Schoolgirl who captured a cliffhanger on camera
LINDA Paschali was getting ready for school when she heard what sounded like thunder. But when she looked out of her window, the teenager saw a steam locomotive pulling dozens of coal trucks out of control and speeding backwards down the tracks towards the edge of the mountain behind her home.
Grabbing a small cartridge camera she had been given for her birthday, she headed out into the back garden of her Maesteg home and then climbed over the wall to venture closer.
Linda took dramatic images of the steam loco from St John’s Colliery, which had stopped and was left teetering precariously on the edge of a mountain surrounded by puzzled National Coal Board (NCB) officials.
Now 64 and retired, she had long forgotten about the derailment and her stunning photos until she went looking for a baby picture of her son and resdiscovered them instead.
“It’s about 20 years since I have seen them and they brought back memories,” she said.
She thought the crash – near her childhood home in St Mary’s Crescent, Garth – happened in May or June of 1968, when she was a pupil at Maesteg Comprehensive.
But, knowing no other details apart from the fact the driver had jumped clear and no-one was injured, she approached us in the hope of getting some answers.
And Neil Parry, the secretary of Llynfi Valley Historical Society, has been able to shed light on the event, believing the NCB Bagnall loco went off the rails in either 1971 or 1973.
He worked on the traffic weigh bridges at both St John’s and the washery – where coal was washed, sorted and graded before sale – between 1962-89, when the washery closed. He recalled a previous derailment in 1961 under similar circumstances, when an overladen loco slid on the wet tracks.
“The loco started sliding and the driver tried to put the brakes on and off [to stop the slide],” he said of the earlier incident. “The crew jumped off and started putting more sand on the line [to provide traction]. Eventually they couldn’t control it and they all jumped off. At the end of the railway is a twmp and it just rolled up over the twmp.”
Neil said a shutdown due to a backlog of full coal trucks was not allowed, as production was everything for mines. So train drivers, who completed the run from the colliery to the washery six or seven times a day, were always pressured into taking more wagons than strictly allowed. Each wagon weighed around 20 tons.
Following the inquiry into the derailment, the railway workers “were all told no more than 20 wagons and the drivers stuck to that”.
“But then you get the situation where the colliery is on stop because they are not dealing with the coal quick enough.”
Neil also shared a couple of other pictures from the society’s collection which show the Bagnell loco shunting at the washery on April 21, 1971 and the crumpled, derailed trucks after the crash.
The NCB continued to use steam locos long after they had been taken out of commission on passenger railways. Neil said they were used in Maesteg far longer than in other locations and railway enthusiasts from around the world would visit to take pictures.