Lives of the First World War

Remembering the lives of people who were involved in the Quintinshill rail crash. At 6.49 am on Saturday 22 May 1915 a Liverpool-bound troop-train carrying half of the 7th (Leith) Battalion, The Royal Scots collided head on with a local passenger train, which had been ‘parked', facing north, on the south-bound main line at Quintinshill, just North of Gretna. The troop train overturned, mostly onto the neighbouring north-bound mainline track and, a minute later, a Glasgow-bound express ploughed into the wreckage causing it to burst into flame. The ferocity of the fire, and consequent difficulty of rescuing those trapped in the overturned and mangled carriages, was compounded by the fact that most of the carriages were very old, made of wood and lit by gas contained in a tank beneath them. Between the crash and the fire a total of 216 men of the 7th Royal Scots and 12 others (mostly from the express but including the driver and fireman on the troop-train), died in, or as an immediate result of what was, and remains, Britain's worst railway disaster. The remains of the majority of the victims are buried at Rosebank Cemetery in Edinburgh, where there is also a memorial to those who died. Articles about the incident can be found at http://www.cwgc.org/media/108844/quintinshill_final.pdf and http://www.theroyalscots.co.uk/page/the-quintinshill-gretna-train-crash-22-may-1915 . There is an animated booklet available at http://ww100.publishingthefuture.info/quintinshill_rail_disaster/ , and there are also clips from a BBC documentary currently available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05vqx7v/britains-deadliest-rail-disaster-quintinshill .

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