Clapham Junction rail crash

Cover of the Hidden Inquiry report into the Clapham Junction rail accident

The Clapham Junction rail crash was a serious railway accident involving two collisions between three commuter trains at 0810 on the morning of December 12 1988. The collisions occurred 800 m (half a mile) southwest of Clapham Junction railway station in southwest London. Thirty-five people died and more than a hundred were injured, making the crash one of the worst in the UK in recent times.

The first collision occurred after the driver of the 0718 from Basingstoke to Waterloo saw a signal in front of him abruptly change from green to red without going through an intermediate yellow aspect. As required, the driver stopped his train at the next signal post telephone to report to the signalman at Clapham Junction 'A' signal box that his train had passed a red signal. He was advised there was no fault and that he was free to proceed. The driver told the signalman that he intended to make a formal report when he reached Waterloo. As the driver hung up the phone his train was hit from behind at a speed of about 40 mph (65 km/h) by the late-running 0614 from Poole, running under false 'proceed' signals. A second collision a short time afterwards involved an empty train leaving Clapham Junction hitting the wreckage. A fourth train approaching also under false clear signals at the time managed to stop about 70 yd (60 m) clear of the rear of the Poole train.

The direct cause of the disaster was sloppy work practices in which an old wire, incorrectly left in place after rewiring work and still connected at the supply end, created a false feed to a signal relay, thereby causing its signal to show green when it should have shown red. A contributing technical factor was the lack of double switching in the signal relay circuits, which would have prevented a single false feed causing an accident. The larger cause of the accident was the failure by British Rail senior management to recognise that the resignalling of the Clapham Junction area – and indeed the resignalling of all the lines out of Waterloo, of which this was a part – should have been treated as a major, safety-critical project, controlled throughout by a single, senior, named project manager. Instead the job was left to middle-level technical staff, stressed, poorly supervised by their seniors and poorly supported by their juniors. Staffing levels were inadequate and the staff, dulled by months of voluntary seven-days-a-week work, were carrying out the complete resignalling of the largest and, on some measures, busiest junction on the whole British rail system.

The Hidden Inquiry into the Clapham rail crash found that a supervisor - Mr. Lippett - had noticed some loose wiring during an inspection but had not told anyone about it because he did not want to "rock the boat". The supervisor's reluctance to raise the issue was characteristic of a form of self-censorship which organisations such as Public Concern at Work (PCaW), founded in 1993, have sought to overcome. In latter years, the balance between confidentiality and safety (or in other milieu, societal accountability) has been addressed in part by so-called "whistleblowing" legislation such as the UK Public Interest Disclosure Act (1998), and similar provisions in other countries.

The inquiry also recommended the introduction of the Automatic train protection (ATP) system; however the inquiry's recommendation was not acted on. Subsequent crashes such as at Southall in 1997 and Ladbroke Grove in 1999 led to further recommendations for the introduction of ATP, and although it has been installed on some lines, it has not to date been specified for the entire network. In the statement on the Ladbroke Grove crash, the Department for Transport sought to make the point that "no workable system was available in Britain" at the time.

Any recommendation for enhanced safety systems must ensure that those systems are correctly installed and correctly maintained. Unlike a manually-operated signalling system, where safety-critical decisions are made by the signaller every time a signal is changed or points switched, an automatic system has these decisions wired in at the design and construction stages. If the design and construction are flawless, the decisions will always be correct. If faults occur, whether as a result of equipment failure or (as here) of human error in the relay room, the decisions will be arbitrary. It is not apparent, therefore, that ATP on the lines out of Waterloo would have prevented this accident, since the ATP could have also been bypassed by the false feed wrong side failure.

A memorial marking the location of the crash site is atop the embankment above the railway on Windmill Road by Spencer Park, Battersea.

See also

*List of British rail accidents

External links

*Hidden Inquiry - PDF of the inquiry report, from The Railways Archive.
*BBC News story on the crash
*Map of the location of the crash, from Multimap.co.uk. The crash site is between the Emanuel School and Spencer Park.