The Moorgate tube crash occurred on 28 February 1975 at 8:46 am on the London Underground's Northern City Line; 43 people died and 74 were injured after a train failed to stop at the line's southern terminus, Moorgate station, and crashed into its end wall. It is considered the worst peacetime accident on the London Underground. No fault was found with the train, and the inquiry by the Department of the Environment concluded that the accident was caused by the actions of Leslie Newson, the 56-year-old driver.
The crash forced the first carriage of the six-car train into the roof of the tunnel at the front and back, but the middle remained on the trackbed; the 16-metre-long (52 ft) coach was crushed to 6.1 metres (20 ft). The second carriage was concertinaed at the front as it collided with the first, and the third rode over the rear of the second. The brakes were not applied and the dead man's handle was still depressed when the train crashed. It took 13 hours to remove the injured, many of whom had to be cut free from the wreckage. With no services running into the adjoining platform to produce the piston effect pushing air into the station, ventilation was poor and temperatures in the tunnel rose to over 49 °C (120 °F). It took a further four days to extract the last body, that of Newson; his cab, normally 91 centimetres (3 ft) deep, had been crushed to 15 centimetres (6 in).
The post-mortem on Newson showed no medical reason to explain the crash. A cause has never been established, and theories include suicide, that he may have been distracted, or that he was affected by conditions such as transient global amnesia or akinesis with mutism. The subsequent inquest established that Newson had also inexplicably overshot platforms on the same route on two other occasions earlier in the week of the accident. Tests showed that Newson had a blood alcohol level of 80 mg/100 ml—the level at which one can be prosecuted for drink-driving—though the alcohol may have been produced by the natural decomposition process over four days at a high temperature.
In the aftermath of the crash, London Underground introduced a safety system that automatically stops a train when it is travelling too fast. This became known informally as Moorgate protection. Northern City Line services into Moorgate ended in October 1975 and British Rail services started in August 1976. After a long campaign by relatives of the dead, two memorials were unveiled near the station, one in July 2013 and one in February 2014.
Background
The London Underground—also known as the Underground or the Tube—is a public rapid transit system serving London and some parts of the adjacent counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire. The first line opened in 1863 and by 1975 the network contained 250 miles (400 km) of route track; that year three million people used the service each day. The Tube was one of the safest methods of transport in Britain in 1975. Apart from suicides, there were only 14 deaths on the Underground between 1938 and 1975, 12 of which occurred in the 1953 Stratford crash.
Moorgate station, in the City of London, was the terminus at the southern end of the Northern City Line, five stops and 2.6 miles (4.2 km) from the northern end at Drayton Park. Moorgate is an interchange between the Underground network and suburban overground services. The station contains ten platforms; numbers 7 to 10 are deep level, and numbers 9 and 10 were used for the Northern City Line service.
At the end of platform 9 in 1975 was a red warning light atop a post, situated in front of a 61-centimetre-high (2 ft) sand drag placed to stop overrunning trains. The drag was 11 metres (36 ft) long, of which 5.8 metres (19 ft) was on the tracks in front of the platform, and 5.2 metres (17 ft) was inside an overrun tunnel that was 20.3 metres (67 ft) long, 4 metres (13 ft) high and 4.9 metres (16 ft) wide. The tunnel had been designed to accommodate larger main line rolling stock and so was wider than the standard tube tunnel width of 3.7 metres (12 ft). A buffer stop, which had once been hydraulic, but had not been functioning as such for some time prior to the crash, was at the end of the tunnel, in front of a solid wall. The approach to Moorgate from Old Street station, the stop prior to the terminus, was on a falling gradient of 1 in 150 for 196 metres (642 ft) before levelling out for 71 metres (233 ft) to platform 9; a scissors crossover was located just prior to platforms 9 and 10. There was a speed limit of 40 miles per hour (64 km/h) on the line, and a limit of 15 miles per hour (24 km/h) on entry into Moorgate station.
From November 1966 the Northern City Line ran 1938 rolling stock. Weekly checks were made on the stock's brakes, doors and compressors; all equipment on the train was examined on a six-week basis and the cars were lifted from their bogies for a thorough examination once a year.
Crash
On 28 February 1975 the first shift of the Northern City Line service was driven by Leslie Newson, 56, who had worked for London Transport since 1969 and been driving on the Northern City Line for the previous three months. Newson was known by his colleagues as a careful and conscientious motorman (driver). On 28 February he carried a bottle of milk, sugar, his rule book, and a notebook in his work satchel; he also had £270 in his jacket to buy a second-hand car for his daughter after work. According to staff on duty his behaviour appeared normal. Before his shift began he had a cup of tea and shared his sugar with a colleague; he jokingly said to the colleague "Go easy on it, I shall want another cup when I come off duty".
The first return trips of the day between Drayton Park and Moorgate, which started at 6:40 am, passed without incident. Robert Harris, the 18-year-old guard who had started working for London Underground in August 1974, was late and joined the train when it returned to Moorgate at 6:53 am; a driver waiting to go on duty took his place until his arrival. Newson and Harris made three further return trips before the train undertook its final journey from Drayton Park at 8:38 am, thirty seconds late. The train carried approximately 300 passengers; it was a Friday and, as it was the peak of rush hour, most of the travellers were commuters. As the exit from platform 9 was next to the overrun tunnel, the first two carriages were more popular with commuters and more full than the remaining four. Although pupils from the nearby City of London School for Girls would normally have been on the service at that time, the pupils had a day's holiday as the school was in use for external examinations. The journalist Sally Holloway, in her history of the crash, observes that the number of casualties could have been higher if the girls had been attending school.
