At 1:24 in the morning of 11 November 1890, a Great Western boat train carrying passengers from Plymouth toward London Paddington tore past a clear signal at Norton Fitzwarren and slammed at full steam into the back of a goods train waiting on the same line. The signalman had forgotten the goods train was there. He had cleared the signals, opened the section, and waved the express into a darkness that ended ten lives. The driver and fireman of the goods train jumped clear at the last instant. The boat train's guard, asked later about braking, could remember none.
Norton Fitzwarren station sat about two miles south-west of Taunton, the point where the Great Western mainline narrowed and country branches peeled off toward Watchet and Minehead. By the small hours of a November night it was nearly silent: a single signalman in his box, lamps trimmed low, the only movement the slow shunting of freight wagons. At 12:36 a.m. a down goods from Bristol to Exeter arrived, hauled by both a standard-gauge engine and a broad-gauge pilot. It came to take on and put off stock. Another goods train, a faster one not scheduled to stop, was due at 1:17 a.m. To get the slow goods out of its way, the signalman told its guard at 1:05 to shunt clear of the down main onto the up line. The pilot engine was sent separately onto a branch.
The fast goods passed safely. The signalman moved the pilot engine back to the down main. While he was still concentrating on that, the next signal box up the line offered him the up boat train at 1:23. It was the Plymouth-to-Paddington service, a special running to connect with the cross-channel steamers, carrying passengers and mail. He accepted it. He cleared his signals. He had forgotten the slow goods, still standing on the up main, exactly in the path he had just opened. One minute later the boat train passed his box at an estimated fifty miles an hour, full steam on, brake-handle untouched. The driver and fireman of the goods saw the headlamps coming and managed to leap from their cab. There was no time to signal. There was barely time to jump.
Ten passengers were killed in the collision. Eleven others, including the boat train's driver and fireman, were seriously injured. The engine, a Bristol and Exeter Railway 4-4-0ST numbered 2051, was so badly damaged it never returned to traffic and was withdrawn. The dead would have been ordinary travellers - merchants and clerks and families bound for London, asleep or dozing in the compartments of a train that, at that hour and at that speed, gave them no warning at all. The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette of 12 November reported the names; many were carried in newspapers across the country in the following weeks. They had bought tickets on a train that should have run clear all the way to Paddington and never made it past a Somerset signal box.
Colonel Rich of the Board of Trade conducted the inquiry. The immediate cause, he wrote, was the signalman's lapse - a man holding too many movements in his head at once on a quiet shift, allowing an express into a section he had just blocked himself. Rich also identified contributing factors. The goods train's tail lamp had been changed from red to green too soon; a red lamp ahead might have given the boat train's driver the seconds he needed to brake. The goods train's guard had failed to remind the signalman of his train's location, as the rulebook required. And the shunting onto the main line had only been necessary because no suitable refuge siding existed at Norton Fitzwarren. The recommendations were practical. Rich called for a device that signalmen could clip onto a lever when a line was obstructed, a simple physical reminder. Some lines had been doing this unofficially already. Within years, lever collars had become standard across British signalling. Twelve new refuge sidings were built between Exeter and Weston. Rule 55 - the requirement for train crews themselves to remind signalmen of their presence - took shape over the following decades, partly in answer to nights like this one.
Norton Fitzwarren station closed to passengers in 1961. The trackwork has changed, the signal boxes are long gone, and the new West Somerset Railway platform that opened in 2009 sits on a slightly different alignment to the original. But the place itself has another, darker resonance for railway historians. On 4 November 1940, fifty years and one week after the boat train collision, a second major accident happened on the same stretch of line. A driver named Percy Stacey, whose house had been bombed the night before, misread signals in wartime blackout and derailed a King-class express. Twenty-seven died. Norton Fitzwarren became one of the few junctions in Britain to give its name to two distinct railway disasters - one a lesson in signalling discipline, the other in the strain that war places on the men who keep the trains running.
Located at 51.02°N, 3.13°W, on the mainline two miles south-west of Taunton. The site is now part of the Bristol-to-Exeter line, with the West Somerset Railway's modern Norton Fitzwarren station immediately to the north. Recommended viewing altitude is 2,000-3,000 feet. Look for the railway curving northwest out of Taunton and the modern motorway (M5) just to the east. Nearest airfields: Dunkeswell (EGTU) to the south, Exeter (EGTE) to the southwest, Bristol (EGGD) to the northeast. Visibility is usually good across the Vale of Taunton Deane; the Quantock Hills rise to the northwest, the Blackdown Hills to the south.