Britain's Deadliest Rail Disaster: Quintinshill

100 years ago,

during the First World War,

a massive accident occurred in the south of Scotland.

Hundreds died in a raging inferno.

The truth of what caused it has been shrouded in mystery to this day.

This is very close to the border between Scotland and England

and the fields here today are every bit as peaceful as they would

have been at the outbreak of the First World War.

But, by 1915, things were starting to change...

on the sea, in the trenches and in government.

The reality of the Great War was beginning to dawn.

Military disasters were plaguing the government

and more men were desperately needed at the front line.

The strain was beginning to take its toll on the government -

who were hopelessly unprepared for the war - and on Britain's railways.

And then, in May 1915,

on the railway line that cuts through these fields,

everyone got precisely what they didn't want - another disaster.

CRASHING

In a huge crash involving five trains, hundreds lost their lives

trapped inside a burning pile of wrecked carriages.

Nobody in the UK has heard about

the Quintinshill crash,

yet it was the railway's Titanic.

In the investigations, inquests and trials that followed,

the railwaymen on duty were imprisoned

for causing the entire catastrophe.

Now, some believe there was a cover-up to prevent

the blame going any further.

There had been a deal struck and this deal meant that they were

never going to get the defence that they would otherwise have expected.

I'm going to look again at what happened,

examine the case against the signalmen

and see why the accident was so deadly.

Was this regarded as safe?

First 106 coffins,

53 of those were full of ash, essentially,

incinerated bodies.

I'm also going to hear the arguments that were never put

in Britain's deadliest rail disaster.

It's a bright, sunny morning on the 22nd of May 1915

at Quintinshill near Gretna.

There is little sense, here, that the country is at war

and no suggestion at all that, in less than ten minutes,

the pressures of that war will fill these fields

with hundreds of dead and injured soldiers.

At the nearby signal box on the main line between London and Glasgow,

the signalmen have just changed shift.

George Meakin has just finished his turn,

leaving his replacement, James Tinsley,

to deal with the traffic passing through Quintinshill.

BELL DINGS

See the price of eggs is going up again.

Waiting on one of the main lines just outside the box

is a local train from Carlisle facing north.

The only passengers on board are all five members of

the Nimmo family from Newcastle.

Mrs Nimmo has left her two young girls with her husband

to comfort her son, Dickson.

At the same time, heading south are around 500 soldiers

of the 1/7th Royal Scots Battalion on their way to Liverpool.

As the railways are vital to the movement of supplies

and troops, the government are now in charge

and their specially commissioned troop train is late.

Earlier that day,

the soldiers had begun their journey at Larbert in central Scotland.

It was a very local battalion, it drew its officers and soldiers

from Leith, Portobello and Musselburgh,

just down the coast from Edinburgh.

They were very much a family affair.

Many fathers and sons,

and many had been in the battalion

for 10, 12, 15 years

by the time the war came. They were very close.

Technically, you had to be 17 to join.

A number undoubtedly slipped through

saying, "I'm 17," when I think some were probably as low as 15.

Nobody asked for birth certificates, they took their word for it.

They'd been waiting since August 1914

and now, at last, they were going to war.

This is what they'd joined for - they'd been worried that the war

was going to be over before Christmas

and they might have missed out.

The train had left very early in the morning,

it had then been delayed by traffic,

but then, when it gets onto the main line towards Carlisle,

all the reports suggest that it is going very quickly indeed. That...

People talk about it...70mph.

BELL DINGS

The prices only go one way.

-Potatoes are going down.

-Really?

At 6:42, Tinsley makes the last of a series of mistakes

that will have catastrophic consequences.

Best tonic medicine you can get. BELL DINGS

Why do you think I need that?

Nerve instability, influenza, indigestion,

sleeplessness, exhaustion...

Oh, that's a good one, exhaustion.

From this moment on, the fate of hundreds are sealed.

BABY BABBLES

-Brake!

-WHEELS SQUEAK

CLOCK TICKS

CRASHING

The first to arrive on the scene

fought their way to the main-line tracks.

There, they found that the troop train

had smashed head-on into the waiting local.

At the centre of the crash was a terrible scene

of crushed and splintered wooden coaches

filled with hundreds of soldiers

and the smell of escaping gas.

Some soldiers manage to free themselves.

Others are helped by uninjured troops

arriving from the back of the train.

Any uninjured men, follow me!

Then, only one minute after the crash,

came a second disaster.

CRASHING

An overnight sleeper from London to Glasgow

ploughed into the wreckage on the tracks,

spilling yet more hot coals into the lethal mix of gas and wood.

Contemporary newspaper reports describe, in vivid detail,

the horrors experienced by soldiers in the flaming wreckage.

