Cannon Street crash
Former BR employee TREVOR STONE recalls the tragic scenes he witnessed and also captured on film, in the immediate aftermath of the fatal buffer collision that occurred at Cannon Street on January 8 1991
Former BR employee TREVOR STONE describes the aftermath he witnessed of the fatal buffer stop collision in January 1991.
Thirty years ago, I had been working at the Network SouthEast rolling stock drawing office at King’s Cross for less than a year, having finished my engineering apprenticeship in July 1990.
At about 0900 on January 8 1991, I had just arrived for work when someone from down the corridor popped their head around the door and said: “Don’t take your coat off - you’re needed at Cannon Street. There’s been a crash.”
Back in those days, the drawing office and specialist engineers from King’s Cross attended rail accidents to record the layout of vehicles, carry out an initial inspection, test brakes, and so on. These were the days before the Rail Accident Investigation Branch.
I had never attended such an incident before, so I accompanied my drawing office colleague Martin, who had previous experience of attending incidents. We gathered up our equipment (tape measure, torch, note pad) and made our way over to Cannon Street.
We were allowed across the police cordon and into the station, but the emergency services were still hard at work attending to the injured, so we were invited into a station staff messroom and then waited a couple of hours.
Eventually, in the early afternoon, we were called onto the platforms. The unit of the ten-car train closest to the buffer stops (Class 415/6 [BR design] 4EPB number 5618) had suffered some damage, but the second unit (Class 415/4 [SR design] 4EPB number 5484) was a shocking sight.
Twisted metal, broken glass and debris were everywhere. Holes had been cut into the sides
of some vehicles to allow greater access for the emergency services.
We got down to our job of recording the layout of the vehicles for the drawings that we would create during the next couple of weeks. I took some photos for reference with my trusty Olympus Trip camera, which I always carried with me.
I got home late that evening, having spoken to my parents using a payphone on the station concourse. Mobile phones weren’t common back then.
Back home, my dad told me that one of my friends had phoned a couple of times and was going to call again later. When he phoned again, he was rather sombre, with some news from another mate whose brother had been on the 0758 Sevenoaks to Cannon Street service, and who was the one person on that train who died that day. (A second passenger died in hospital three days later, while there were also more than 500 people injured.).
Tuesday January 8 1991 was a tragic day in my railway career which I will never forget.