A DERAILMENT WITHOUT APPARENT CAUSE

Sometimes a railway accident occurs for no apparent reason and in spite of all the technology available to the investigators of the time the cause remains a mystery. Such a one was that which occurred at Buddon on the Dundee & Arbroath Joint (D&AJ) line in 1924.

Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate (HMRI) has been, right from the very earliest days, adept at investigating and determining the cause of all kinds of railway accidents although at first it had no statutory duty to do so; nevertheless the inspectors were sufficiently concerned for the safety of the travelling public that they took it upon themselves to carry out investigations and to provide reports on their activities to the Board of Trade, their employers. For those who would like to learn more about their work and those who served in the Inspectorate, I can recommend Stanley Hall’s book The Railway Detectives published in 1990 by Ian Allan Ltd.

So far as accidents are concerned the primary purpose of their inquiries was ensuring that the circumstances would not be repeated elsewhere and that lessons were learned – a common enough phrase amongst politicians nowadays, usually meaning we hear what you say but do not intend to do anything about it as that will cost money at the expense of something else. In truth that is not a lot different from the reactions of some railway company directors to the HMRI recommendations throughout the nineteenth century.

In the earliest days mechanical or other engineering failures, such as boiler explosions, were the most frequent causes of accidents but, as time went on and Rules and Regulations were laid down by Parliament, it tended to be a case of one or more persons ignoring the rules or taking short cuts. It was not very often that the Inspectorate was unable to find a definite cause or, if such a cause was identified, determine the circumstances which led to it occurring. On these occasions the Inspector reported on the likely cause (perhaps something falling off a vehicle in the train involved) but could not say with 100% certainty where the something had come from.

To set the scene for the Buddon