The daily Folkestone-to-London boat train of the South Eastern Railway connected to the tidal cross-channel ferries from Boulogne. The service ran at a different time each day depending on the Channel tides. On 9 June the train left Folkestone between 2:36 and 2:39 in the afternoon, hauled by Tender Locomotive No. 199, with three brake vans, a second-class carriage, seven first-class carriages, and two more second-class carriages, carrying eighty first-class and thirty-five second-class passengers in total. Three guards rode in the brake vans, able to communicate with the driver by whistle. The Beult viaduct between Headcorn and Staplehurst stations was a low wooden structure, ten feet high, with eight openings of twenty-one feet each crossing what was usually a dry river bed. For the previous eight to ten weeks, a team of eight men under a foreman named John Benge - some sources call him Henry Benge - had been replacing the timbers under the track on the local viaducts.

The system was supposed to be safe. The track would be lifted only when no train was due. Benge, however, had misread his timetable as to the schedule of the tidal boat train that day. Because the train's time depended on the tides in the English Channel, it ran later or earlier each day, and on 9 June Benge thought he had longer than he did. He set his lookout - the flagman - at what he believed was the regulation distance, but the labourer was counting telegraph poles to measure it. The poles on this stretch of line were unusually close together. The man ended up only 554 yards from the gap, not the 1,000 yards regulations demanded. There was no notification to the driver about any track repairs in the area. When the flagman waved his red flag, the train was already too close to stop. The locomotive, tender, brake van, and leading second-class carriage made it across. The first-class carriage behind them tipped, one end coming to rest in the dry river bed, the other still coupled to the carriage ahead and hanging out over the broken viaduct. The next seven carriages fell, one by one, into the muddy ground below. Seven carriages were destroyed - either in the derailment itself or during the chaotic rescue that followed.

Ten passengers died at Staplehurst. The records do not preserve all their names in popular memory, but they were real people - businessmen returning from Paris, families coming home from holiday, ordinary travellers on a routine afternoon journey. One witness described the moment of impact as "two terrible jolts and in an instant... all became darkness... and chaos." Another reported "the groans of the dying and wounded, the shrieks of frantic ladies and the shrill cries of young children." Charles Dickens, who was 53 years old at the time, was in the first-class carriage that did not completely fall. He was travelling with Ellen Ternan, the young actress widely believed to have been his mistress for the last twelve years of his life, and her mother Frances Ternan. All three survived. Dickens climbed out through the carriage window, rescued the Ternans, then went to help the others. He filled his hat with water from the river and his flask with brandy, and worked his way among the injured in the wreckage. Some of the people he tried to help died while he was with them.

Before he left in the emergency relief train sent down from London, Dickens climbed back into his own ruined carriage to retrieve the manuscript of the episode of "Our Mutual Friend" that he had been working on. He acknowledged the accident in the novel's postscript. "On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year," he wrote, "Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage - nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn - to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt." He closed the postscript: "I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then." The Board of Trade report, published on 21 June 1865, laid the blame on Benge for misreading the timetable and on the failure to post the flagman at the correct distance. Benge was tried for manslaughter.

Dickens never travelled the same way again. He avoided trains when he could, and showed visible distress when he was forced to use them. His son later said that his father "had never fully recovered" from Staplehurst. The shock - what Victorian doctors were beginning to call "railway spine," what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder - shadowed his last five years of writing and public life. He continued to give exhausting reading tours. He worked on "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," the novel he would never finish. He died on 9 June 1870 - five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash. The coincidence felt to many who knew him not coincidental at all. Among the people he failed to save from the wreckage, he was perhaps - belatedly - one. The viaduct over the Beult was rebuilt. The line still runs. A bend in the track and a quiet stretch of fields are all that mark the place where ten passengers died, and where a writer was given five more years and one of the strangest, slowest debts to fate in English literary history.