You almost only have to read the headlines to get a sense of...

the disbelief and the horror. "Men Roasted To Death".

"Horror Upon Horror". "Graphic Story Of Disaster".

And the coverage just goes on and on.

Private James Arnott, he was interviewed

while he was in Carlisle hospital with a broken leg.

"He said that, when the second collision occurred,

"the bottom came out of the compartment

"and he, along with Private Arthur Colville,

"Musselburgh, dropped down and crawled along

"searching for a way out."

PANTING

-We have to go back.

-Why?

-We have to go back.

-We can't.

The report describes how the soldiers faced up

to a dreadful death when they realised they were trapped,

with flames both in front and behind them.

Are you OK?

Although James Arnott was rescued,

Arthur Colville perished in the wreck.

"Suffering from a broken leg and other injuries,

"he remained conscious

"while he lay for several hours till placed aboard an ambulance.

"During that time, he gazed on the horrible scene."

15-year-old Peter Cumming was one of those that

freed himself from the wreckage.

John?

"I was sitting still asleep in a compartment

towards the centre of the train

"when I was awakened by this terrible crash.

"I remember realising that disaster had struck us

"and my immediate thought was, 'It's sabotage.'

"My first thought was for my brother."

John?

"And I began to search feverishly for him."

John?!

After some time, Peter found his brother, injured but alive.

"When we got to Carlisle, I was frantic

"and, although I had hardly any money,

"I managed to stop a complete stranger.

"I gave him three shillings, all I had in the world,

"and begged him to wire my mother and tell her that my father

"and I were all right, and that only my brother had been injured.

"My brother died soon after."

There's some upsettingly vivid descriptions

of what people experienced.

This is from Piper Thomas Clachers who said,

"I had only just lain back to sleep

"when all of a sudden, the carriages seemed to crumple up

"like a melodeon.

"Fire shot up right before my face, it must have been gas,

"it was such a sudden and big flame."

COUGHING

Clachers was badly burnt but he managed to free himself

and help others out of the wreckage.

Is there anybody there?

Many of the trapped men faced a dreadful dilemma as the fire

drew nearer. Some lost their limbs to doctors with carpenter's saws,

some opted to lose much more. Clachers continues.

"It was an awful sight, right enough.

"I saw a private lying under an engine tender with just his feet

"and part of his legs sticking out.

"He asked to be shot and, as he could not recover,

"an officer shot him with a revolver.

"Another private was caught between buffers and jammed

"and fire was all around him.

"I saw him cut his throat with his jackknife."

For hours, the fire roared through the wreckage unchecked

and the uninjured soldiers had to rescue those comrades

they could, virtually unaided.

Soldiers that could not be reached faced a long wait

for an agonising death.

Only after three hours did the local volunteer fire brigade arrive,

completely ill-equipped for what faced them.

Frederick Tassell from Carlisle was one of the first photographers

to reach the site.

My father had been on the spot very shortly after the accident

and started taking photographs

and also helped looking after the injured.

His son, Archie,

arrived the next day as bodies were still being recovered.

He recorded his memories of the crash in 1984.

I was a boy of 15 at school

and I went out on a Sunday morning hoping to get some more photographs

but I received a tremendous impression

of the general scene.

It was the locomotives lying on their sides, the general smash-up

and debris and, er...

on the fields at Quintinshill adjoining the embankment

there were 77 coffins covered with black cloth laid out

in the sunshine and there were relatives moving about from coffin

to coffin, lifting the lids, trying to recognise their dead.

I've got a postcard here of the men standing for a roll call

after the accident.

They understood that it was their duty to go

and fight on foreign fields.

What they could not possibly have expected, though,

was that almost half of their comrades

would lie dead before they were even out of the country.

Grayton, AB.

Roxburgh, NS.

The commanding officer graded the survivors

and literally wrote their names down in a notebook.

There were 55 soldiers and 7 officers,

62 out of the 498

who'd set out from Larbert who were uninjured or not dead.

Thank you Corporal Grayton, stand at ease.

The ordeal for the survivors didn't end there.

As far as the army was concerned, there was still a war to fight

and these men were bound for the doomed campaign in Gallipoli.

The...

survivors after the roll call were taken by train to Carlisle,

they got there late afternoon, fiveish, erm,

went to the barracks there, were given a meal

and an element of rest but, later that evening,

marched from the barracks back to the railway station

and went on down to Liverpool to join the troop ship.

Only at the 11th hour did the War Office change their mind

and send the men back home to Edinburgh.

It was an insensitive end to a dreadful day.

The dead were buried throughout Scotland and the north of England.

Among them was Mrs Nimmo and her son Dickson, buried in Newcastle.

