Qualla: Bere Ferrers Rail Accident

Bere Ferrers Rail Accident: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The young men had not eaten since six o'clock that morning. They had sailed from New Zealand on the troopships Ulimaroa and Norman, landed at Plymouth Sound earlier that day, and boarded a train at Plymouth Friary station bound for Sling Camp on Salisbury Plain. They were told that when the train made its first stop at Exeter, two men from each carriage could go to the brake van for provisions. At 15:52 the train made an unscheduled halt at a tiny country station called Bere Ferrers. The end carriages were beyond the platform. The soldiers, hungry and unfamiliar with English railways, assumed they had reached Exeter and stepped down. Many of them stepped down on the wrong side, onto the down line. The London Waterloo to Plymouth express was approaching at 40 miles per hour around a blind curve.

Bere Ferrers Rail Accident: What They Brought With Them

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The men were part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, the volunteer army that New Zealand had sent across the world to fight Germany's war. By September 1917 the country had already lost thousands of its young men at Gallipoli, on the Somme, and in the appalling mud of Passch...

Bere Ferrers Rail Accident: A Small Misunderstanding

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everything that went wrong was small. In New Zealand, trains had platforms on the right. In England, at Bere Ferrers that afternoon, the platform was on the right as the train had entered. But after the long journey, the soldiers had instinctively turned and stepped down the way ...

Bere Ferrers Rail Accident: Forty Miles an Hour

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nine soldiers were killed instantly. A tenth died later at Tavistock Hospital. The express finally came to a halt a quarter of a mile beyond the station. One of the survivors said something afterward that the inquest recorded, and it has been quoted in every account of the accide...

Bere Ferrers Rail Accident: What the Track Remembers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bere Ferrers railway station is still in use today, served by trains on the scenic Tamar Valley Line between Plymouth and Gunnislake. The platform looks much as it did in 1917. The curve in the line is the same curve. The express trains no longer thunder through at the speeds the...