Staplehurst rail crash

Staplehurst rail crash
Details
Date	9 June 1865
Time	15:13
Location	Staplehurst, Kent
Country	England
Rail line	South Eastern Main Line
Cause	Engineering possession error / Bridge failure
Statistics
Trains	1
Deaths	10
Injuries	40
List of UK rail accidents by year

The Staplehurst rail crash was a railway accident at Staplehurst, Kent, England, which occurred on 9 June 1865 and in which ten passengers were killed and 40 injured. It is remembered particularly for its effects on the author Charles Dickens, who was travelling as a passenger in a front, first class carriage of a "boat train" (with passengers from France), with his companions Ellen Ternan and her mother.

Background

The track was in the process of being renovated at Staplehurst, at a place where the rails were on a low cast iron girder bridge over the River Beult. The timing of the train, the Folkestone Boat Express, varied with the tides which governed the arrival of ships at the port. The foreman mistakenly believed the train would arrive later than it did, and the final two rails had not yet been replaced. The foreman posted a lookout, but this lookout was not far enough away to give adequate warning to the fast-approaching train. Detonators should have been placed on the rails as an additional safeguard, but they also were missing. The investigator, Colonel Rich, reckoned later that the train was travelling at about 30 mph when it entered the bridge. The engine itself arrived at the far side of the viaduct by riding on the timber baulks supporting the rails, but the cast iron girders below cracked, and most of the carriages rolled into the River Beult under the viaduct, which was not protected by guard rails or any type of balustrade to prevent such a calamity; the poor design of the viaduct contributed significantly to the disaster.

Charles Dickens

Dickens, and the manuscript of a novel in progress, were in one of the few carriages which did not fall (it is the one leaning at an angle, in front of the guard's van at right in the picture). In the postscript to Our Mutual Friend, Dickens wrote:

“

On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage—turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn—to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding day, and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone's red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:—THE END

”

This experience affected Dickens psychologically for the remainder of his life. He became a public hero for his efforts in helping the dying and injured passengers. He wrote a short story soon after the accident, a ghost story named "The Signal-Man", in which one of the principal incidents is a rail crash in a tunnel. Though Dickens possibly based his fictional crash upon the events of the terrible and well-known Clayton Tunnel accident of 1861 (23 dead, 176 injured), rather than the Staplehurst crash, it is reasonable to suppose that his personal involvement with the Staplehurst incident also contributed to the harrowing tale. But he also included a fatal fall from a train and the signalman's own demise, as foretold by a spectre who appears to the signalman before every accident. Dickens was affected by his experience, and was thereafter nervous when travelling by train; he tried to avoid train travel, using alternative means when available. It is also possible that the psychological effects and anxiety of the crash helped to shorten his life; he died five years to the day after the accident.

The accident is used as part of the plot in R. F. Delderfield's Swann saga novel, God is an Englishman. It also forms the starting point of Drood, a novel by Dan Simmons published in February 2009.

External links

• Board of Trade (Railway Department), Report by officer Captain Rich, R.E. - PDF file (1865)
• Charles Dickens survives a train crash (text of a letter sent by Dickens after the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865)
• Danger Ahead! Staplehurst 1865
• Brief account of crash with Dickens involvement
• Dickens and the railways
• The crash described

References

• Nock, O.S. (1983). Historic Railway Disasters (3rd edition ed.). London: Ian Allan Ltd.. pp. 15–19. ISBN 0 7110 0109 X. 
• L. T. C. Rolt - Red for Danger: the classic history of railway accidents. Sutton Publishing (1998)
• PR Lewis, Disaster on the Dee: Robert Stephenson's Nemesis of 1847, Tempus Publishing (2007) ISBN 978 0 7524 4266 2
• Peter R Lewis, Dickens and the Staplehurst Rail Crash, The Dickensian, 104 (476), 197 (2009).