The driver and firemen of the troop train were interred at Carlisle.

And perhaps the most tragic burials

were those for people that could not be identified.

Here in Glasgow lie the remains of four unclaimed children.

But it's here, in a mass grave at the Rosebank Cemetery in Leith,

that most of the soldiers came to be buried.

Many of the men had been recruited from the streets around here

and it felt as if the whole town of Leith had turned out to watch

the seemingly endless procession of coffins pass by.

The funeral procession took three hours to complete its journey.

There wasn't a family untouched by the disaster

and it has always been there in the Leith memory.

So what exactly happened that morning?

How did two experienced signalmen get it so wrong?

And why did so many people die in such dreadful circumstances

so that they now lie in a mass grave?

It was at the Board Of Trade enquiry, held only three days after

the accident, that most of the facts came out.

It appeared to uncover a catalogue of errors, mistakes

and a blatant disregard for the company's rules.

Tinsley admitted that he'd been late to work that day, as he often was,

and there was an arrangement between him

and Meakin that they had practised many times before.

From the moment that the shift-change should have occurred,

Meakin wrote the times of every signal

and train movement on scraps of paper.

Tinsley then spent some minutes copying

the train times into the register,

so that a change of handwriting wouldn't give away their deception.

There were more men in the box than were allowed.

William Young, the brakesman

from one of the goods trains, was warming himself by the fire.

The suggestion was that there might have been distracting chatter.

Meakin made two errors.

He did not block the line to traffic

while the local train was on the line.

He also didn't use a caller on the signal lever

that would have prevented either man from later setting the signal

to allow the troop train to enter the section.

These mistakes meant Tinsley was able to send messages

and pull the signal levers to allow the troop train to pass

through the Quintinshill section,

even though there was a train standing on the line.

In his defence, Tinsley said that he just forgot the train was there,

despite having got a lift on the locomotive only 17 minutes earlier.

During the enquiry, the company was clear about its rules

and the men were clearly seen to have broken them.

After just one day of evidence, the enquiry was adjourned.

On the 28th May, the procurator fiscal depute from Dumfries

ordered that Tinsley be arrested.

Now, a century later, and with the benefit of hindsight,

I'm going to take a fresh look at the case, starting here,

close to the Ribblehead Viaduct in Yorkshire.

The Quintinshill signal box doesn't exist any more.

It's been swept away by a tide of modernisation.

But we can still see what it was like to work there

because some of the boxes are still standing

and the people inside them are still doing more or less the same job.

And there's one up ahead.

The signal box here has almost the same

layout as the one at Quintinshill

and one of the signalman inside has operated this box for ten years -

around the same length of time as Tinsley and Meakin operated theirs.

I would have just assumed that by now it would have been,

I don't know, automated, electronic, all happen, push a button.

I wasn't still imagining big, heavy, metal levers.

I think, yeah, it'll be a good 50% plus of the rail network

is still run with levers.

You know, manually operated with bell signals.

A set-up which will have been similar to Quintinshill.

So what are the responsibilities of a signalman in a box like this?

And are they the same now as they've always been?

Pretty much so. We have to ensure the safety of the train.

There's a list of rules and regulations as long as your arm

and we have to just ensure that whatever goes on,

we have to be able to run trains on time as best we can.

Do you know the first thing that strikes me as a surprise

is the fact that when you are working these levers,

you've got your back to the traffic.

I would just have assumed, if you'd asked me,

that you'd be doing all this while you're looking at the track.

I don't believe it makes any difference.

I've worked in signal boxes where the frame is by the window

and to be honest, you can't actually see as much as you do here.

You do your business here and you can turn round

and you get a full view of the train all the time,

where if you can picture that being by the window,

-you are obstructed by the equipment.

-Of course, yes.

You're not really going to be seeing out of the window at all, are you?

Aye, you actually do get a better...

And when it comes to the view, in terms of the track layout,

is that, again, more or less what was at Quintinshill?

Two main lines, so it would have been exactly the same.

So the two central tracks are for the trains coming and going?

They are the mainline, yes.

And then the two sets beyond are temporary positions

for them to wait for things to clear?

Yeah, let trains pass them. Yeah.

Do signalman know about Quintinshill?

Is that part of the lore of men working in signal boxes to this day?

It's mentioned. When I was at signalling school it was mentioned

and I know it's still mentioned to lads now

when they go to signalling school.

What happened there,

it's an easy sort of thing that kind of happened, the distraction factor,

but everything is fail-safe on the railway now.

Like, you couldn't possibly do that now.

If you put yourself in the minds of Tinsley and Meakin,

what do you think explains what they did and didn't do?

