British Transport Police have a train driver had been killed when two trains collided north of London on Friday, an accident that also left 11 people seriously injured.<\/p>\n
The crash occurred late afternoon near Bedford, a town around 90km north of the UK capital, and involved two London St Pancras-bound trains on the same track, the 4.40pm departure from Corby and the 3.50pm departure from Nottingham, according to East Midlands Railway (EMR).<\/p>\n
Most carriages of the two southbound trains remained on the tracks but at least one derailed.<\/p>\n
“Tragically, one person was pronounced dead at the scene. He is the driver of one of the trains involved,” transport police said in a statement.<\/p>\n
In total, 33 people were taken to hospital, including 11 in serious condition, the police added.<\/p>\n
Another 56 people were treated for injuries.<\/p>\n
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said it was “too early to speculate” on the cause of the crash.<\/p>\n
“We will make sure that there’s a thorough investigation done to establish how this collision happened and to ensure that lessons are learnt so that we don’t have an incident like this ever again,” Ms Alexander said.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the crash as “hugely concerning” and said he was “grateful to the emergency services for their swift response to this tragic incident”.<\/p>\n
A passenger on one of the trains, Paul Cavin, told the BBC: “We had stopped and suddenly we were hit from behind pretty bad.”<\/p>\n
“There were people injured on my carriage,” he said, adding he could see many wounded people walking away from the trains, some with “smashed up noses”.<\/p>\n
Another passenger, Brett Byatt, told BBC radio today: “This morning, it feels surreal and I think I’ve moved into the stage of anger now. I’m feeling pretty angry.”<\/p>\n
Passenger Pete Knapp described people “crying, screaming” and said some seemed to have major injuries.<\/p>\n
Dr Knapp, 40 said: “There was a moment of being flung into the chair in front, and then I saw smoke.<\/p>\n
“People were crying, screaming, people were so scared and confused.<\/p>\n
“I got up and I saw a lot of people who were unable to speak, had broken legs, and then I managed to get out of the train and because I’m quite thin I was able to squeeze out through the gap in the doors.”<\/p>\n
Train collisions are relatively rare in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
A collision between two trains in mid-Wales in October 2024, in which one passenger died and four other people were seriously hurt, was Britain’s first fatal crash involving multiple trains for more than a quarter of a century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British Transport Police have a train driver had been killed when two trains collided north of London on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-648828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}