To be involved in one railway accident must be bad enough but to be a passenger in a train which became involved in two incidents on the one journey must be quite unnerving as well as possibly unique. This, however, was the fate which occurred to the passengers on an overnight train from Aberdeen to London in 1891. To set the scene, a snowstorm was raging over the whole of the country on the night of the 10th/11th December that year and the train in question was running about twenty minutes behind time when it left Dundee on its way south.
Kinghorn
Having crossed over the Tay Bridge and passed through Fife the train was making its way along the shores of the Forth when it encountered a special mineral train which was being shunted from the up main line on to the down main line to allow the passenger service to pass. Looked at from the 21st century the concept of shunting a slow-moving train from one track to another to allow a faster one to pass it seems somewhat alien – the logical solution nowadays would surely be to recess it in a loop or, where the opposite track is signalled for running in both directions, make use of this capability. Nevertheless shunting like this or into a siding was common practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was the directly contributing factor in a number of accidents, both with the faster train running into the slower one, usually a goods, while it was still shunting and occasionally when the train being shunted derailed in the face of an oncoming service such as happened at Dunbar in January 1898.
To say the passenger service encountered the mineral train is an accurate description of what happened, for it ran straight into the guard’s van at the rear as it was being propelled back towards the crossover – it had not been possible for it to be moved across earlier because a down train was coming. The driver and fireman of the express escaped with a few scratches but regrettably the goods guard lost his life. Three ladies were slightly injured. The line was cleared of the debris in two to three hours by a squad from Burntisland, with the passengers being sent on their way in a relief train which also came from Burntisland. This took the passengers to Edinburgh where they arrived at about 1.15am
