It was 17 December 1915, and the fog that morning was thick enough to swallow signal lights. The signalman at St Bedes Junction, near Jarrow on the North Eastern Railway line between Newcastle and South Shields, did not know that a banking locomotive was sitting on the up main line in front of his box. He had not been told. He had not seen it. When the 7:05 passenger train from South Shields rounded the curve at thirty miles per hour, the driver had no warning. Two of the leading coaches telescoped into the stationary engine. Almost at the same moment, an empty stock train coming the other way ploughed into the wreckage. The coaches were gas-lit, and the gas caught fire. Nineteen people died. Eighty-two more were hurt. Their names are largely lost; their disaster is remembered alongside the much worse one that happened earlier the same year at Quintinshill.
Britain's railways suffered terribly in 1915. The Quintinshill rail disaster in May had killed at least 227 people - a troop train, a passenger train, and a stationary local, also lit by gas, also ending in fire. The pattern of St Bedes was eerily similar: a signalman unaware of a train near his box; rules not observed; gas lighting turning a collision into a furnace. The accident is sometimes called the Jarrow railway disaster, because there was no station at Bede and Jarrow was the nearest place of importance on the map. It was a morning rush hour collision in fog at a working-class commuter route on the Tyne. The people on the 7:05 were going to work.
St Bedes Junction sat at the top of a mineral line that fell on a gradient of 1 in 100 down to Tyne Dock Bottom. Heavy goods trains needed help to climb the bank; a six-coupled tank engine would push from behind, then drop back when the climb was done. That morning, a goods train had been banked successfully up the incline. The banking engine uncoupled and rolled back, coming to rest on the up main line. It should have been an unremarkable manoeuvre. But the signalman at St Bedes did not see it in the fog. The driver of the banking engine - whose job under Rule 55 was to send his fireman immediately to the signal box to remind the signalman the engine was there - stood for seventeen minutes before complying. By the time the fireman started walking, two trains were already approaching.
The signalman accepted the 7:05 passenger train from South Shields, bound for Newcastle, onto the up line. He also accepted the 6:58 empty stock train from Hebburn to South Shields onto the parallel track. The passenger train, running at about thirty miles per hour, struck the rear of the stationary banking engine head on. The two leading coaches telescoped - one carriage driving violently into the next, crushing the people inside. Within seconds, the empty stock train, moving slowly at about ten miles per hour, collided with the wreckage on the adjacent line. The fireman of the empty stock train was killed in that second impact. Then the gas tanks under the passenger coaches ruptured. Fire took the wooden carriages. Eighteen passengers died instantly in the collision; the fireman of the empty stock train was killed in the second impact. The Board of Trade report records nineteen dead and eighty-two injured in total.
The Board of Trade inquiry placed primary blame on the signalman for not noticing the banking engine, and secondary blame on the banking engine's driver for ignoring Rule 55 for seventeen minutes. Both human errors. But the inquiry was equally clear about gas lighting: it had turned a survivable collision into a catastrophe, just as it had at Quintinshill seven months earlier. A circular went out to all British railway companies stressing the urgency of converting passenger coaches to electric lighting. It took years. The cost of conversion ran against wartime budgets, and gas remained in service on many lines into the 1920s. Today the site of St Bedes Junction is part of the Tyne and Wear Metro - a single-track section with passing loops, soon to be doubled under the Metro Flow scheme. Trains run electric. The disused branch curves into the dock through overgrown undergrowth. The people who died in the fog one December morning are remembered in newspaper archives and Shields Gazette retrospectives, the rough shape of their last journey traceable in track-bed that has long since been repurposed.
St Bedes Junction was located at approximately 54.9742 degrees N, 1.4646 degrees W, between Jarrow and Bede stations on the Tyne and Wear Metro. Newcastle International (EGNT) is 8 nautical miles north-west. From the air, the Tyne and Wear Metro line is visible threading along the south bank of the Tyne, with Bede and Jarrow stations roughly a mile apart. The Tyne Dock complex sits 1 nautical mile east at the river mouth, and the Tyne Tunnel under the river is just east of the crash site. Best viewed at 1,500-2,500 feet AGL.