After the train departed Old Street on its 56-second journey to Moorgate, Harris was bored and left his position at the guard's control panel—which contained the controls for the emergency brake—at the front of the rear carriage and walked to the back of the train to look for a newspaper. He did not find one and spent his time reading the advertisements on the walls at the rear of the carriage.
On arrival at Moorgate at 8:46 am, the train, which comprised two units of three connected cars, did not slow. It was still under power and no brakes were applied; it passed through the station at 30–40 mph (48–64 km/h). The signalman on duty later reported that the train appeared to be accelerating as it passed along the platform. A passenger waiting to take the return journey stated that Newson appeared "to be staring straight ahead and to be somewhat larger than life". Tests were later done on trains entering platform 9 at slow speed. These showed that because of the station lighting, it was impossible to clearly see the driver's eyes. Witnesses standing on the platform saw Newson sitting upright and facing forward, his uniform neat and still wearing his hat; his hands appeared to be on the train's controls as far as they could tell.
The brakes were not applied and the dead man's handle, which must be held down for the train to be able to travel, was still depressed when the train entered the overrun tunnel, throwing up sand from the drag; when the driver's cab crashed into the hydraulic buffer, the carriage was separated from its bogie and the coachwork was forced into the end wall and the roof. The first 15 seats of the carriage were crushed into 0.61 metres (2 ft). The second coach was forced under the rear of the first, which buckled at three points into the shape of a V with a tail, and had its rear forced into the tunnel roof. With the weight of the train piling up behind it, the 16-metre-long (52 ft) front coach was crushed to 6.1 metres (20 ft). The third car was damaged at both ends, more significantly at the leading end as it rode over the second. Javier Gonzalez, a passenger who was travelling in the front carriage, described the moment the train crashed:
Just above my newspaper I saw a lady sitting opposite me and then the lights went out. I have the image of her face to this day. She died.
As darkness came, there was a very loud noise of the crash, metal and glass breaking, no screams, all in the fraction of the second one takes to breathe in. It was all over in no time.
Forty-two passengers and the driver died; seventy-four people were treated in hospital for their injuries. It was, and remains, the worst peacetime accident on the Underground.
Rescue
The first call to the emergency services was received at 8:48 am; the London Ambulance Service arrived at 8:54 am and the London Fire Brigade at 8:57 am. At around the same time the City of London Police alerted nearby St Bartholomew's Hospital (Barts) that "a tube train had hit the buffers" at Moorgate, but there was no indication at that stage of the seriousness of the crash. A small assessment team comprising a casualty officer and a medical student was sent from the hospital; 15 minutes later a resuscitation unit was sent, although the hospital staff were still unaware of the scale of the problem. The City of London Police also contacted the medical unit of BP at Britannic House, Finsbury Circus. Donald Dean and a team of two doctors and two nurses walked around to the station to assist, and were the first medical assistance at the scene. After assessing the situation, Dean realised that he did not have enough painkillers with him, or in BP stores, so he went to the Moorgate branch of Boots where the pharmacist gave him the shop's entire supply of morphine and pethidine. The Fire Brigade undertook a brief inspection of the site and, once they saw what they were dealing with, the status was changed to a Major Accident event; additional ambulances and fire tenders were soon sent. One of the doctors from Barts later described the scene:
The front carriage was an indescribable tangle of twisted metal and in it the living and the dead were heaped together, intertwined among themselves and the wreckage.
It was impossible to estimate the number [of casualties] involved with any degree of accuracy because the lighting was poor, the victims were all tangled together, and everything was covered with a thick layer of black dust. Many of the victims were writhing in agony and were screaming for individual attention. It was obvious from an early stage that the main problem was the disentanglement of a heap of people, many of whom appeared to be in imminent danger of suffocation.
By around 9:00 am the last casualty had been removed from the third carriage. By 9:30 am Moorgate and many of the surrounding roads had been cordoned off to allow space for the co-ordination teams above ground to manage the flow of vehicles—particularly for ambulances taking casualties to hospitals. A message was sent from the London Fire Brigade headquarters to all fire stations in London; it estimated that there were still 50 people trapped and warned that "this incident will be protracted". To make a clear passage through the wreckage for equipment, the emergency services and injured commuters, a circular route was organised through the carriages. Firefighters cut holes in parts of the structure, including in the floors and ceilings of the carriages through which it was possible to move, even if it meant crawling through some areas. At 10:00 am a medical team arrived from The London Hospital and set up a makeshift operating theatre on a platform near the triage team.
Platform 9 was 21 metres (70 ft) underground, and fire and ambulance crews had to carry all the equipment they needed through the station and down to the scene of the accident. The depth at which they were operating, and the shielding effect of the soil and concrete, meant their radios could not get through to the surface. Messages and requests for further supplies were passed by runners, which led to mistakes: one doctor requested further supplies of the pain-killing gas Entonox, but by the time the request reached the surface, it had been garbled into "the doctor wants an empty box". The fire brigade deployed a small team with "Figaro", an experimental radio system that worked in deep locations. Working conditions for the emergency services became increasingly difficult throughout the day. The crash had thrown soot and dirt into the air from the sand drag, and from between the two metal layers of the tube carriages. Everything was covered with a thick layer of the residue which was easily disturbed. The lamps and cutting gear used by the fire brigade raised the temperature to over 49 °C (120 °F) and oxygen levels began to drop. In the deep lines at Moorgate, ventilation is produced by the piston effect, created by trains forcing air through the tube lines. With services stopped since the crash, no fresh air was reaching platforms 9 and 10. A large electric fan was placed at the top of the escalators in an attempt to remedy the situation, but soot and dirt was disturbed and little draught was created; the machine was soon turned off.