Five Killed In English Train Crash

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 July 1947, Page 7

Five Killed In English Train Crash

(Recd. 9.55 a.m.) LONDON, July 21.

The London-Liverpool express was derailed at Grandon, between Nuneaton and Tamworth. Five persons were killed, and 30 injured. The train was crowded with holiday-makers. It was derailed on a bend in a cutting- while travelling at high speed, blocking all four lines. The first coach was wrecked and fourteen of; the 16 coaches derailed. The driver and fireman escaped injury, though the engine fell on its side.

Fire brigades and ambulances were rushed from the surrounding towns. Firemen, using axes, hacked away the coachwork to get at the injured passengers. ■ Doctors and rescue workers used linen and tablecloths from the kitchen of the train’s restaurant to bandage wounds.

The London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company in an official statement said five were killed and about 30 injured, s Ten merchant navy men, due to sail from Liverpool for their homes in Australia and New Zea-

land, wore among' the thousand passengers on the train. There is no indication that they were among the casualties. ..The train’s normal running speed at the place of the crash was between 50 and 60 miles an hour.

A Royal Engineers lieutenant organised the first rescue squad of 50 other soldiers when the express crashed. He crawled from a wrecked carriage, called to other servicemen to unload emergency ladders, ropes and axes from the guard’s van and began rescue work. The majority of the injured were in the first and second coaches, which were straddled across the tracks, and in the seventh and eighth carriages, which were thrown zig-zag across the rails.

The passengers included a number of families bound for Liverpool, enroute to Canada and South Africa. One passenger, who had been standing in the corridor between / two coaches, saw a man he was talking to crushed to death.

“The train rocked alarmingly and a gap appeared between the two coaches,” he said. “The man I had been chatting to fell into the gap and was killed.”

Albert Peebles, aged 32, a New Zealand seaman was among the passengers treated, but. was not detained in hospital. He was travelling to Liverpool to join his ship. “My escape was a, miracle,” he said. “I was in the front compartment behind the engined The coach listed and then toppled over. I could feel the shingle of the track grazing my back. I can remember nothing after that, but eventually I found myself on the side of the embankment, with only a cut leg and bruises on the head.”