Well, it's the old...

We can go through it with signals, and people agree and disagree,

the most dangerous part of our job, I would say, is shift change.

-Why?

-It's just, you are ready to go,

you're passing on your stuff to your man and you need to listen carefully.

Stuff gets forgotten, but, like, them two,

I think they've swapped over,

they've had the distraction of the late-running train

and they hadn't done their basic...

These reminder appliances,

that's all they are, but we're told to use them.

-It's so simple.

-Is this the collar?

-That's the collar.

You just pop it on a lever.

And that's there to remind you not to play with that?

It's as simple as that.

You can't pull that. Once that's on, stop.

It's as simple as that and they didn't put them on.

It's the simplest explanation.

The accident happened just after a shift change.

The signalmen clearly broke the rules and it was them,

Meakin and Tinsley, that caused the tragedy.

But a century later,

a similar enquiry would probably not come to the same conclusions.

And it would start with very different assumptions.

It's a very, very rare accident that has a single cause.

NEWSREADER: Just after eight this morning,

two packed commuter trains

collided near Paddington station in West London.

It was the worst rail accident in over ten years.

Unlike the Quintinshill Board of Trade enquiry,

which heard evidence for only one day,

the lengthy enquiry into this crash at Paddington

found a wide-ranging set of causes for the accident.

One of the features, looking at any major accident,

is there will always be a whole sequence of events

related to each other,

one of which led to the other and, had that not been the case,

the following wouldn't have happened.

The unfortunate thing about major accidents

is when you get to the other side of them, we've had the accident,

we are looking back,

we can all look at it and say it was inevitable.

With the set of events that were in place,

it was inevitable that that was going to happen.

The extensive examination into events

that led to the Paddington rail crash

involved teams of forensic investigators.

Those advantages obviously weren't available to the people

looking into the accident at Quintinshill.

But one WA Paterson used the technology of 1915

to lay out the undisputed facts on a simple drawing.

Directly outside the box were four tracks.

The two main lines were at the centre.

One northbound to Glasgow and Edinburgh,

the other southbound to Carlisle and London.

On each side, a passing loop allowed slow-running trains

to be moved aside temporarily

so that the fast-running trains could pass at speed.

The crisis that confronts the signalman

at roughly 6:30 on that morning

is that two overnight sleepers from Euston to Scotland are running late.

And a local train, which normally follows them,

has been sent in front of them

because of the need to make connections further on in Scotland.

That then raises the question

how the express is going to get past the local train.

The overnight sleepers were the most prestigious trains

running at the time.

It was the quickest and most practical way

of travelling from London to Scotland,

and wealthy passengers were willing to pay to travel in style.

However, the two sleepers,

one for Edinburgh and one bound for Glasgow,

had both been delayed before they had even left London.

And they were still running late when they departed Carlisle

for the final leg north, now chasing the slow-running local train.

After Carlisle, the best place

that the expresses would be able to pass the local

would normally be at Quintinshill.

However, the pressures caused by extra wartime traffic

meant that some passing loops were commonly blocked with trains.

At Quintinshill, the northbound loop

had been occupied by a goods train for several hours.

And the southbound loop was about to be filled with an empty coal train.

So you had an immediate conflict.

You had had these long, moving slow, freight trains

travelling at sometimes as slow as 15mph

vying for paths on an otherwise fairly antiquated

and outdated system, with express passenger trains

who were timed to travel at 60mph.

It was Meakin's job to ensure that the expresses were not delayed.

But as the passing loop was full, he had nowhere to put the local.

His decision,

it was something of an unusual occurrence, but not unheard of,

and it actually made sense, was to move the local train

when it arrived at Quintinshill across from the northbound

line to the southbound line.

You might say the wrong line.

Keep it there for a while

to allow the first of these expresses to go through

and then shunt it back on to its proper line,

send it further north where it could then be shunted aside again

to allow the second Anglo-Scottish express to pass it.

One of the things that's so incredibly important, I think,

and it is part of the culture of the railway service,

was the idea that you've got to keep the job moving.

You don't want to be responsible for stopping the job.

This, I think, is an imperative that is always there.

The fact that there are two overnight sleepers leaving Euston

very close together at what is the weekend

clearly demonstrates the extent to which, in 1915,

the railway companies were still trying to carry on,

to a large degree, business as usual.

So we've got the normality on the one hand but, obviously,

on the other hand we've got the imposition of special traffics,

which are clearly priorities for the war effort.

And they included the late-running troop train that was now

descending on Quintinshill.

The War office decreed that this troop train was

so important that it was belled as a 444,

which is ordinarily only given to the Royal train.

Meakin had these trains coming at him from all directions.

