A number of technologies grew and matured during the Great War, airplanes, submarines,
radios, zeppelin's. Terrible technologies like shrapnel, artillery, munitions and poison gas,
but one technology rose above the rest in the Great War. It has been called the first and
only Railway War. Railroads were so important to the prosecution of the Great War that the timing
of the start of the first world war was based on the existing railway schedules. The German
better control of their railway network was one of the reasons that they were able to more quickly
deploy more troops and gain success in the early part of the war, and as the war went on, it was
the ability to move masses of reinforcements by rail to any point of attack that turned
the Great War into the bloody static war that it was. And rail was just as important on the
homefront. In the United Kingdom, for the first time in the UK's history, the railway networks
were all brought under government control, and the extensive British railway network served
the United Kingdom's war effort in immeasurable ways. But it also contributed to the worst rail
disaster in the history of the British Isles. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
The United Kingdom realized the importance of rail for war preparations even before the Great
War started. In 1912, the Railway Executive Committee was formed to manage railways in
Britain in the event of an emergency such as war. The REC was to act as
an intermediary between the various British railway companies and the War Office. There
were roughly twice as much track in the United Kingdom in 1912 as there is today,
and routes and stations were under the control of different companies. While the railway companies
already worked with the War Office, for example, moving troops for training and during maneuvers,
it was quickly recognized that a much greater degree of coordination would be required if
Britain were to go to war. Trains were the only real option to move soldiers and sailors,
their equipment, weapons, horses, and vehicles. The need was even more acute as the huge amount
of horses requisitioned in war would further limit ground freight movement. Britain understood
that railways would be a central technology in the war that was already on the horizon.
The railways established plans, and timetables to move troops and equipment,
to ports of embarkation in case of war, and all that was coordinated by the REC
who kept the timetables, and distributed them in something called the War Book. On August 4th 1914,
when the United Kingdom officially declared war, the Railway Executive Committee officially
took direct government control of a hundred and thirty railways in the United Kingdom.
The war caused a special problem for the British railway service as men left to serve in the war.
Over 180,000 British railway workers enlisted, many of those went to work on the rail that
supported troops in France, part of the railway operating division of the Royal Engineer Corps.
More than 20,000 of the British railway workers that went to war never made it home from the
European battlefields. Famously, more women were hired to help make up for the shortage of railway
workers at home. The number of women employed by the British railway companies went from about
13,000 at the start of the war, to over 68,000. Production was turned to a number of specialized
cars produced by the military, although shortages meant that older and less safe carriages,
often in a state of disrepair, were also pressed into service. Specially designed wagons were
built to convey army, and navy equipment, and fuel. Specialized trains, included hospital
trains that could be a third of a mile long, that transported more than one and a quarter million
injured and sick troops to hospitals throughout the United Kingdom over the course of the war. And
the Jellicoe Specials, trains named for Admiral of the Fleet, John Jellicoe, that carried coal
from Southern Wales to the Royal Navy fleet in the Orkney Islands. By the end of the war more than a
hundred Jellicoe Specials were running every week. But of course the central role of the railways in
the Great War was directly moving troops. Many army camps were provided with new branch lines
and sidings, as were new munitions factories. At Richborough Kent, a new port was built and
included the world's first roll-on/roll-off rail ferry. In the first two weeks of the war,
fourteen hundred and eight Special trains ran, taking troops to ports of embarkation for France.
The scale was staggering. Over a period of three weeks in 1914, a troop train would arrive at the
Southampton docks every 12 minutes during the course of a 14-hour day. By August 31st 1914,
just 27 days after entering the war, trains to Southampton had transported more than a
hundred eighteen thousand army personnel, 37,000 horses, 314 artillery pieces, and 5,200 vehicles.
And the trains would keep rolling, carrying men and equipment to the ports that would
carry them to France, or the far-flung battlefields of the Great War. In May of 1915,
one of those units that was being transported was the 7th Battalion of the Royal Scots.
Originally raised in 1633, the Royal Scots were, at the time of the Great War,
the oldest and most senior Infantry Regiment of the line of the British Army. The Royal Scots
regiment expanded quickly during the Great War. The seven battalions of the so-called
Territorial Force were mobilized, and seven more battalions of volunteers were raised
under Kitchener's new army scheme. By the end of 1914, the regiment included 24 battalions,
and ten more were added in 1915. All told, the Royal Scots raised more than a hundred thousand
troops during the Great War, almost half of which would end up as casualties, killed or wounded. The
Territorial Force had been created in 1909 as a part-time volunteer force designed to augment
British land forces as a unified auxiliary without resorting to conscription. At first
the Territorial Battalions, not well regarded by the Regular Army, were only used for home defense,
freeing regular army battalions for foreign service. But as demands for the war increased,
the territorial forces were increasingly deployed to The Front. One such unit was the 7th Battalion
of the Royal Scots Guards. Mobilized in what was then the city of Leith in August of 1914,
the 7th RS spent the first several months of the war manning coastal defenses around
Edinburgh. But in April 1915, they were sent for additional training, meaning that they were going
to be deployed to The Front. They expected that they were going to be sent to France,
but that was not the Army's plan. On the evening of May 21st 1915, the battalion was mobilized and
issued with ammunition, blankets and bedding, and to their surprise, sun helmets. A sure sign
that France was not their destination. The men of the battalion were instead being sent to the
Mediterranean, to the bloody conflict at the mouth of the Dardanelles, called the Gallipoli campaign.
