The standard practice on single-track sections was to use a pilot engine: a small, distinctively shaped locomotive that escorted every train along the length of single track, so that any train moving on that section knew the pilot was with it. The pilot's distinctive appearance was the safety system. On the night of 13 October 1862, both legs of that system failed. The line through the cutting at Winchburgh was single because the other line was closed for maintenance. The usual pilot engine was being used for other duties and had wagons attached to it. A larger locomotive had been substituted for the distinctively small pilot. The inexperienced pointsman saw a ballast train following the train from Glasgow and assumed the ballast train was the pilot. He let the Glasgow train through. From the east, the Edinburgh train was already coming.

Both engines were braking when they met. The cutting walls and the curve had hidden each train from the other until three hundred yards out, almost no time at the speeds they had been making. The driver of the Glasgow train leapt clear and survived, badly injured. The other driver, the firemen, and fifteen passengers did not. Estimates of the injured ranged widely: between thirty-five and one hundred. Among the dead were James Hosie, the manager of the Oakley Iron Works and founder of the Bathgate Foundry, and John Wightman, who managed the Earl of Lauderdale's estate. The seventeen names included Hosie and Wightman, but most of the dead were ordinary passengers in ordinary carriages travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow on a Monday night.

There were no telegraph wires at the cutting and no help in the immediate vicinity. One passenger, injured but able to walk, made his way to a local home called Craigton House and commandeered a horse and cart. He drove more than four miles to Linlithgow in the dark to raise the alarm and bring back doctors. A special train was dispatched from Edinburgh carrying workmen who laboured through the night, first freeing the dead and the injured, then clearing the wreckage. The line was back in use the following day. The speed of that recovery says something about Victorian railways. So does the fact that one survivor had to commandeer a horse and cart because no faster method existed.

Legal charges were brought against the pointsman for letting the Glasgow train through. The charges were dropped. Charges of culpable homicide were then brought against two officials of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Company. A jury found them not guilty. No one was convicted for the deaths of seventeen people. The reasoning, perhaps, was that the failure was systemic: the pilot engine practice had broken down because of substitutions, a normal piece of operational improvisation that any railway of the period might have made. To convict the officials would have meant convicting an industry. Instead, the practice itself was tightened, slowly, across the network, and absolute block signalling eventually replaced pilot engines as the way to keep two trains off the same single track.

Seventeen names. James Hosie left a foundry he had founded in Bathgate. John Wightman left an estate he had managed for the Earl of Lauderdale. The other fifteen passengers, and the two railway employees who died with them, are recorded by total rather than by name in most accounts. They were people travelling on a Monday in October to wherever they had been going. The Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway absorbed the loss. The line continued. Today the same route is used by ScotRail trains running between the two cities; the cutting near Winchburgh is no longer a single-track section. A safety system that depended on a small locomotive looking distinctive at night, and on one pointsman reading that signal correctly under pressure, is gone. The accident is what convinced the industry to replace it.