Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
On our railways
south east London.
The crash - which involved an electric train to Hayes and a steam train to Ramsgate - killed 90 people and injured almost 200 more after a bridge collapsed onto the steam train. Tonbridge born-and-bred Donald Corke was tasked with steering the 5.22pm service from Holborn to Dartford out of London on a foggy December night. “In those days, there were no automatic brakes or signals,” he told the KM on the 50th anniversary of the disaster. “You really had to rely on your senses completely.”
As the 29-year-old’s train, packed with almost 1,000 passengers, approached the Lewisham to Nunhead bridge, Mr Corke saw a green signal followed by two yellow ones and decided to proceed with caution. “The visibility was very, very bad and I was looking out for a red signal - I was sure there would be one. As we came on to the bridge, I suddenly noticed the metal girder on the bridge bending upwards towards the carriage,” he recalled in 2007. “I immediately thought the bridge must have fallen down, and applied the brakes.” Mr Corke’s caution paid off and he managed to stop the train on the very edge of the gaping hole that was once the Lewisham Bridge.
As he got out of the carriage and stood on the bank above the tracks below, the thick fog meant he had no idea that the 16.56 express service from Cannon Street to Ramsgate and the 17.18pm from Hayes to Charing
Cross were lying in a mangled heap a few feet below him. He said: “There wasn’t a sound coming from the wreck - the fog had muffled any noise. You could have heard a pin drop.” The driver of the Ramsgate service would later be tried for manslaughter, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. He was discharged and died a year later. While the driver may not have been convicted following the Lewisham crash, a huge accident at Maidstone East station in 1993 did lead to a conviction. Driver Graham Barnes had drunk the equivalent of a bottle of vodka when his train derailed at high speed coming into the station shortly after 2am on September 6, 1993, causing almost £2 million of damage.
His freight train was laden with 900 tonnes of steel when it came crashing into the railway station, almost destroying it. An investigation concluded that with its brakes set incorrectly for the heavy load, the locomotive hit a curve in the tracks at such speed - thought to be around 60mph on a 25mph section of track - the wagons overturned.
Mr Barnes was later jailed for 12 months for endangering the safety of passengers, causing criminal damage, and driving with excess alcohol. Remarkably, apart from Mr Barnes suffering bruised ribs, no-one was injured.