Stacey's house had been bombed on the night of 3 November. The Battle of Britain was over but the night raids of the Blitz were ongoing, and in towns and villages across England men and women were going to work in the morning after watching their homes burn. Stacey's wartime employment with the Great Western Railway carried him through it. He had driven trains for four decades. The Chief Inspecting Officer who would later examine the wreckage called his record 'excellent'. There is no record that he asked for the night off. He took the train as scheduled, blacked-out windows shuttered against the chance of stray Luftwaffe attention, and by Taunton he was an hour behind time, the cumulative weight of disruptions all the way from London.

The crash site was where four tracks merged into two. The fast lines ran in the centre. The slow lines, called Relief lines, ran on the outside. Great Western practice usually placed all signals on the same side of the track, typically to the right where the driver stood. At Norton Fitzwarren the signals for the Relief Line were on the left, and the Main Line signals on the right. Stacey, looking out from the right side of his cab, saw a row of green signals and read them as his own. They were not. They were clearing the path for a faster non-stopping train that had been routed past him while he stood at the Taunton platform. The signalman at Taunton had changed his train's route during the stop and the fireman, performing his check, had reported the new signal as 'clear' without either man noticing they were now on the slow line, not crossing over to the fast. In peacetime the difference might have been obvious. In blackout, with shielded oil lamps casting only the dimmest pools, the geometry of the layout became a trap.

Stacey realised his mistake only when the other train overtook him in the dark, racing past on what he had believed was a parallel track but was now revealed as his rightful one. By then his King-class locomotive was already approaching the trap points - a deliberate piece of track designed to derail any train that ran past the end of its line, sending it harmlessly into ballast rather than letting it collide with whatever was crossing ahead. The points did their job. The locomotive nosed down off the end of the overrun siding and slewed across the main tracks, missing the rear of the train that had just passed by what witnesses described as feet. The guard of that train, in his end vehicle, heard strange noises he later identified as flying ballast, applied his brakes, and stopped at the next signal box. He found the sides of his last carriages scored, windows broken. Behind him, the King had come to rest in chaos. The fireman was dead. Twenty-six passengers in the leading carriages were dead. The Automatic Train Control system in Stacey's cab had been giving false 'caution' warnings for weeks because of deferred wartime maintenance, and crews had grown used to cancelling them without thought. The system that should have caught his error had become background noise.

Sir Alan Mount of the Railway Inspectorate conducted the inquiry. He found the signal arrangement confusing - the unusual left-side placement, the wartime conditions, the obscured layout in blackout. Yet his official conclusion placed the responsibility on Stacey himself. The 'sole cause', Mount wrote, was 'an unaccountable lapse on the part of Driver P. W. Stacey,' despite his forty-year record. Mount did acknowledge the contributing strain of the war and the previous night's bombing. The verdict was delivered with what the inquiry intended as fairness, but it was, in its bureaucratic way, devastating. Press coverage was deliberately limited; the locomotive's name - King George VI - was suppressed to prevent propaganda value to the enemy. Australian newspapers reported the cause as a culvert washaway, the official line repeated for distant readers. The truth ran in Somerset's local papers and not much further.

Sympathy for Stacey was widespread. His colleagues knew the conditions. His record spoke for itself. None of it reached him. When a reporter approached him for comment in the aftermath, he gave only one sentence: 'Don't talk to me, I'm a murderer.' He had lost his fireman, a man who had ridden the footplate beside him and trusted his judgment. He had lost twenty-six passengers whose names he never knew. He returned home to a house already bombed and a life already broken, and within a little over a year he was dead, with no medical cause that anyone could identify. He grieved himself out of existence. Two miles from the same junction, fifty years and one week earlier, ten passengers had died on a Plymouth-to-Paddington boat train at the hands of another tired man on a quiet night shift. And two miles from the same junction, thirty-eight years later, twelve passengers would die in the Taunton sleeping-car fire of 1978. The Vale of Taunton Deane has held more than its share of railway grief.