British Railways in the 1950s was looking for a way to cut the cost of crossing keepers. The bill for manning the country's 2,400 level crossings had climbed past £1 million a year, and at some locations had risen tenfold. The job itself was responsible but dull and hard to recruit for in the postwar labour market. Manual gates also slowed road traffic, since they had to close, latch, and let the distant signal clear before a train could pass, taking three or four minutes. In October 1956 senior members of Her Majesty's Railway Inspectorate visited the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to study automated crossings. Their report recommended automatic half-barrier installations, known as AHBs. Closed for under a minute, no keeper required, the projected savings were significant. The first pioneering British installation went in at Spath in 1961. Hixon, eight miles away, followed soon after.

On 8 November 1966, a transporter belonging to the haulage firm Robert Wynn and Sons Ltd had nearly come to grief on an automatic crossing at Leominster, in Herefordshire. The vehicle had become grounded on the rails. Disaster was avoided only because the driver violently revved the engine and let in the clutch, dragging the transporter clear before a train arrived. Wynn's wrote to British Railways to flag concerns about the short warning time the crossings gave to slow heavy vehicles. The reply, from the Western Region's assistant general manager, was, in a later assessment, remarkable for its arrogance and lack of insight: "I must emphasise that the hazard was of your firm's making and it is fortunate that it was not more than a hazard." The letter closed the conversation. In parallel, a BR signal technician at Leominster, Jack Westwood, had quietly phoned the signalman to set the signals to danger before an earlier slow Wynn's transporter could be hit. The luck would not hold.

The transporter that left Stafford at around 9:30 that Saturday was hauling a 120-ton electrical transformer from the English Electric works to a storage depot at the old RAF Hixon airfield, three miles north of Colwich Junction. The vehicle was propelled by a tractor unit at each end and crewed by five men, with B. H. Groves in the leading cab. The journey was only six miles as the crow flies, but the load forced a long roundabout route south out of Stafford, up the M6 motorway, along the A34 to Stone, and finally the A51 to Hixon. The Ministry of Transport had approved the route. The order said nothing about the level crossing. Six earlier abnormal loads belonging to English Electric had already crossed at Hixon without incident in the preceding months. The crew at the crossing that morning had no special instructions for it.

An express on the West Coast Main Line met the transporter on the crossing. Eleven people were killed. Forty-five were injured. The damage to the train and rolling stock was significant, the inquiry put it at £2 million. The transformer was wrecked. Two of the Mark 1 Tourist Second Open carriages involved, numbers 4963 and 4973, derailed and came to rest beside the ruined transformer; both have since been preserved, along with the undamaged Mark 2 TSO 5191. Behind the bare facts lay 11 individual lives ended in a few seconds on a Staffordshire crossing whose risk had been raised, in writing, more than a year before.

The public inquiry found the haulage company's directors chiefly at fault. It also exposed the institutional pattern that had allowed the disaster: the Railway Inspectorate, not BR, had pushed automatic half-barriers into service, and Colonel Reed of the HMRI, who took charge of AHB introduction in 1961, had opposed providing telephones or signal protection at the crossings. Some BR managers had insisted on telephones anyway, and Hixon did have a telephone, but the available 24 seconds of warning was simply not enough for a 148-foot, 162-ton vehicle. Signage and procedure around automatic crossings were tightened across the network. On 6 January 2018, on the fiftieth anniversary, a memorial stone was dedicated in Hixon village churchyard. Another stands by the railway bridge near the site. The crossing itself is gone, replaced by a bridge with cul-de-sacs of road on either side. In 2021, a CrossCountry train, 220009, was named Hixon at Stafford station, in memory of those who died and of the slow institutional learning that followed them.