He had two priority expresses from the south

and he had this extra priority train from the north.

Something had to give.

It seemed that every train

on its way to or already sitting at Quintinshill that day

was, in effect, a priority - except, that is, the local train

sitting about 60 yards from the signal box.

The local had, in fact, been completely forgotten about

when, at 6:49am, the troop train appeared, heading straight for it.

CRASHING OF METAL AND SPLINTERING OF WOOD

The government's war effort

and the railway company's desire to maintain profit

were in direct conflict and it was this

that caused a logjam of trains at Quintinshill that morning.

And those weren't the only factors that could have

contributed to the crash.

At the Ewart Library in Dumfries,

are more newspaper reports of the disaster.

This is especially fascinating for me.

This is the Annandale Observer from May 28th, 1915.

I trained as a journalist with the Annandale Observer.

That was where I did my indenture as a cub reporter.

It's great to see my journalistic ancestors covering this event.

There's a big double page spread.

"The Gretna Green Railway Accident."

And it's all the sort of headlines you would expect.

"Terrible Railway Calamity." "Double Collision."

"Three Trains On Fire." "Soldiers Burned Alive."

"Men Burnt To Powder."

"I could have taken 12 of the bodies and put them in a riddle," a sieve,

"and it would not have had a bit of flesh left

"after I had riddled them."

"Appalling scenes at work of rescue."

All sorts of individually headlined stories. Indescribable scenes.

And in these papers is one of the first suggestions

that Tinsley and Meakin were perhaps not solely responsible

for the disaster at Quintinshill.

This is the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, here.

This was our, one of our rival papers

when I worked at the Annandale Observer.

What's priceless in here is a letter that been sent to the paper

by a railwayman, someone who is experienced in the industry

and he's pointing the finger at the Caledonian company,

saying that there are rules and regulations,

but they are not necessarily for people's safety.

They are so that the company can go through

a kind of a hand-washing of responsibility.

There's an excellent quote in here.

"If they are broken and nothing happens,

"the company is conveniently and consistently blind."

And then, in case of an accident, the company turns round and says,

"Our regulations are there

"and we did not know that they were not being carried out."

So you get a real sense that someone on the inside

thinks that the company has to take some of the blame.

So, was the company negligent in not enforcing its own rules?

It seems they probably were.

The evidence of Alexander Thorburn, Tinsley's supervisor and neighbour,

implied that he knew about Tinsley's late shift change arrangement.

He's inconsistent in his evidence

about whether he was around at the time that the local leaves

with Tinsley on board to take him up to Quintinshill.

But if you look at his evidence overall,

it is unimaginable that he didn't know what was happening.

I mean, this is a very small railway community.

The number of railway employees is not great.

It's basically the station staff at Gretna plus a few signalmen,

and his responsibility is to make sure everything operates properly.

Therefore, the idea that he would never have heard about this,

I think, is absurd.

The suspicion is that some of the other rules

were also regularly flouted -

and the company knew.

I think what we find in Quintinshill,

in the absence of further evidence,

is what you'd expect any management to do in that situation,

which is that senior managers in the Caledonian

had a good idea that not every shift change in every signal box occurred

when it should have done.

That not every stationmaster

was punctilious in making sure

that the people under their jurisdiction

stuck by the rule book all the time.

The most obvious rule broken by Meakin

was not using the lever collar

that would have prevented Tinsley from signalling

the troop train to come through.

The lever collar is just a piece of metal

you put over the signal lever to prevent it being pulled.

They are available at Quintinshill

and it's clear they're not used.

It is also clear they very rarely were used.

It's perhaps worth noting that the Midland Railway

didn't provide them because it would make the signalmen careless.

It was not unusual for signalmen not to use collars.

Prior to 1910 the railway company actually actively discouraged

signalmen from using these.

They were considered almost namby-pamby instruments.

The signalman's a professional. He should know where his trains are.

Why does he need all these fangled modern devices?

That attitude continued throughout the railway even post-1910

but signalman like Meakin,

who had years of experience,

were not used to using them, and the railway,

most importantly, did not police the use of collars.

The make-up of the train that carried the troops

was also a major feature of the crash.

And here in these sidings at Ruddington, near Nottingham,

it's possible to get a rare glimpse of what the coaches looked like.

All of the carriages that were actually involved in the crash

are long gone,

but in a shed over here there's one exactly like the rolling stock

of the Great Central Railway that the government

and the Caledonian Railway Company

had organised for the movement of the troops.

Pat Sumner is one of many enthusiasts here

who has restored this Central Railway carriage

to its original condition.

How many soldiers would have sat in one of these compartments?

-They are built for six a side.

-Right.

So as many as a dozen...

