At about five in the morning on 13 December 1926, fog hung dense over the railway tracks at Orgreave, east of Sheffield. A goods train waited at a signal on the Up Goods Line, around forty wagons, mostly empty. Another goods train, accepted into the same section under Permissive Block working, came up behind it and collided with the rear. Wagons derailed across both running lines. Half an hour later, a workmen's train carrying roughly 800 miners ran into the wreckage. Almost a century before the same place became famous for very different reasons, Orgreave was the site of a railway accident that, against the odds, killed nobody.
The line at Orgreave Colliery was four tracks wide. The two centre tracks were Main Lines, worked under Absolute Block regulations, which kept a clear interval between trains and made collision essentially impossible. The two outer tracks were Goods Lines, worked under Permissive Block regulations, which allowed trains to follow each other into the same block as long as they kept below four miles an hour. Permissive Block was a tool for moving congested mineral traffic through a busy junction without the delays Absolute Block would have imposed. It depended on visibility. In foggy conditions, it was supposed to be suspended entirely. On the morning of 13 December the signalman at Orgreave Colliery box accepted the 1.15 a.m. Dewsnap to Nottingham goods train onto the Up Goods Line behind the standing Mexborough to Woodford train, under Permissive Block rules, even though the weather was foggy and dense in places. The Dewsnap train hit the back of the Mexborough train. Wagons came off the rails. Some were thrown across the adjacent Up Main line.
Paddy mails were the workmen's trains that ran around the South Yorkshire coalfield to ferry miners to their shifts. They were operated to schedules locked tight to the colliery clock: three shifts a day, hundreds of men in each, brought in from Sheffield and the surrounding villages. The Orgreave paddy mail of 13 December left Sheffield Victoria just before 5.30 a.m. with around 800 miners aboard, hauled by an elderly ex-Great Northern Railway 'Atlantic' locomotive driven by Fred Bagley of Neepsend engine shed. Fourteen assorted coaches made up the train. The route ran via Darnall, then onto the Up Main line at Orgreave, where the train would slow to take the branch points into the colliery sidings. The wreckage was directly ahead. Bagley was already braking for the branch when he saw it. The train hit the wagons at moderate speed and was stopped within fifty yards.
Nineteen miners needed treatment at Sheffield Royal Hospital. One was admitted with back and thigh injuries. There were no fatalities. The damage to the front coaches was significant, but the train had been decelerating, and the moderate impact speed made all the difference. What is striking, reading the report a century later, is what most of the uninjured miners did next. Many of them got out of the damaged carriages, walked along the lines to Orgreave Colliery, and started their shift. They did not want to lose a day's pay. The miners booked for Treeton Colliery were too far away to walk in time and went back to Sheffield by rail. The whole episode was contained, treated, sorted out, and the shift went on. In 1926, the gap between a comfortable life and a hungry one was thin enough that an early-morning train wreck did not change the calculation about turning up for work.
The post-accident commentary in the railway trade press, captured later in the journal of the Great Central Railway Society, focused on procedural failures. Permissive Block working should not have been in operation in dense fog. The Nottingham train should have been moving slowly enough to stop short of the train in front. When the collision occurred, the guard of the colliding train was supposed to have run back down the line with a red hand signal and placed detonators on both the Goods and Main lines, the standard procedure to protect a fouled track. None of that appears to have happened in time. The Orgreave paddy mail came around the curve into a situation the system was supposed to have warned it about. Things had to have gone wrong in several specific ways at once. They did. Eight hundred lives turned on the speed at which Fred Bagley happened to be already slowing for the branch.
The site of the Orgreave rail accident is at 53.367 N, 1.359 W, immediately east of Sheffield in South Yorkshire. The location is at about 60 m elevation along the Sheffield-Worksop railway corridor. The former Orgreave Colliery footprint, redeveloped as Waverley housing and business park, sits adjacent to the line. Best viewed from 2,000-3,000 ft AGL; the railway alignment remains visible, though the colliery itself is long gone. Nearest airports: Doncaster Sheffield (EGCN) 11 nm east-northeast; Sheffield City Heliport 4 nm west.