Qualla: Lichfield rail crash

Lichfield rail crash: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was supposed to be a quiet New Year's evening. Twenty passengers were sitting in the rear three coaches of a stopping train at Lichfield Trent Valley station on 1 January 1946, waiting for the express fish train from Fleetwood to clatter past on the fast line, when the goods train left the rails it was meant to be on and ploughed into the back of them at thirty-five miles per hour. The wooden coaches were forty years old. The impact destroyed three of the four passenger carriages and threw their LNWR Prince of Wales 4-6-0 locomotive a hundred yards down the track. Thirteen people died in the wreckage. Seven more died of their injuries in hospital or on the way there. Twenty-one others were injured, some seriously. The cause was a frozen set of points, a bent connecting rod, and a piece of safety equipment that had been giving false information for hours without anyone noticing.

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Lichfield rail crash: Four Tracks and a Loop

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lichfield Trent Valley sat on the West Coast Main Line between Birmingham and Crewe, four tracks wide at the station - two fast through-lines for expresses, two platform loops for trains that actually stopped. A local passenger service to Wichnor Junction had come up the slow lin...

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Lichfield rail crash: What the Cold Did

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It had been bitterly cold all day. The mechanism of the facing points - the moveable rails that decide whether a train continues straight or branches off - had frozen solid in the position used by the previous local train, the one now standing in the platform loop. When the signa...

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Lichfield rail crash: The Collision

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At 18:58 the fish train passed into the station at about thirty-five miles per hour. The driver saw the green signal ahead and would have had no reason to slow down. At the north end of the platform the still-frozen points routed him onto the loop instead of the fast line. There ...

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Lichfield rail crash: Twenty People

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirteen people died in the immediate impact. Seven more died later in hospital or on their way. The names were ordinary names - returning soldiers, families heading home from New Year's visits, people who had simply chosen the wrong evening to travel. The fish train crew suffere...

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Lichfield rail crash: The Flying Kipper

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Reverend Wilbert Awdry, the country vicar who created the Railway Series of children's books that became Thomas the Tank Engine, took the Lichfield crash and combined it with the Abbots Ripton accident of 1876 to write a story called The Flying Kipper. In Awdry's version, Hen...

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