-A dozen people could sit in here.

-Right.

When you imagine the events of Quintinshill,

what are the likely consequences of a compartment or a carriage

built like this experiencing a high-speed collision?

Well, this might look fairly solid on the top

but in the collision,

the stresses would collapse the bodywork

and of course the whole train would telescope,

depending on the severity of the impact.

And so the men are sitting here knee-to-knee

and they are just going to be crushed together.

Crushed and they would be thrown.

And up here, this goldfish bowl up here, is that lighting?

That would have been the gas lighting for the coach. Yes.

Fed from tanks on the underside of the vehicle.

So all of the ingredients are there, aren't they?

The compartments are made of wood, which tends to collapse on impact.

They are packed with men who are going to get jumbled

and thrown together.

Above their heads is a naked flame.

Below our feet are canisters of gas fuel.

Yes. Yes, I'm afraid so.

It's an accident waiting to happen.

The crashworthiness of these coaches was abysmal.

They were effectively reduced to timber.

There were gas cylinders underneath.

The gas cylinders exploded and this is what led to the massive,

horrific casualties at Quintinshill.

Had the coaches been more modern, the normal standard for 1915,

yes, there would have been casualties.

Yes, there probably would have been a fire too, but it wouldn't have

been anything as bad as the horrific nature that we saw that morning.

-Ah, so this big black cylinder here is the gas?

-Yes, there's two of them

and they would be filled with gas at the terminal station

or in the carriage sidings.

It does seem a bit dangerous to have a wooden train

with gas bolted on to its underside.

Was this regarded as safe?

Well, that was the technology that was available at the time.

You are talking about Victorian times, of course.

-Everywhere you look, there is something flammable.

-Uh-huh.

But, by 1915, there were already steel-built carriages

lit by electricity.

And, crucially, the continuing use of gas lighting

had also been condemned as highly dangerous

in two previous accident enquiries.

It's arguable, too, that even in a time of war,

when rolling stock was in short supply,

these dangerous coaches could have been run more safely.

Had they only been travelling at a much lower speed,

20 or 30mph,

that would have greatly lessened the possibility of impact

and, no doubt, a train travelling at that speed,

antiquated though it was,

probably would've avoided catastrophe.

The Board of Trade enquiry was only the first of many.

Further inquests and trials were held in both Scotland and England.

One month after the accident, an inquest was held

in Carlisle for the 27 men that died in the hospital there.

The coroner, Thomas Slack Strong,

paid little heed to the fact that the gaslit wooden carriages

would have played a major part in the deaths of so many.

The purpose of the coroner's inquest

is to identify the causes of the death

and to essentially determine if it was unlawful or not,

but it's not a finding of guilt.

However, Strong relied heavily on the railway company for evidence,

and they indicated quite clearly who had broken their rules.

These two chaps, George Meakin and James Tinsley,

had caused this accident.

It was made clear to everybody in the country that they had

caused the accident, they were to blame.

It was as if Strong was unwilling to explore factors

contributing to the high death toll

unless they could be ascribed to the signalmen.

I suspect one of the difficulties

for the inquest was actually

working out what the purpose of the inquest was,

given that this was a case in which

there was going to be a subsequent criminal prosecution.

Nowadays we would expect an inquest or a fatal-accident enquiry

to look at all the facts, not just the criminal negligence,

if there was criminal negligence on the part of the people

who caused the accident, but also what measures,

perhaps more importantly, could be taken to ensure

that if this happens again the consequences aren't as severe.

But in 1915 the verdict of the inquest was straightforward.

Manslaughter.

The signalmen were subsequently charged with breach of duty

and the killing of five of the victims.

It was here, in Edinburgh's High Court,

that the men were put on trial.

It was a big case and it was being held only a mile or so from Leith,

where most of the soldiers had been recruited.

The Lord Advocate himself led the prosecution,

and he called the Caledonian Railway officials

to provide almost all the evidence.

It is surprising that the bulk of the prosecution witnesses

were coming from the Caledonian Railway Company. Er...

The kind of witnesses we'd be looking at calling today

would be rail safety experts

who could come in and talk about whether the procedures adopted

by the company were state-of-the-art procedures or not, and so on.

No independent expert witnesses were called, however,

either by the prosecution or by the defence,

and everyone who gave evidence at the trial,

with the exception of the policeman who arrested Tinsley,

were on the Caledonian payroll.

It's a curious case, because, erm...

The strong sense you get is that the facts were not being contested,

that by the time the trial took place

a narrative had clearly been established that, er,

the signalmen had been responsible for the crash,

and there was no attempt to open up questions

of whether the company was at fault in the use of the gas cylinders

and the wooden design of the carriages or suchlike.