Originally the men of the 7th RS should have shipped out a day earlier on May 21st,
but the troopship that was intended to carry them had run aground in the Mersey River and
so the battalion was mobilized the day later, and they left on the morning of May 22nd. The
battalion was loaded onto two trains, the first train left at 4:00 a.m. and the second left two
hours later. The second train included about half the men of the thousand man battalion,
included 21 wooden carriages with men packed 8 to a compartment.
The Caledonian Railway was formed in 1845 at a period when local railway concerns in the
United Kingdom were developing into longer lines between cities and broader networks. The idea of
the line was to connect local Scottish lines with the incipient English networks that were forming.
The main line of the railway connected Glasgow to Carlisle using the four foot eight and a half inch
standard gauge, and when it was completed in 1848, it was the first continuous railway route between
Glasgow and London. There were competing lines connecting Scottish cities to the English network,
but the Caledonian line was a popular railway. The town of Gretna was just on the Scottish side
of the English Scottish border. About a mile north of Gretna Junction on the
Caledonia main line was the Quintinshill signal box. Quintinshill wasn't a town,
the spot had probably been named for a house that was nearby in the 1850s, but by 1915 the
house was gone. What Quintinshill was, was a place where there were two passing loops, one on either
side of the northbound and southbound tracks of the Caledonian main line. Passing loops are
short sections of track connected to the main track that allow trains to pass each other.
On the morning of May 22nd, two northbound overnight sleeping car expresses were
running late, so the local service from Carlisle had to be sidelined to allow
the sleepers to pass. But a goods train was occupying the loop on the northbound track,
and so the local was shunted onto the southbound track. A Special freight train of empty coal
wagons was coming southbound and was placed on the southbound loop. The first of the sleeper
cars passed by northbound. The signalmen were making a shift change, the morning signalmen,
James Tinsley, having arrived late on the local that was now parked on the southbound
track. He and the night signalman George Meakin were chatting in the signal box.
The second troop train carrying the men of the Royal Scots was headed southbound.
It's still not completely clear why the accident occurred,
there were several breaches of regulations involved, but it appears that Tinsley
and Meakin simply were distracted. As the troop train came they signaled it through,
apparently having forgotten that the local was still parked on the southbound track.
The train full of sleeping soldiers was traveling at some 80 miles an hour when it
struck the parked local train at approximately 6:49 a.m. The collision was so hard that the
leading carriages of the troop train hopped right over the locomotive of the local. The
rest of the Train compressed, spilling over onto the northbound tracks. Some 215 yards of
train were compressed into less than 70 yards of space. Fires started almost immediately,
the cars were lit by gas lamps, and the canisters of gas under the wooden train carriages had
ruptured and were ignited by the coals from the trains tinderbox. Soldiers were thrown, crushed,
trapped, trying desperately to escape the burning wreckage. But less than 30 seconds later a whistle
started blowing. The second northbound sleeper was desperately trying to stop but there was not
enough time! It struck the wreckage at nearly 50 miles per hour. Many of the men who had managed
to escape the initial collision were mowed down. A survivor, Peter Stoddart of Leith was interviewed
in 1985, he said, “I think I prayed. The Express hit us and I lost consciousness as it was thrown
into the air. I came to halfway down an embankment by the track.” The survivors, as well as nearby
farm workers and villagers alerted by the noise, came and started to pull men from the wreckage.
Some men had to have limbs amputated on site to get them free. There is a persistent rumor that
some men who were trapped were shot to keep them from being burned to death. Stoddart says he saw
it happen. Rachael Nimmo, 28 years old, and her one-year-old son Dixon traveling from Newcastle,
were the only passengers on the local train killed. Seven died on the Express, including a
43 year old Scottish engineer, and three army, and two naval officers. The driver and fireman of the
troop train, and a sleeping car attendant on the express train also died. That was horrible enough,
but the mass of the casualties were among the men of the Royal Scots. The official death toll
listed by the Army was 210, with another 224 injured. Only eighty three of the Royal Scots
dead could be identified. Of the 499 officers and men on the train only 58 men and seven officers
were present for roll call that afternoon. The accident was devastating for the town of Leith,
where it was said that there was not a family in the town untouched by the tragedy. The
Quintinshill train disaster is still today, the worst rail disaster in British history.
Tinsley, Meakin and a man named George Hutchinson, who was the fireman on the local train,
were charged in both Scotland, where the accident occurred, and England where many of the victims
died. They became the first men to be indicted for the same crime in two different United
Kingdom countries, although they were tried in Scotland. Hutchinson was found not guilty,
but Tinsley and Meakin were convicted of culpable homicide, they served a little over a year and
were released in December of 1916 where they were immediately reemployed by the Caledonian
railway. That fact was part of the reason that the British Broadcasting Corporation in a 2015
reanalysis of the accident, postulated that they might have conspired with the Caledonian
railway and the British government, who was technically in charge of the line,
to take sole responsibility for the accident, thus exonerating the people that were running
the railway. They faulted the railway operators for knowingly ignoring violations of regulations,
for overburdening their signalman by trying to keep peacetime service running,
despite the increased demands of the war, in order to preserve profits. And for negligently
endangering the soldiers by putting them in wooden railway cars that they knew to be less
safe. The bodies of a hundred and one men of the Royal Scots were buried together in a mass grave
in Edinburgh’s Rosebank Cemetery. The funeral procession was lined by more than 3,000 soldiers
and thousands of citizens. A memorial to the dead troops was erected in the cemetery in 1916.
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