TRAINS COLLIDE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26749, 19 April 1948, Page 5

TRAINS COLLIDE

TWENTY-FIVE KILLED TRAGEDY IN CHESHIRE COMMUNICATION CORD PULLED N.Z.P.A.—Copyright Rec. 9.30 p.m. LONDON, Apl. 17. Twenty-five persons were killed and 34 injured as the result of a collision between the Glasgow to London passenger express train and the Glasgow to London night mail train between Winsford Junction and Winsford station, Cheshire, at midnight. Seven coaches of the passenger train- were wrecked. The passenger train had halted because the communication cord had been pulled, and the mail train crashed into it. Only the Post Office sorting crew was on the mail train, but the express was packed, mainly with servicemen going’to and returning from leave. Several of them, including a German prisoner of war, were among the casualties. The staff of the express placed fog signals along the line in a frantic but futile effort to halt the mail train alter the guard had spent several minutes going through the carriages trying to ascertain who had pulled the communication cord. Sixty firemen and Royal Army Medical Corps doctors crawled among the twisted steel and splintered woodwork in the eerie beams of pmbulance headlights to rescue the trapped persons. Uninjured soldiers also assisted, while rescuers with acetylene cutters cut a way through the wreckage. The rear coach of the express was an unrecognisable mass of wood and metal. The engine of the mail train r.emained upright after it ploughed into the passenger train. The train staff escaped injury. “If someone had not pulled the communication cord the Cheshire railway crash would not have occurred. Did a soldier pull the cord so he could jump the train and return to a nearby camp? Was it someone in trouble or just a prank?” are questions asked by the police who are trying to check a survivor’s story that a man ran from the line with a suitcase a few minutes before the crash. Neither the police nor the railway officials have yet discovered who pulled the cord. The person who did so may be among the dead, the police think. A quick transfer of survivors to the Irish mail train from London hampered their inquiries. They hope someone among those detained in hospital may provide a clue.