Old Photograph Funeral Victims Railway Disaster Gretna Green Scotland

Old photograph of the funeral of some of the victims of the railway disaster at Quintinshill near Gretna Green in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The disaster occurred on 22 May 1915 near at Quintinshill, an intermediate signal box with passing loops on each side on the Caledonian Railway Main Line linking Glasgow and Carlisle. The crash, which involved five trains, killed a probable 226 people and injured 246 and remains the worst rail crash in the United Kingdom in terms of loss of life. Those killed were mainly Territorial soldiers from the 1/7th Leith Battalion, the Royal Scots heading for Gallipoli. The precise number of dead was never established with confidence as the roll list of the regiment was destroyed by the fire. The crash occurred when a troop train travelling from Larbert, Stirlingshire to Liverpool, Lancashire collided with a local passenger train that had been shunted on to the main line, to then be hit by an express train to Glasgow which crashed into the wreckage a minute later. Gas from the lighting system of the old wooden carriages of the troop train ignited, starting a fire which soon engulfed the three passenger trains and also two goods trains standing on nearby passing loops. A number of bodies were never recovered, having been wholly consumed by the fire, and the bodies that were recovered were buried together in a mass grave in Edinburgh's Rosebank Cemetery. Four bodies, believed to be of children, were never identified or claimed and are buried in the Western Necropolis, Glasgow. The cause of the accident was poor working practices on the part of the two signalmen involved, which resulted in their imprisonment for culpable homicide after legal proceedings in both Scotland and England.



All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.

View the most recent Tour Scotland photographs.