Moorgate Crash (Flickr set)

I used to be safey concience in my days as a guard and I would pull my motorman up no problem. Being ASLEF I took pride in being a guard and have worked to rule before. I used to note signal failures and the driver wouldnt pass an automatic until I got the number and time. Yes safety I felt was important. The only time I looked for papers was when the train was in the station and secure......Tunnel lights at Moorgate at the points were always on I believe, but I dont believe these were the cause.

Well medicals for guards was a strip down job and cough at the end of the day, nothing really stronger than that except you had if memory serves me was an eyesight test and an injection I think, and I think that was about it, I dont think when you went from Guard to motorman you were ever tested again. But even with a medical one can still have a seizure or heart attack, I dont think medicals would have saved the driver, I still say the guard had he had been alert should have pulled him down, there still would have been an accident for metal on metal downhill is like a bobsleigh on ice. The accident though wouldnt have been so messy, I could be wrong.

Basically, it means that the guard was looking for a newspaper left behind by a passenger, so that he could read it at the terminus, or during a relief.

It was more difficult finding newspapers back then than it is now - no freebie newspapers!

I tend to agree that this ghastly, dreadful accident would have happened sooner or later. Perhaps on an even busier part of the system, goodness forbid.

The dark irony with these type of disasters is that future safety-measures only came into being on the back of them once they'd happened. It's a bit lije the Titanic: it was only after that disaster that all ships were fitted with sufficient lifeboats and watertight compartments that reached the top of the decks.

History and fate give us truly awful ways of learning lessons.

I was on the train behind the fateful one.

This was during the period that I had more or less lost interest
in the Underground after I first became interested around 1966/7.
(My interest was re-aroused at the beginning of 1978, and have
been a LURS member consecutively since, living outside the UK since 1982).

I happened to be late that particular day, and should have been
in my usual place in the back section of the first (leading carriage),
to enable a quick get out up the escalators at Moorgate,
having traveled from Oakwood, via Finsbury Park (Victoria)
and Highbury & Islington.

What I do remember (as I had a number of cab rides in the late
60's on the Northern City and knew the line well) was that we
stopped short of the crossover on the approach to Moorgate,
and stood there for a long time. (can't remember exactly how long).
At a later stage the lighting went off, and afterwards
we were all detrained and led slowly over the crossover.
I remember at the time seeing the train, it seemed strange that
it was a long way down the platform.

We were walked into platform 10 (I think) with instructions
to walk straight up the platform, and up the escalators.

I, being inquisitive, wandered through one of the cross passages
and saw the train, not fully realizing at that moment the full
extent of the disaster. I saw a lot of staff/emergency personnel
around the tunnel mouth, the doors of the cars in the platform
were all open, and there was a lot of sand on the platform,
having been thrown up from the train mounting the sand drag.
From what I was able to take in, the coaches seemed jack-knifed
into the roof of the tunnel.

I was quickly ushered back to the other platform, up the
escalators, and continued my journey to work in Liverpool Street.

It was only later, when the full extent of the disaster began to be known,
I started to feel the shock of it all and went home early.

I knew John senior too. His son, also John, is now a Railway Inspector with HMRI and one of the nicest people I know.