Charfield was a small station on the Bristol and Gloucester line where, in the early hours of that October morning, signalman H. Button was managing a complex ballet of trains. Two goods trains needed to be shunted clear of the main line to allow faster services through. An unscheduled stop by one goods train driver to take on water -- five minutes he was not booked for, and which he did not report to the signalman -- forced a last-minute rearrangement. A Great Western Railway goods train was still being shunted into the sidings at Charfield when the LMS night mail, the 10:00 pm from Leeds carrying passengers and mail, came racing out of the darkness at roughly sixty miles per hour.

The mail train struck the goods train and derailed, ploughing into empty wagons on the opposite line and crashing beneath a road bridge that trapped the wreckage. The violence of the collision telescoped the wooden carriages into one another. Then the gas ignited. The mail train's coaches were lit by flammable gas canisters -- twenty-three of them -- and only one vehicle had been converted to electric lighting. The oldest carriages dated to 1885. Within minutes, the wreckage was ablaze, and according to L.T.C. Rolt's account in Red for Danger, the fire burned for twelve hours. Sixteen people died and forty-one were injured. Archie Ayres, the village carpenter regularly employed by local undertakers, made thirteen coffins and two small boxes -- the latter for remains that could not be matched to any individual.

Both Aldington and Want insisted the distant signal had shown green, which would have meant the line ahead was clear. They stormed into Button's signal box after the crash demanding an explanation. But the investigation proved Button could not have pulled the signal to clear while the goods train occupied the section -- the block system's interlocking mechanisms made it physically impossible. Post-accident testing found the distant signal correctly set to caution. The only explanations were that the crew did not see the signal, or that something -- debris, sabotage, some mechanical anomaly -- had temporarily set it to green. No evidence of interference was ever found. The driver and fireman were charged with manslaughter but acquitted. The mystery of what Want actually saw through the fog that morning remains unsolved.

The official report laid bare systemic failures that compounded human error. The LMS railway had been slow to convert its rolling stock from gas to electric lighting, a conversion the Board of Trade had urged after a similar fire at Ais Gill in 1913 -- fifteen years earlier. Had the coaches been electrically lit, the inspector concluded, the toll would have been far lower. The report also recommended installation of the GWR's automatic train control system, which used an electrified rail to trigger automatic braking when a driver passed a signal at caution. This technology, already proven, could have stopped the mail train regardless of what the crew thought they saw. A memorial to the sixteen who died stands at St James Church in Charfield, a quiet reminder that railway safety was written in the lives of those who did not survive its absence.