Introduction
“On the morning of October 8th 1952, the 7.31am local passenger train from Tring to Euston crossed from the up slow to the up fast line at Harrow & Wealdstone Station and came to a stand at the up fast platform ” And so begins the relatively brief narration of the UK’s second worst rail disaster, England’s worst and the worst-ever in peacetime, in L. T. C. Rolt’s definitive account of such calamities Red for Danger, first published in 1955.
This accident on the London Midland Region of British Railways would be the worst disaster of the BR era and as far as fatalities were concerned would only be surpassed by the infamous events at Quintinshill in May 1915 (Backtrack, May 2015). In the index to Rolt’s book, Harrow & Wealdstone is tersely summarised as “Double collision, signals overrun”. This pithy comment does scant justice, however, to a complex series of events, which we are still trying to understand today 70 years on. As Rolt correctly says. “We know how Harrow happened, but not why, even now.” So, what exactly did transpire on that fateful Wednesday morning?
Previous accidents
There had been fatal accidents in the Harrow area previously with three such reported in M. Foley’s Britain’s Railway Disasters (2013). These were on 12th November 1840 when a collision between two trains left two dead, although “it was thought that the stoker of engine No.82 was also unlikely to survive his injuries”. Early reports had suggested the death toll might be a lot higher. A few days before Christmas 1852 an up express derailed resulting in the death of “the guard of the brake van next to the engine”. On 26th November 1870 the 5.00pm Liverpool/ Manchester express smashed into trucks that had become detached from an empty coal train which was heading into sidings to allow the passenger train to pass. Although the wagons had been reunited, the shunting operation had been fatally delayed. Seven people died with a number injured whilst a Birmingham paper recorded laconically that “the driver of one of the engines was nowhere to be found” (Driver Shelvey on the lead engine of the express, who was one of the seven). In a prescient foretaste of what was to come over 80 years later “signals had been set but due to the fog they were not seen”. The only one of these listed in Rolt is the last, summarised as “rear collision with goods, fog”.
History and topography
The station opened as ‘Harrow’ on 20th July 1837 courtesy of the London & Birmingham Railway), taking on its current nomenclature of Harrow and Wealdstone on 1st May 1897, a name that more accurately reflected the location of the station. Wealdstone is north of the station whilst Harrow is south. The modem station has six platforms with Platforms 1 and 2 (south side) reserved for Underground and Overground services, Platforms 3 and 4 mostly used for fast non-stop National Rail services although these can sometimes be brought into operation,
