Fire
A great number of men on the troop train were killed as a result of the two collisions and the disaster was made much worse by a subsequent fire. The great wartime traffic and a shortage of carriages meant that the railway company had to press into service obsolete Great Central Railway stock. These carriages had wooden bodies and frames, so had very little crash resistance compared with steel framed carriages, and were gas-lit using the Pintsch gas system. The gas was stored in reservoirs slung under the underframe and these ruptured in the collision, the escaping gas igniting from the coal burning fires of the engines. The gas reservoirs had just been charged prior to leaving Larbert and this, plus the lack of available water, meant it was not until the morning of the next day that the fire was extinguished despite the best efforts of railway staff and the Carlisle fire brigade.
The troop train had consisted of 21 vehicles and apart from the rear six, which had broken away during the impact and rolled back along the line a short distance, the entire train was consumed in the fire, as were four coaches from the express train and some goods wagons. All four locomotives (the express was double headed) of the troop train, the local train and the express, were also badly damaged by fire and the intensity of the fire was so hot that all the coal in the tenders was consumed.
Read more about this topic: Quintinshill Rail Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word fire:
“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)