Quintinshill rail crash
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The Quintinshill rail crash on 22 May 1915, which killed 227 people, was the worst ever rail crash in British history.
Quintinshill, near Gretna Green in Scotland, was an intermediate block station with passing loops on the Caledonian Railway. A distracted signalman forgot a stationary local train waiting at his signals, leading to a multiple collision between a troop train, the local train, a coal train in an adjacent siding and, shortly afterwards, an express train which ploughed into the wreckage. 227 people died and 246 were injured - of the 500 soldiers of the 7th Royal Scots on the troop train, only 60 made it to roll-call the next morning. The precise number of fatalities is not known because the roll of the regiment was destroyed in the fire. The disaster was made much worse by fire caused by wooden carriages and gas lighting, and the troops were locked into the carriages, a common practice in those days.
The accident took place at a change of shift. George Meakin had worked the night shift and was relieved by James Tinsley. These two men had an agreement whereby if the local train was stopping at Quintinshill, Tinsley would travel on it and start work half an hour late. Meakin would record all the details of that half hour on a piece of paper and then Tinsley would copy this into the train register when he arrived, to cover up his late arrival. This arrangement, which distracted Tinsley to the extent that he forgot about the local train on which he had himself arrived, makes Tinsley and Meakin more culpable than if it had been just a simple case of a signalman forgetting a train standing on the line.
The signalmen, James Tinsley and George Meakin, were sentenced to three years in prison for neglect of duties. Quintinshill is poorly known because most of the victims were military and it occurred during the First World War, but in terms of casualties and destruction it is by far the worst rail disaster in British history.
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Lessons learned
The Quintinshill disaster would have been avoided if the line had been equipped with track circuits which detect the presence of trains and so prevent the signals being changed to green. However, as Quintinshill had good visibility from the signal box, this station would have low priority for the fitting of track circuits.
The Quintinshill signal box may or may not have been fitted with "lever sleves", a device fitted to the signal levers to remind the signalmen not to clear that signal to green because of some obstruction. These lever sleves are less automatic that track circuits, and hence less foolproof.
Similar accidents
The Hawes Junction train disaster of 1910 also involved a busy signalman forgetting about a train on the main line, but because the signalman there was fully focussed on his job, his momentary lapse was excusable.
Chain of Responsibility
Chain of Responsibility is a system where safety is held to be the responsibility of an organisation as a whole and not just of those at the front line.
In the case of the Quintinshill accident, it raises the question "Why didn't the signalmen ask for permission to vary the shift changeover times, and avoid the dangerous distraction of rewriting the train-registry book?"
Clearly, if this had been allowed, then the risk of an accident would have been reduced to something like the blameless Hawes Junction train disaster.
One can only suppose that management of the railway concerned would have considered such a request uppity if not a sackable offence.
At Quintinshill, management escaped scrutiny of the Coroner.
In New South Wales in 2005 a Chain of Responsibility system is being introduced for truck drivers to reduced the overbearing pressure of management for truck drivers to arrive on time, and therefore speed at dangerous levels to achieve this. The state sees about 70 truckdrivers killed every year.