Events
The train arrived at Plymouth from Penzance at 23:50. It was coupled up to the Plymouth sleeping cars (which included W2437) and the ETH was turned on at 00:15. The train departed on time at 00:30 and made scheduled stops at Newton Abbot and Exeter. Nobody who saw the train noticed anything amiss, but the bags of linen were now heating up. As they smouldered they began to give off toxic gases, including carbon monoxide. Unfortunately the ventilation system drew fresh air from the vestibule, and the gases were sucked into the system and into each berth.
A major fire developed and the train was stopped at 02:41 near Silk Mill signal box about a mile short of the station in Taunton, Somerset, by the communication cord being pulled. By that time, most of the victims were already dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. A small number of passengers awoke and were able to escape, although they had considerable difficulty in doing so due to the smoke and heat. The sleeping car attendant of the Plymouth coaches could only shout a warning to a few of the occupants before he was overcome by smoke; it was the attendant in the adjacent coach who pulled the communication cord. The victims as well as other injured passengers were taken to the nearby Musgrove Park Hospital for treatment.
A twelfth passenger, a Belgian national, died from pneumonia nine months later, having never regained consciousness.
Read more about this topic: Taunton Sleeping Car Fire
Famous quotes containing the word events:
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—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire—thinner than the paper on which it is printed—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)