Site of Quintinshill Rail Disaster

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At around 6.50am on the morning of 22 May, 1915, the worst train crash ever to occur in the UK took place at Quintinshill in Scotland, a short way north of Carlisle on the Caledonian Railway. The accident involved a special troop train carrying a Royal Scots battalion, two goods trains, a local train and an express from London Euston via Carlisle.

At the site of the accident were two railway sidings, one taken by a coal train and the other by a goods train. A local train on the line was traveling on the line northbound. The signalmen shunted it onto the opposite track right at the sidings to make way for the express train coming in the same direction, but forgot about it, while the troop train was coming the other way. The rather old troop train crashed into the shunted train and its gas lamps started a fire, and the express then hit the wreckage.

The death toll reached 227 after the two collisions and a resulting fire left little but a burning wreckage on the line. Despite the horrific nature of the accident - or, more pertinently, due to it - the crash was kept a secret until after the end of World War I.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintinshill_rail_disaster
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Coordinates:   55°0'47"N   3°3'45"W

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This article was last modified 12 years ago