The Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash was a major disaster which occurred on the

Great Western Railway The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran ...

. It involved the derailment of a long passenger train at

Shipton-on-Cherwell Shipton-on-Cherwell is a village on the River Cherwell about north of Kidlington in Oxfordshire, England. The village is part of the civil parish of Shipton-on-Cherwell and Thrupp. Manor The earliest known record of Shipton-on-Cherwell is fr ...

near

Kidlington Kidlington is a major village and Civil parishes in England, civil parish in Oxfordshire, England, between the River Cherwell and the Oxford Canal, north of Oxford and 7 miles (12 km) south-west of Bicester. It remains officially a village ...

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1874, and was one of the worst ever disasters on the

. Colonel

William Yolland William Yolland CB, FRS FRSA (17 March 1810 – 4 September 1885) was an English military surveyor, astronomer and engineer, and was Britain's Chief Inspector of Railways from 1877 until his death. He was a redoubtable campaigner for railway s ...

of the

Railway Inspectorate Established in 1840, His Majesty's Railway Inspectorate (HMRI) is the organisation responsible for overseeing safety on Britain's railways and tramways. It was previously a separate non-departmental public body, but from 1990 to April 2006 it ...

led the investigation and chaired the subsequent Court of Enquiry of the

Board of Trade The Board of Trade is a British government body concerned with commerce and industry, currently within the Department for International Trade. Its full title is The Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed for the consideration of ...

. Its report highlighted several safety problems including wheel design, braking and communications along trains. The accident came in a decade which saw many terrible accidents on the rail network, and which culminated in the

Tay Rail Bridge disaster The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on Sunday 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed as a North British Railway (NBR) passenger train on the Edinburgh to Aberdeen Line from Burntisland bound for its final ...

of 1879.

Accident

The accident happened a few hundred yards from the village of

Hampton Gay Hampton Gay is a village in the Cherwell Valley about north of Kidlington, Oxfordshire. Archaeology In 1972 a cast bronze clasp was found at Hampton Gay near St Giles' parish church. It is decorated with stylised '' Acanthus'' leaves and may ...

and close to

. The train with 13 carriages and two engines had left Oxford station for Birmingham Snow Hill at 11:40."Terrible Railway Accident." Times ondon, England25 Dec. 1874: 3. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. The train was approximately 30 minutes behind schedule and travelling about when after the tyre of the wheel on a third-class carriage broke. The carriage left the track for about including the bridge of the

River Cherwell The River Cherwell ( or ) is a tributary of the River Thames in central England. It rises near Hellidon, Northamptonshire and flows southwards for to meet the Thames at Oxford in Oxfordshire. The river gives its name to the Cherwell local g ...

. After the bridge and before a similar bridge across the

Oxford Canal The Oxford Canal is a narrowboat canal in central England linking the City of Oxford with the Coventry Canal at Hawkesbury (just north of Coventry and south of Bedworth) via Banbury and Rugby. Completed in 1790, it connects to the River Thame ...

the carriage went down an embankment taking other carriages with it, breaking up as they crossed the field. Three carriages and a goods wagon carried on over the canal bridge, and another fell into the water. The front section of the train carried on for some distance. The owner and men from the Hampton Gay paper mill close to the accident site tried to assist the injured in the snow. Telegrams were sent to local stations to summon medical help but it took an hour and a half before a doctor appeared. A special train was used to move the injured back to hospitals in Oxford. At least 26 died at the scene while four others were dead by the time the special train had arrived at Oxford station. At least one other died in hospital. The canal was dragged, but no bodies were found.

Causes

Bridge over the Oxford Canal near Shipton On Cherwell - geograph

The basic cause was found to be a broken tyre on the carriage just behind the locomotive, but that failure was worsened by the poor braking system fitted to the train. When a passenger warned the fireman of the problem, by waving from the carriage window, it was still being pulled along intact along the rails. However, the driver braked immediately, before the brake at the rear of the train in the guard's van could be applied. The engine brake caused the failed carriage to be crushed, and the carriages behind derailed near the

. There were 34 deaths and 69 seriously injured in the carriages which fell from the bridge over the canal.

Inquiry

The inquiry that followed quickly established the root causes. The tyre was on an old carriage and was of an obsolete design. The fracture started at a rivet hole, possibly by

metal fatigue In materials science, fatigue is the initiation and propagation of cracks in a material due to cyclic loading. Once a fatigue crack has initiated, it grows a small amount with each loading cycle, typically producing striations on some parts o ...

, although it was not recognised as such by the Inquiry. The weather was very cold that day, with snow blanketing the fields and very low freezing temperatures, another factor that hastened the tyre failure. The Railway Inspectorate recommended that the railway companies adopt

Mansell wheel The Mansell Wheel is a railway wheel patented by Richard Mansell, the Carriage and Wagon superintendent of the South Eastern Railway in the UK. The design was created in the 1840s and was eventually widely used on passenger railway stock in the U ...

s, a type of wooden composite wheel, as the design had a better safety record than the alternatives. There had been a long history of failed wheels involved in serious accidents, especially in the previous decade. The problem of broken wheels was not resolved until

cast steel Steel casting is a specialized form of casting involving various types of steel cast to either final/net or near-net shape. Steel castings are used when iron castings cannot deliver enough strength or shock resistance.Oberg, p. 1332 Examples ...

monobloc wheels were introduced. The disaster led to a reappraisal of braking methods and systems, and the eventual fitting of continuous automatic brakes to trains, using either the

Westinghouse air brake The Westinghouse Air Brake Company (sometimes nicknamed or abbreviated WABCO although this was also confusingly used for spinoffs) was founded on September 28, 1869 by George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Earlier in the year he had i ...

or a

vacuum brake The vacuum brake is a braking system employed on trains and introduced in the mid-1860s. A variant, the automatic vacuum brake system, became almost universal in British train equipment and in countries influenced by British practice. Vacuum bra ...

. The Inspectorate was also critical of the communication method between the locomotive and the rest of the train using an external cord and gong, suggesting that a

telegraphic Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...

method should be adopted instead.

Inquest

An inquest was opened on 26 December 1874 using the manor house at

; the 26 bodies found at the scene were laid out in two rows in a large paper store in the paper mill for the court to view and seek formal identification and the wreckage was also examined."The Shipton Railway Accident." Times ondon, England28 Dec. 1874: 9. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. The coroner and jury decided to re-convene in Oxford and permission was given to move the wreckage but only one carriage would be moved to Oxford for further investigation and examination. The following week the coroner returned to Hampton Gay to further identify bodies and also those which had been kept in the third class waiting room at the Oxford Railway Station and one at Radcliffe Infirmary.

Related incident

''Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham'', discussing the accident, notes that:

References

Sources and further reading

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External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shipton-On-Cherwell Train Crash Derailments in England Railway accidents in 1874 1874 in England Rail transport in Oxfordshire Disasters in Oxfordshire Accidents and incidents involving Great Western Railway 19th century in Oxfordshire December 1874 events 1874 disasters in the United Kingdom