On This Day in 1975, Watford Junction Train Crash

On this day, 23 January 1975, a late-night accident at Watford Junction unfolded in seconds into a derailment and a major collision on the West Coast Main Line. An express passenger train working the 19:10 Manchester to London Euston was on the Up Fast line and had just begun to pull away from a hooked stop at Watford Junction when it encountered an obstruction that should never have been there.

The obstruction was two heavy steel stillages lying on the track. They had fallen from a freight train that had passed only a few minutes earlier on the adjacent Down Slow line. When the Manchester–Euston express ran into them, the leading bogie of the locomotive derailed in such a way that it fouled the Down Fast line, placing it directly in the path of an approaching service.

Within a few seconds of the express coming to a stand, it was run into by the 22:15 sleeping-car train from London Euston to Glasgow, a 14-vehicle service hauled by an electric locomotive. The impact derailed the sleeper locomotive and deflected it towards the cess, after which it ran down an embankment about 50 feet high and came to rest at the bottom; a bogie brake van also ended up with one end at the foot of the embankment and the other still at the top, while the remainder of the sleeper train continued forward more or less upright, each vehicle taking damage as it passed the wreckage.

One member of railway staff lost his life: the rostered driver of the Manchester–Euston express, who was seated in the secondman’s position on the leading locomotive at the time of the collision. Three other members of staff were injured and required hospital treatment, and eight passengers were also injured and taken to hospital, all of them having been released by 30 January. Although the slow lines were not obstructed by the trains themselves, an electrification structure was demolished and overhead line equipment was brought down across all four running lines, underlining how a load shed from one train can rapidly escalate into danger for everything that follows.