The dead included James Gordon Melville Turner and Hugh Whittard, son of Walter Whittard whose name still hangs over Whittard of Chelsea tea shops. Most of the casualties had been travelling in the carriages that overturned. Seventy-eight more were injured, twenty-seven seriously enough to be detained in hospital. Among the survivors, climbing out of a tilted carriage into the November dark, were a young singer named Robin Gibb and his fiancee Molly Hullis. Gibb, then seventeen years old, was at that very moment enjoying the Bee Gees' first British number one - Massachusetts had reached the top of the UK charts on 11 October 1967, three weeks before the crash. He would marry Hullis in December 1968. He would later say the experience shadowed him for years. The crash was simply called, in family terms, the night Robin nearly didn't come home.

The cause was small and dull and ordinary, which is what made it so devastating. A fatigue crack had been progressing through the first bolt hole of a rail at a joint, and a triangular sliver of metal had finally broken away. The wooden sleeper supporting that joint had recently failed and been replaced with a shallower timber substitute. The replacement had not been packed properly. Beneath it lay only a shallow layer of clean ballast. The rubber pad meant to cushion the rail on the adjacent concrete sleeper was missing. None of these things was, by itself, a catastrophe. Together, with a twelve-coach train at seventy miles an hour pounding the joint every few seconds, they were enough.

Just four months before the crash, in July 1967, British Rail had raised the speed limit for electric multiple units on this section of track from 75 to 90 miles per hour. The Hastings line trains were diesel-electric and slightly heavier, and they continued at lower speeds, but the maintenance regime had not been reassessed when the new limits were set. The Ministry of Transport report, when it came, was blunt. The Civil Engineering and Inspection Departments had permitted too low a standard of maintenance on the line, and had failed to assess the implications of running faster trains over track that was already showing its age. The temporary 60 mph restriction imposed after the crash felt, to commuters, like an admission.

The emergency services reached the wreckage within five minutes. The first casualty was at hospital eighteen minutes after the derailment. The last survivor came out at one in the morning. Salvation Army workers and the Women's Voluntary Service moved among the shocked passengers handing out blankets and tea, and local residents opened their doors to strangers. The slow lines reopened in time for the Tuesday morning rush. The fast lines reopened on Wednesday, with a speed restriction in place. In the months that followed, the entire jointed-track maintenance regime across Southern Region was overhauled. Inspection techniques were rewritten. Plans to replace bolted track joints with continuous welded rail, smooth and unbroken across miles, were accelerated. Concrete sleepers were banned at rail joints on Southern Region. The reforms shaped British rail safety for decades.

There is a plaque inside Hither Green station, mounted on the wall above the platform. It lists the forty-nine names. Each year on 5 November, while the rest of London sets off fireworks and burns effigies of Guy Fawkes, station staff and family members lay wreaths and small bunches of flowers beneath it. Some of those laying flowers are children and grandchildren of people on the list, who never met the relatives they are remembering. Robin Gibb died in 2012, but he spoke about Hither Green into his last decade. He said survivors carry the night with them. The plaque carries the names. The continuous welded rails carry the trains, smoother now, over the place where the joint failed.