Woodhead station and tunnels (1975)
Whiling away a couple of hours in Nottingham Local Studies Library I came across a memoir by L Geoffrey Raynor, Geoff: 44 years a railwayman (Plowright 2000). Mr Raynor joined the LNER as a messenger boy and successively worked as train-register lad, signalman, controller and finally senior accident clerk at Doncaster from before the Second World War until he retired.
My eye chanced on a story about the notorious Woodhead Tunnel in the latter days of steam. Driving a steam locomotive three miles through the uphill single bore was unusually difficult and deeply unpleasant because it was often impossible to see, and sometimes impossible to breathe.
If the loco stalled, there was nothing to be done but to start up in pitch darkness – darkness so impenetrable that the walls of the tunnel were invisible, and it was possible unintentionally to restart in reverse. The only way to know whether the loco was going forwards or backwards was to scrape a shovel along the tunnel lining.
According to Mr Raynor, at least once a train propelled out of the portal in full reverse and collided with the train behind it. I can’t find a record of such an incident in the excellent Railways Archive website http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/, which mentions two Woodhead Tunnel accidents, on March 24th 1875 and September 24th 1936.
The latter would be within Mr Raynor’s memory-span, but the Archive doesn’t carry documents relating to the incident. The data-file states there were no fatalities or injuries and specifies the results as “train split, runaway train portion, collision, derailment”. It adds, “We believe that this accident was not the subject of a published formal accident investigation.”
According to newspaper reports, the 1875 derailment was caused by the unexplained presence of a platelayer’s trolley on the track. A fast goods train smashed into the trolley, damaged the track and several wagons. There were no injuries, but the clearance operation created a queue of sixteen trains waiting to proceed until an emergency two-way signalling operation was arranged through the adjacent single-line tunnel.
The 1936 collision took place in the eastbound tunnel, which climbs towards Dunford Bridge, when a freight train split, allowing wagons to roll westbound back down the grade. The guard, James Ernest Sykes, managed to stop the runaway by means of the brake in his van, and rushed to plant detonators and red danger lights to alert an oncoming train. He was unsuccessful and fortunately uninjured, and when the second train collided with the wreckage its locomotive remained on the rails and the driver and fireman were unharmed. The guard of the second train was, as it happened, a Mr P Sykes.
The wreckage damaged the tunnel lining, and the following day part of the arch unexpectedly collapsed on top of the team sent to repair it. One man, Maurice Clarke, aged 37, was killed. It was the day of his fifteenth wedding anniversary. Three others were seriously injured along with a number of minor casualties.
Neither of these incidents bears any resemblance to Mr Raynor’s account of a collision beyond the tunnel between a loaded train running in reverse wrong-line and another proceeding normally.
A contributor to a now-deleted forum quotes from Trains in Trouble (1996 – one of a series by Alan Earnshaw, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trains-Trouble-Accidents-Pictures-1868-1968/dp/0906899699/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305662350&sr=1-1) which identifies 54 examples of runaways through the Woodhead tunnels.
Another frightening trans-Pennine tunnel accident that miraculously caused neither fatalities nor injuries is described at Trouble at Summit | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.