Friends of the Rail Forum

To show how easily mistakes can be made and how quickly things can go wrong in railwayland, this unfortunate derailment happened on Saturday 27 April 2013 during an enthusiast's weekend at Quorn on England's preserved Great Central Railway in Leicestershire. (Google coordinates 52d 44m 19.25s N, 1d 11m 14.45s W)

It seems the crew on loco number 46521 (a 1953-built LMS class 2) did not check the catch points behind them as they started out of the siding with a heritage "Travelling Post Office" train. The crew also passed a semaphore starting signal at "danger" (known as a "SPAD", signal passed at danger) for reasons that are not yet known. Did they get an authority from the signaller to pass that signal at danger or did they also fail to check the signal before starting?

The signalbox interlocking would almost certainly have prevented the starting signal being "pulled off" whilst the catch points were set incorrectly which would be one reason why the signal was at danger.

Of course what happened is exactly what those catch points were intended to do - prevent a potentially dangerous train movement (or runaway) going onto a main line without authority. In that way, the catch points serve to prevent a major collision or accident.

We await the full report with interest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr5EztEP ... ata_player
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=en ... 7ofOJsFRlk

My heart goes out to that crew - caught for posterity on YouTube! I notice they remain on the footplate, presumably making their loco safe. Let's hope there's not too much damage to loco or track.

Press statement from the GCRN.

As many of you will be aware already, Saturday morning was marred by an incident at Quorn - this was at very low speed and involved 46521 being derailed in the trap points. The first thing to say is that no-one was injured - metal can always be replaced or repaired, but humans can't - nevertheless for the operational staff involved such events can be traumatic.
In terms of the event, we were able to resume running trains in less than an hour. This reflects the fantastic response by our Operations team and the collective expertise from right across GCR which was on the scene at Quorn within minutes. The co-operation by all concerned in working together was a tribute to GCR. Elsewhere in this newsletter you can read some of the tributes received from visitors who recognised what was achieved.
The recovery operation was planned throughout the afternoon and began in earnest in the early evening. The loco and tender arrived back in Loughborough at 2 am on Sunday morning. Again, hats off to everyone who worked in such an exemplary fashion in the cold and arduous conditions. The teamwork was awesome to me as a virtual bystander.
Richard Patching

Is that incident classified as an OOPS?