The Norwood Junction railway crash occurred on 1 May 1891, when a

cast-iron Cast iron is a class of iron–carbon alloys with a carbon content more than 2%. Its usefulness derives from its relatively low melting temperature. The alloy constituents affect its color when fractured: white cast iron has carbide impuriti ...

underbridge over Portland Road, north-east of

Norwood Junction railway station Norwood Junction railway station is a National Rail station in South Norwood in the London Borough of Croydon, south London and is in Travelcard Zone 4. It is down the line from . The station is managed by London Overground and trains are oper ...

, fractured under the weight of an

express train An express train is a type of passenger train that makes a small number of stops between its origin and destination stations, usually major destinations, allowing faster service than local trains that stop at most or all of the stations alo ...

from Brighton to London Bridge. The locomotive, no. 175 "Hayling" crossed the bridge safely with most of its carriages, but the

brake van Brake van and guard's van are terms used mainly in the UK, Ireland, Australia and India for a railway vehicle equipped with a hand brake which can be applied by the guard. The equivalent North American term is caboose, but a British brake van ...

fell into the gap on the bridge. There were no serious casualties: a passenger suffered a dislocated ankle; four further passengers were slightly injured and the guard in the foremost brake van received head and arm injuries. The accident drew attention to the weakness of cast-iron structures in underbridges, especially as many had been installed in the 1830s and 1840s when locomotives and carriages were much lighter.

Causes

The bridge belonged to the

London Brighton and South Coast Railway The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR; known also as the Brighton line, the Brighton Railway or the Brighton) was a railway company in the United Kingdom from 1846 to 1922. Its territory formed a rough triangle, with London at its ...

and had been reconstructed in 1859. The Board of Trade investigation was carried out by General Hutchinson, who had investigated a similar bridge failure at Carlisle in 1875. He found that the single girder that cracked was seriously flawed with a very large hidden

casting defect A casting defect is an undesired irregularity in a metal casting process. Some defects can be tolerated while others can be repaired, otherwise they must be eliminated. They are broken down into five main categories: ''gas porosity'', ''shrinkage ...

in the flange and web. Even if perfect, the girder design did not meet current Board of Trade requirements for safety margins on cast-iron girder underbridges, and this was already known from a previous accident.

The attention of the Brighton Company was drawn by the Board of Trade to this deficiency of strength after ... the accident on this bridge in December 1876 when two identical girders at a different part of the same bridge were broken by an engine getting off the rails, and they were then recommended to substitute stronger girders in their place, a recommendation to which unfortunately no attention was paid, or the present serious accident would have been prevented; the Brighton Company is therefore, in my opinion, deserving of much blame for having omitted to substitute stronger girders for the existing ones after attention had been thus specially directed to the weakness of the latter

A cast-iron rail bridge girder had fractured under a passing train at Inverythan in Scotland in 1882, with five passengers killed and many more injured. The Board of Trade investigation report on the Inverythan accident had commented on the problem of latent defects, but had concentrated attention in the first instance on composite girders, bolted together mid-span, and those of over span. The Portland Road bridge did not use composite girders, and its span was . (The failed girder in the Carlisle incident was non-composite, with a span and had a major hidden casting defect. It had been built before the 1847 Dee bridge disasterHutchinson said it was built in 1826, but it was on the westmost section of the

Newcastle and Carlisle Railway The Newcastle & Carlisle Railway (N&CR) was an English railway company formed in 1825 that built a line from Newcastle upon Tyne on Britain's east coast, to Carlisle, on the west coast. The railway began operating mineral trains in 1834 between ...

, built in 1836 and the consequent specification by the Board of Trade of required wide safety margins on cast-iron structures; even if perfect it would have not have met them. The bridge had been rebuilt with wrought-iron girders and the failure had not triggered any wider survey of cast-iron bridges.) General Hutchinson recommended that all cast-iron girder bridges on the LB&SCR network be inspected. The task fell to Sir John Fowler, who recommended that many be replaced by wrought iron (or preferably steel) structures, commenting that

the result of my investigation does not indicate any peculiar weakness in the Brighton bridges which are neither better nor worse in that respect than those on similar lines of railway at home or abroad

The accident led the Board of Trade to issue a circular requesting details of all cast-iron underbridges on the UK network. There were thousands of them, and most were gradually replaced, but as of 2007

Network Rail Network Rail Limited is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, which was known as Railtrack plc before 2002) and infrastructure manager of most of the railway network in Great Britain. Network Rail is an "arm's leng ...

stated that there are still many hundreds of cast-iron beam overbridges remaining, many with very low weight restrictions.

References

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External links

Description of accident with photographsPunch article and cartoon illustrating contemporaneous concern at structurally unsound bridges
{{coord, 51.39901, N, 0.07369, W, type:event_region:GB, display=title Railway accidents and incidents in London Railway accidents in 1891 1891 in England History of the London Borough of Croydon Disasters in Surrey Bridge disasters in the United Kingdom Bridge disasters caused by engineering error Bridge disasters caused by construction error Accidents and incidents involving London, Brighton and South Coast Railway May 1891 events 19th century in Surrey 1891 disasters in the United Kingdom