There are disasters which (almost) everyone knows about, from the sinking of the Titanic to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge. But I had not come across Quintinshill – the UK’s most deadly rail disaster – until recently reading an apparently well-researched, intense, and engaging (if gory) detective novel set almost a century ago amidst high society & low society in the West of Scotland during the Great Depression.
The book is “Edge of the Grave” by Robbie Morrison, ISBN 978-1-5290-5403-3, 400 pages, (2021). In the aftermath of a very disturbing fire at an orphanage, pathologist Dr. Kivlichan explained to detective Dreghorn why he so hated fires:
“I was at Quintinshill. On the first train”. …
At 6 am on 22 May 1915, a glorious summer morning, a train carrying five hundred soldiers, half of the 1st Battalion/the 7th Royal Scots, left Larbert Station in Stirlingshire, bound for Liverpool, where they would travel by ship to the Dardanelles, their ultimate destination the killing grounds of Gallipoli. At Quintinshill [in the Scottish Borders] … a local stopping train had been temporarily shunted to the southbound mainline to clear the northbound line for a couple of Glasgow expresses. This placed it directly in the path of the troop train. …
The troop train struck the local train at eighty miles per hour. The front carriages derailed, shooting over the locomotive of the smaller local train. Wreckage was strewn across both railway tracks. The carriages of the troop train were wooden, the majority lit by gas cylinders suspended beneath the floor. The impact crushed the carriages, compacting 275 yards of train into just 69 yards, every carriage filled to capacity with human beings. Fire erupted immediately, as burning coals from the locomotive tender ignited gas leaking from the ruptured cylinders.
Thirty seconds later, the second northbound Glasgow express, whistle shrieking as the drivers tried desperately to stop, ploughed into the twisted wall of blazing wreckage. Two hundred and twenty five lives were lost, all but twelve of them Royal Scots, the rest passengers and workers on the express and local train. Another 191 soldiers were injured, along with 55 civilians. …
“I was lucky”, he [Dr. Kivlichan] said. “I was close to the rear, in one of the few cars that didn’t have gas lighting. I was asleep for the first collision. Woke up being wrenched all over the place, as if the world was turning upside down. … There were screams everywhere … And you could hear the carriages creaking and the hiss of the gas, the whoosh of the cylinders going up as the fire shot along the train. Through that, I heard a whistle, getting louder and louder, and I realized there was another train heading for us. …
“When I came to, I was halfway down an embankment by the tracks. There was burning grit in my hair and I shook it out. … I climbed to the top of the embankment. It was chaos. Trains piled on top of each other, carriages crushed or overturned, fires everywhere, the walking wounded staggering around, hundreds of men still trapped. Officers were trying to impose some sort of order, but it was impossible.
“I was covered in burns and cuts and bruises, but nothing serious, so I tried to help as best I could. I’d only just qualified as a doctor, but had never seen or imagined anything like that. There were men missing limbs, soldiers trapped in the wreckage, some of them in burning carriages, watching the fire creep closer, no way to free them. …”
[Detective] Dreghorn said “I heard officers shot their own men”.
At first, Kivlichan didn’t seem to hear, but then he nodded gravely. “When they ran out of bullets, they used their bayonets – thrusting and stabbing to end things as quickly as possible. It was either that or let them burn to death. … Sorry, I shouldn’t go on about it. You’ve seen your fair share too”.
Apparently, reports of officers “mercy killing” their trapped men circulated at the time of the disaster but were (surprise!) never officially confirmed – however, later in the book, the author makes those incidents a component of his crime mystery.
One has to feel for the unfortunate soldiers who were saved from dying in Winston Churchill’s debacle in distant Gallipoli by instead dying on a beautiful summer morning in their native Scotland. It calls to mind the lyrics of a Chris Rea song – “When that Man in the Sky points his finger at you …”