So in some sense it's surprising to us that these kinds of issues,

which we might expect to be relevant issues, weren't addressed at all.

So why did the barrister defending the men,

James Condie Stewart Sandeman, a leading defence advocate,

not call on any independent witnesses

or mount an effective defence?

It's likely that the directors of the Caledonian Railway Company,

the members of the Bar, of the legal profession, of the...

in the senior ranks of the police forces,

were of similar social classes.

The legal profession at the time was very small.

So, for example, if Sandeman had tried to challenge

the way that the initial investigation had been done,

these are the kind of claims that not only would have been

completely alien to him but would have damaged, er, his...

fundamentally damaged his career immediately.

And so it's not surprising that these kind of issues weren't raised.

I think those men would probably have been convicted

even if they'd had a, you know, very persuasive barrister

or whatever it was,

but nevertheless, the poor did not get the same justice as the rich.

Tinsley and Meakin were found guilty and imprisoned.

Meakin got 18 months but Tinsley was sentenced

to three years of hard labour in Peterhead Jail,

breaking rocks in a quarry.

The fact that he was portrayed as a criminal is, erm, I think,

a very unkind portrayal of this man. He was nothing of the sort.

Something went wrong that morning

that was to have catastrophic effects.

According to the norms of 1915, justice had been served.

Meakin and Tinsley were behind bars.

But were the men just scapegoats?

If one is looking for blame

then one tends not to get to the truth so easily.

Did the focus on blaming the men in the signal box

blind everyone to the wider responsibility for the accident?

If this sort of incident had happened today

then there'd have been a much greater challenge of...

to the procedures of the company.

But at that time, the apparent single-minded pursuit

of the railwaymen meant very little thought was given

to the actual causes of death.

The use of old gaslit wooden rolling stock, a practice already condemned,

clearly caused a very significant number of deaths.

The condition of the carriages is poor and they are gaslit,

which in the end contributes to something much worse than

would have been the case even from a double collision.

There was a strong suggestion that the company's rules

were not adequately enforced or supervised.

There was virtually no supervisory regime in existence

on the southern district of the Caledonian Railway at that time.

The railway company was determined to carry on business as usual,

despite the war.

There was a sense amongst businesses, including the railways,

that things must continue. You know, we must soldier on.

We mustn't allow this inconvenience of the First World War

to actually affect what is otherwise a very profitable business.

Wartime pressure on the rail system,

causing the passing loops to be used as sidings,

left Meakin with little choice of what to do with the local train

but use the most risky option.

That, essentially, was the cause

of what led to the disaster at Quintinshill.

It was too many trains piled into a small area

with simply nowhere to put them,

and huge pressure put on the signalmen to find a solution.

And the late arrival of the fire brigade,

taking over three hours to reach the crash site.

All these were likely factors contributing to the crash

and the appalling death toll.

Few were brought up or pursued in court.

Today we would spend probably more time investigating what, er...

the culture they worked in, what the, erm...

whether there were any particular circumstances

associated with those individuals

that might have led to them being distracted on the day.

Tinsley's defence throughout was that he simply forgot

that the local train was on the line.

This has led some to speculate about his state of mind that day.

There's obviously the possibility that he was simply distracted.

It's a remarkable lapse of attention in that case, erm,

to forget that the train that you've just got off

is standing in the way of the troop train.

The recent literature makes a significant suggestion,

and this relates to the state of Tinsley's health,

that there's a suggestion that he suffered from epilepsy

and that there were serious issues about him getting there on time

and that basically the whole rhythm was to accommodate him,

and that possibly on the disastrous morning

he was in fact suffering from the aftermaths of a fit.

Newspapers reporting the case

describe Tinsley as suffering from fits

and when he's been taken initially to the Sheriff's Court

for his first court appearance,

and then there was this strange, oblique reference at the trial,

by the two men's advocate, Condie Sandeman,

who says in his summing-up,

"It would not have been culpable homicide, would it,

"if he" - Tinsley - "had fallen down in an epileptic fit?"

Now, why does he say that?

There'd been no reference to epilepsy in the court case before.

But he suddenly throws that into the mix.

These short mentions of epilepsy and fits

instigated a search by authors Jack Richards and Adrian Searle

for more clues that might explain Tinsley's forgetfulness.

There is one specific reference held in the Scottish National Archives.

It is in the form of a scribbled note.

On that scribbled note,

which was written by the police in Dumfries,

it specifically says that when the police go to arrest James Tinsley

they are told by his GP that they cannot move him at that stage

because his brain may be affected.

He has been suffering from epileptic fits.

