The Paddington 431

I was about six months away from retirement on that October morning in 1999, when my local commuter train chugged into Reading station. Five or six tracks away, I could see the high speed Inter-City Great Western approaching. I had a choice: stay on the slow train, or make a dash for the faster one. I chose the latter.

Struggling up the stairs to its platform three minutes later, I saw the guard closing doors and heard whistles blowing. I glanced quickly at where the train seemed to be less crowded, grabbed a door handle and leapt onto the train. I was in luck: two rows along was a spare seat. I collapsed into it and, as was my habit in those days, fell asleep within minutes.

I awoke to find my face smashing into the seat in front, and the loudest bang I could remember hearing. There were screams and, as I instinctively got up, some spots of blood spilt onto my shirt. Although I didn’t know it at the time, three bottom teeth had come through the facial skin under my bottom lip. I gaped in astonishment as a diagonally upright Thames Train carriage cruised crazily past the coach window of our train. It was then I realised we’d hit another vehicle.

Screams continued as travellers made a panic-stricken rush for the doors. But the doors were locked. A woman thrust down the door window and yelled into the frsh air that we were trapped. And then an eerie silence fell. A man next to me was shaking violently. I’m claustrophic, he told me: he couldn’t stand this much longer.

Further down the carriage, towards the front of the train, voices began to shout “Can you move along please…it’s very hot here.” Had this lock-up lasted much longer, I think there would’ve been mayhem, but at last a rail official appeared at the door and began letting people out. He climbed in and, in an extraordinary act of sang froid, pushed towards the front of the train asking firmly that passengers remain calm.

It was quite a drop to the rails below. The sight that greeted me on getting out was one I shall never forget. The blue and white commuter train had been smashed apart by the collision. To my left, several charred, smoking bodies lay, with more rail staff covering up these grisly results of hot, violent death.  Two coaches along, a raging inferno belched out smoke and flame. We watched helplessly, knowing only too well that nothing and nobody could survive that.

More staff arrived and began shepherding us across to the far side of the tracks, and into a makeshift field hospital set up in the local Sainsburys. I saw the novelist Jilly Cooper, her forehead gashed, repeating “My manuscript, I’ve lost my manuscript”. A paramedic approached me and pushed the teeth back through my skin. Such is the anaesthetic effect of a major trauma, I hadn’t even noticed their comic protusion.

“Maybe you better come in the ambulance,” she suggested. But I shook my head and walked out of the shop. The main aim of my life at that moment was to get as far away from the accident as possible. As I walked along a sliproad and into Ladbroke Grove, a radio reporter rushed up to me with a microphone and asked was I a victim. I didn’t feel like a victim. But I did feel like pummelling the bloke to death.

I walked and walked and walked, eventually arriving at the office in Westbourne Terrace. As I staggered into reception, the reaction was immediate: I was late for a meeting, and a few people guessed I must have been on the ill-fated train which, already, was an infamous news story on every channel. Not thinking logically, I muttered about the meeting, and then my colleague Adam got me to lie down on a sofa. The agency chauffeur was summoned and, my wife reassured of my safety, I was off up the M4 back the way I’d come.

31 people died in the Paddington rail crash, and a further 400 were injured. Five years later, on 6th April 2004, Thames Trains pleaded guilty to two breaches of safety law over the training of Michael Hodder, the rookie driver who had steered his packed commuter train through a red light and into ours. Thames Trains was fined £2 million, and although the young driver was seen as the weak link, it emerged during the trial that the red light was hard to see in the low morning sun.

The light had been passed at red on eight occasions in the previous seven years, but no remedial action had been taken. A 2001 public inquiry into the crash aimed severe criticism at Thames Trains. Although Lord Cullen’s report accused the company of having a “slack and less than adequate” safety culture, with significant failures of communication – and accused Railtrack of “institutional paralysis” and a “lamentable failure” in reacting to warning signs of a potential danger at the crash site –  no executive in either Thames Trains  or Railtrack went to prison as a result of the companies’ obvious negligence.

On March 30th 2007, a further fine of £4million was levied on Railtrack….but, bizarrely, it had to be imposed on its not-for-profit successor, Network Rail. Because Network Rail was almost completely funded by the State, the fine was down to the taxpayer.