On This Day in 1995, Ais Gill Rail Crash

On this day in 1995, at about 6:55pm, a serious accident unfolded on the Settle–Carlisle line near Aisgill in Cumbria. A two-car Class 156 “Super Sprinter” passenger train was derailed when it ran into a landslip that had obstructed the track, leaving part of the train fouling the adjacent line on this remote section of railway.

The derailed train had been operating the afternoon Carlisle–Leeds service, but disruption meant it could go no farther south and was turned back at Ribblehead, heading north again when it struck the debris. The driver was injured in the derailment, and passengers were gathered into the rear coach, away from the worst of the damage, as the situation was assessed in difficult conditions with the front of the unit left blocking the other track.

Only minutes later, a second Class 156 passenger service, running in the opposite direction, approached from the north after departing Kirkby Stephen. The driver saw red lights ahead and made an emergency brake application, but with the obstruction appearing too late for the train to stop, it ran into the derailed unit at roughly 35mph.

The collision proved fatal for the guard of the first train, Stuart Wilson, and left 30 people injured across the two services. What began as a derailment caused by a sudden failure of the earthworks became, within a short window of time, a much more serious incident involving two trains in the same place, on adjacent lines, with little margin for recovery once the second service came into view.

The official investigation later focused sharply on what happened after the first train left the rails. Railway rules at the time required immediate protection of an obstructed line by going back a set distance to place detonators on the rail and to show the prescribed hand danger signal, a fail-safe intended to stop or slow any following train. The inquiry concluded those protective steps were not carried out, and that the roughly six to seven minutes between derailment and impact was enough time for a much stronger warning to have been given.

Three decades on, the Aisgill crash is remembered for the way a natural hazard and a rapid chain of events exposed how unforgiving the railway can be when a line is blocked and another train is already close behind. It also remains a stark case study in why post-incident protection procedures exist at all: because in the gap between the first emergency and the next approaching headlight, the difference between a near miss and a fatal collision can come down to whether those rules are followed.