If it is true that he had a grand mal - big fit -

following the accident, erm,

then that would be strong support for the possibility

of transient epileptic amnesia,

accounting for his memory loss for the local train being on the track.

It is clear that, were he being tried now,

much more effort would have gone into establishing

whether or not epilepsy could account for...for what happened.

So why does it appear that the Quintinshill accident

was not looked into in more detail,

that the authorities seemed determined

to lock up the railway workers

and not examine the many other causes of the disaster?

Adrian Searle has an astonishing theory.

We believe that a deal had been struck

and it was a deal that really suited everybody.

The deal was, we think, that Meakin and Tinsley

would agree to take the blame, the entire blame, as it were.

They would put up a defence, erm, mitigation, you might call it,

but they would take the whole rap for this.

In exchange, they would be "looked after" by the Caledonian Railway

after the...the legal procedure had taken its course.

This would explain why the Caledonian Railway re-employed both men

after they came out of prison.

It's an attractive theory, as everyone seemed to gain.

Meakin and Tinsley would have jobs to go back to,

despite being convicted killers - although not as signalmen.

The government would avoid all blame, even though

they were in charge of the railways.

And the company would have no-one looking at the way

they ran their business.

The only losers would be the travelling public.

By the end of 1915 it seemed the affair was over.

But some were starting to question the convictions of the signalmen,

especially the harsh treatment of Tinsley.

These were men badly paid, often with very limited technology,

who sometimes have to take difficult decisions,

and, if the decisions go wrong,

on a good day it will simply hold up the traffic,

on a bad day it will be something much worse.

Growing support for the union movement meant more people

started to see the Quintinshill disaster in a different light,

and the case of Meakin and Tinsley as a political one.

It's very easy to put yourselves

in the shoes of the Quintinshill signalmen.

There but for the grace of God go I.

That anyone can make a mistake,

anyone could find themselves in the middle of a disaster,

and then you would want sympathy from your workmates

and you would also want the support of your union.

It's not necessarily a... a political agenda,

it's a sort of visceral feeling of sympathy.

As the war progressed, news of military disasters like Gallipoli

and on the Western Front were filtering through to the nation.

Those in charge were now seen as fallible.

Revolution was in the air,

and in Britain the government was under pressure.

They were in trouble in Ireland, of course,

because you had these two split communities,

and they were in trouble at home with the suffragettes,

the demand not only for votes for women

but for the number of men who were also excluded from the franchise.

And of course there was also industrial disputes.

Jimmy Thomas,

a leading negotiator for the National Union of Railwaymen,

took up the case of Meakin and Tinsley for his own purposes.

Jimmy was a fixer. He was a negotiator.

He would come out with deals.

And everything he did in 1915 in the aftermath of Quintinshill

I think is determined by the idea that he will do the best he can

for his members within what's actually a very difficult situation.

The Quintinshill signalmen were now pawns in a much bigger game.

A power struggle was developing between the established order

of government and an increasingly muscular union movement.

The war is at an appalling stage

and the last thing that any British government needs

in the autumn of 1916 is a rail strike.

Thomas certainly doesn't expect that there'll be a rail strike,

but he is, as part of his negotiating ploy,

presenting the genie in the bottle and saying to the government,

either you cut a deal about the release of these chaps from prison

or the genie will get out of the bottle

and neither you nor I will be able to control the consequences.

Thomas had picked his moment well.

On 5 December 1916, Prime Minister Asquith was ousted.

Ten days later Meakin and Tinsley were also freed.

At the time of the accident it was in no-one's interest

to expose what had happened at Quintinshill,

not the government, not the railway company and not the men involved.

And dreadful casualty figures from wartime battles like the Somme

soon overshadowed those at Quintinshill.

Since then, the story has remained forgotten by almost all.

But not the rail industry,

not the Royal Scots and not the people of Leith.

Nowhere did we lose 216 soldiers

within...100 miles of their home,

having never got to the war they had so valiantly set out to take part in.

And that is something which we will always remember.

Even here, in the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh,

where the name of every soldier who died during the war is recorded,

there is no sense of how the men of the 1/7th Royal Scots

died on 22 May 1915.

However, there is a curious comment by each entry.

And there's two brothers. James Sime and Robert Sime.

Both of them "Leith, Died Home."

And there's one, "John Cumming, Leith."

"Died Home."

And there's another one. "Arthur B Colville."

"Levenhall, Musselburgh."

"Died Home."

Officially, that "Died Home" explanation

indicates that the soldier was killed on home territory

rather than while fighting on a foreign field.

But Quintinshill wasn't just

Britain's worst ever railway accident,

it was also a truly horrific disaster.

So perhaps it's no bad thing that "Died Home"

conceals the reality of what happened there.