distance he had run from Hatch End and still expecting to see the colour light and not the Harrow semaphore stop signals which were at a considerably higher elevation.[20]

The report considered it surprising that there had been only eight deaths in the leading seven passenger coaches of the Liverpool train; some of these coaches were built to a new British Railways standard (all-steel construction, with buck-eye couplings and bodies welded to the underframe) and seemed to have fared better than older stock.[19]

Automatic warning system magnet located between the rails

Railway safety depended on obedience to signals, and the report saw no need for more restrictive ways of working to accommodate driver error;

...the Rules and Regulations for train working in fog have proved adequate in practice with the aid of the professional skill and care which is displayed by engine drivers throughout the country on the vast majority of occasions. The way to guard against the exceptional case of human failure of the kind which occurred at Harrow does not lie in making the regulations more restrictive, with consequent adverse effect on traffic movement, but in reinforcing the vigilance of drivers by apparatus which provides a positive link between the wayside signals and the footplate.[21]

The report considered a system warning drivers that they had passed a signal at caution or danger would have prevented ten percent of the accidents (and 28% of the consequent deaths) in the previous forty-one years, thereby saving 399 lives, including the 112 at Harrow.[22] British Railways was already developing a system that warned drivers that they were approaching a distant signal at caution, and automatically applied the brakes unless this was acknowledged by the driver. By the time the report had been published a five-year plan had been agreed to install the Automatic warning system on 1,332 miles (2,144 km) of line.[23]

The very occasional failures which have occurred give no grounds for loss of confidence in British railway engine drivers as a whole, and there is no reason to believe that the problem has become more urgent in the last few years, notwithstanding the exceptionally tragic results of one such failure at Harrow. All, however, are agreed that enginemen should be given their share of technical aids to safe working, and I consider that at this late stage there should be no reservations on the rate of progress once the apparatus has been approved.[23]

The accident accelerated the introduction of British Railways' Automatic Warning System (AWS),[24] which had received scepticism by some industry expenditure prioritising experts who theorised more lives would be saved by installing more track circuits and colour light signals.[25] By 1977, one third of British Rail tracks had been fitted with AWS.[26]

After the accident experts criticised the local layout of the track: the Tring train had to wait on the fast line; to keep the length of the rods between the points and the signal-box down, the junction between slow and fast lines lay beyond the station. The junction was changed in 1962.[27]

A memorial plaque for the disaster was unveiled in 2002 to mark the 50th anniversary.[28] A mural was painted along the bordering road featuring scenes from Wealdstone's history by children from local schools and dedicated to the victims' memory.[29]

The Dutch pop group The Nits wrote a song titled "Harrow Accident".[30]

• 
  The north entrance to Harrow and Wealdstone railway station where a memorial to the disaster that occurred there in 1952 was unveiled fifty years later
• 
  The disaster memorial stone plaque on display at the north entrance of Harrow and Wealdstone railway station

The badly damaged Perth locomotive City of Glasgow after the crash. This was rebuilt.

• The leading locomotive hauling the Liverpool train was No. 45637 Jubilee Class 4-6-0 Windward Islands. This locomotive was severely damaged in the accident, having borne the brunt of the impact, and its remains were scrapped.[31]
• The second locomotive of the Liverpool train was No. 46202 Princess Royal Class 4-6-2 Princess Anne, which was a rebuild in conventional form from the experimental steam turbine Turbomotive and had been in service as Princess Anne for only a few months. It took serious damage in the crash, having its leading bogie torn off and main frames buckled, and was scrapped after being deemed beyond economic repair.[31] The loss of this locomotive led to the introduction of the BR Standard Class 8P Pacific, an experimental three-cylinder 4-6-2 No. 71000 Duke of Gloucester, which is today preserved.
• The Perth train had been hauled by No. 46242 Coronation Class 4-6-2 City of Glasgow. This was badly damaged, but went on to be rebuilt, and remained in service until 1963.[32]
• The Tring train had been hauled by an LMS Fowler 2-6-4T No. 42389 running bunker first. This locomotive was undamaged.[33]

Nameplates from Windward Islands and Princess Anne were acquired by the Doncaster Grammar School Railway Society, and remain at the school.[34]

• Hamilton, J.A.B. (1987). Disaster Down the Line: Train Accidents of the Twentieth Century. Cassell Illustrated. ISBN 978-0713719734.
• Nock, O.S. (1978). Historic Railway Disasters. Ian Allan.
• Rolt, L.T.C. (1956). Red for Danger. John Lane, The Bodley Head. (or subsequent editions published by David & Charles: 1966 (2nd edn), 1976 (3rd edn), 1982 (4th edn – ISBN 0-7153-8362-0) )
• Tatlow, Peter (2002). Harrow and Wealdstone 50 Years On: Clearing up the Aftermath. The Oakwood Press. ISBN 0-85361-593-4.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Harrow & Wealdstone rail crash.

• Images of the wreck britishrailways.tripod.com
• Pathé Newsreel report of crash
• Pathé Newsreel report of clear-up
• Pathé Newsreel report of the inquest youtube.com
• MovieTone Newsreel report of crash youtube.com
• Angels and Errors: How the Harrow & Wealdstone Disaster Helped Shape Modern Britain London Reconnections
• Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash: Boy rescuer remembers devastation bbc.co.uk 8 October 2012