Vinegar Tom wrote:This is a scan of a photo I have on loan from my dad. There is a family connection somewhere , but sadly forgotten with folk passing away.
It shows a Glasgow & South Western Railway crash site. No idea of the likely location ( any ideas?). Date must be late Victorian / early Edwardian ?
The original photo is about 3x5" , but it is worth looking at the huge size for a lot of detail I couldn't really make out in the original
here
This was the train accident that took place just about 2:30am on Sunday 13th May, 1900, at Inchgreen over by the old Port Glasgow gasworks. The train was just taking 2 staff and 2 passengers who'd missed the last train back from Prince's Pier to Glasgow. The signalman at the Cartsburn junction wasn't expecting an engine at that time and changed the track to allow it to go down to the gasworks instead of allowing it to continue on the main line. The main line was an incline that required the engine to go a bit faster to scale it and so it was going too fast for the signalman to be able to revert the track back as the driver gave the signal he was planning to continue on the main line, so he had to let it continue onto the branch line which was a good 2 miles shorter in length than the main line. So the engine's going too fast on a shorter line, that's not on an incline, than the driver's expecting. No-one was sure why the brakes failed. A witness at the time says,
"When it came to the sleepers it sent them spinning like match-wood."
A news report at the time from the Greenock Telegraph dated the day after the accident says,
"Careering down the incline at a terrific rate, the noise being heard for some distance around, the engine sped through the bridge over the Port-Glasgow Road, rounded the curve at the east-end of the James Watt Dock, cleared the points, and, dashing aside the check sleepers at the terminus of the line, plunged OVER THE EMBANKMENT. The tremendous speed at which it must have been going is shown by the fact that both the engine and the tender cleared a distance of over eighty feet, and that in falling the former buried itself at the front fully fifteen feet in the bank of the old timber pond."
All four men died.
I'm in the process of making up a compilation of Railway Accidents at the moment from around Scotland, 1900-1915, if you're interested -
https://randomscottishhistory.com/railw ... 1900-1915/