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:
“The duce of any other rule have I to govern myself by in this affair—and if I had one ... I would twist it and tear it to pieces, and throw it into the fire when I had done—Am I warm? I am, and the cause demands it—a pretty story! is a man to follow rules—or rules to follow him?”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This Indian camp was a slight, patched-up affair, which had stood there several weeks, built shed-fashion, open to the fire on the west.... Altogether it was about as savage a sight as was ever witnessed, and I was carried back at once three hundred years.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)