Nuneaton Train Crash 1975

Comments

• Reply

  I was a member of the emergency services who attended this major rail crash almost forty years ago. In 1975 I was a firefighter attached to Rugby fire station and I remember responding to the emergency call in the early hours of a very hot Summer night. My colleague Tony Ansell and I were crewing a Humber Emergency Tender which had a pretty impressive turn of speed powered by a Rolls Royce engine.

  The train was the overnight sleeper from Euston to Glasgow which had derailed at high speed in the station at Nuneaton. When we arrived at the scene there were large numbers of passengers clad only in their night wear wandering around in a dazed and confused state. Rescuing passengers proved to be very difficult, many of them were trapped beneath foam rubber mattresses and the wire mesh bed frames that had come down on them when the carriages overturned and these were very difficult to cut through as I recall. I still have all the press cuttings of this incident and some newspaper photographs given to me after the incident.

  By Alan Griffin (15/07/2014)
• Reply

  thanks for your eye witness account Alan, it’s greatly appreciated

  By Nuneaton Memories (22/07/2014)
• Reply

  I remember the train crash well. I was 22, my husband was trying to get me to work by car on that day at around 7am from Bucks Hill to Finn Shoes in Weddington Road. Getting to the Leicester Road bridge was proving to be a problem as their was a tail back of traffic. Back then there was no Ceefax or radio to check on traffic conditions. It was not until we started to go over the Leicester Road Bridge that we realised with horror that a train had crashed. The road was still open. But there was police cars, fire engines, ambulances parked more or less wherever they could on the embankment. Nothing could prepare you for the horror of seeing the train wrecked, pictures never tell the full story as there was smells, shouting of instructions etc.
  I was shaking with shock by the time I arrived at work. Blood was needed and the blood bank came to Finn shoes to ask people to donate blood. I volunteered it was all I could do to help. You gut reaction was to get out and help. But you knew that you would be in the way. So donating blood was my contribution to the cause. Those memories of seeing that crash have never left me and I often reflect on that day when I go over the Leicester Road Bridge. For me those people involved, injured and those that died have never left my thoughts. It was an event that I will remember to my dying days. An experience that I never wish to witness again. Through that experience I went on to donate 65 pints of blood before having to stop because of medical problems. I also became a nurse so was able to help others later on in life. If only I had been able to help that day.

  By Helen Deakin (03/12/2015)