North London Food & Culture

Wednesday Picture: Fatal railway crash, Kentish Town, 1861. But where?


This report is almost without full stops so we’ve added a paragraph break to help:

“[Here is] the result of my inquiry into the circumstances which attended the dreadful accident that occurred on the evening of the 2 September on the Hampstead Junction Railway, close to the Kentish Town station, from a collision between a up-excursion train returning from Kew to Bow, and a down-train of empty ballast waggons, in the act of crossing from the up-line on which it stood (after being drawn out of a siding in course of construction) to the down line, when the engine of the excursion train was thrown off the rails and dragged six of the carriages after it, and then separated from the carriages, and ran down the embankment on the left side, and fell over on to its side, while the derailed carriages followed, and three of them were precipitated over the wing-wall of an under bridge into the road below, and they remained, one standing above the other, greatly damaged; the fourth rested partly on the wing-wall of the under bridge and partly over the road, with the coupling chains of the preceding carriage still attached, and partly holding it up, and the fifth remained on the edge of the embankment which is about 29 feet high at the under bridge; some of the trucks of the ballast train were thrown off the line and knocked down the embankment on the right hand aide.

No less than 16 persons were either killed on the spot or received such injuries as have since caused their death, and it is probable that this number may even yet be augmented. About 20 other persons received severe concussions or had limbs broken, or were severely injured in different ways, while 301 other persons were shaken and bruised but are not considered to have been seriously hurt.”

Still interested? Read the full, quite dense report here. And isn’t it another world of tail lamps, semaphore and telegraphs?


2 thoughts on “Wednesday Picture: Fatal railway crash, Kentish Town, 1861. But where?”

  1. Very interesting. I started life just around the corner from Gospel Oak Station (a long time ago now). It was always my understanding that the accident occurred near the station, and that the wreckage ended up on Gordonhouse Road.
    Cheers

Leave a Comment

2 thoughts on “Wednesday Picture: Fatal railway crash, Kentish Town, 1861. But where?”

  1. Very interesting. I started life just around the corner from Gospel Oak Station (a long time ago now). It was always my understanding that the accident occurred near the station, and that the wreckage ended up on Gordonhouse Road.
    Cheers

Leave a Comment

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The award-winning print and online title Kentishtowner was founded in 2010 and is part of London Belongs To Me, a citywide network of travel guides for locals. For more info on what we write about and why, see our About section.