The Irish mail leaving London at shortly after seven A.M., it was timed
in 1868 to make the distance to Chester, one hundred and sixty-six miles,
in four hours and eighteen minutes; from Chester to Holyhead is
eighty-five miles, for running which the space of one hundred and
twenty-five minutes was allowed. Abergele is a point on the seacoast in
North Wales, nearly midway between these two places. On the 20th of
August, 1868, the Irish mail left Chester as usual. It was made up of
thirteen carriages in all, which were occupied—as the carriages of that
train usually were—by a large number of persons whose names, at least,
were widely known. Among these, on this particular occasion, were the
Duchess of Abercorn, wife of the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, with
five children. Under the running arrangements of the London and
North-Western line a goods train left Chester half-an-hour before the
mail, and was placed upon the siding at Llanddulas, a station about a
mile-and-a-half beyond Abergele, to allow the mail to pass. From
Abergele to Llanddulas the track ascended by a gradient of some sixty
feet to the mile. On the day of the accident it chanced that certain
wagons between the engine and the rear end of the goods train had to be
taken out to be left at Llanddulas, and, in doing this, it became
necessary to separate the train and to leave five or six of the last
wagons in it standing on the main line, while those which were to be left
were backed on to a siding. The employé whose duty it was to have done
so, neglected to set the brake on the wagons thus left standing, and
consequently when the engine and the rest of the train returned for them,
the moment they were touched, and before a coupling could be effected,
the jar set them in motion down the incline toward Abergele. They
started so slowly that a brakeman of the train ran after them, fully
expecting to catch and stop them, but as they went down the grade they
soon outstripped him, and it became clear that there was nothing to check
them until they should meet the Irish mail, then almost due. It also
chanced that the wagons thus loosened were oil wagons.
The mail train was coming up the line at a speed of about thirty miles an
hour, when its engine-driver suddenly perceived the loose wagons coming
down upon it around the curve, and then but a few yards off. Seeing that
they were oil wagons, he almost instinctively sprang from his engine, and
was thrown down by the impetus and rolled to the side of the road-bed.
Picking himself up, bruised but not seriously hurt, he saw that the
collision had already taken place, that the tender had ridden directly
over the engine, that the colliding wagons were demolished, and that the
front carriages of the train were already on fire. Running quickly to
the rear of the train, he succeeded in uncoupling six carriages and a
van, which were drawn away from the rest before the flames extended to
them by an engine which most fortunately was following the train. All
the other carriages were utterly destroyed, and every person in them
perished.
The Abergele was probably a solitary instance, in the record of railway
accidents, in which but one single survivor sustained any injury. There
was no maiming. It was death or entire escape. The collision was not a
particularly severe one, and the engine driver of the mail train
especially stated that at the moment it occurred the loose wagons were
still moving so slowly that he would not have sprung from his engine had
he not seen that they were loaded with oil. The very instant the
collision took place, however, the fluid seemed to ignite and to flash
along the train like lightning, so that it was impossible to approach a
carriage when once it caught fire. The fact was that the oil in vast
quantities was spilled upon the track and ignited by the fire of the
locomotive, and then the impetus of the mail train forced all of its
leading carriages into the dense mass of smoke and flame. All those who
were present concurred in positively stating that not a cry, nor a moan,
nor a sound of any description was heard from the burning carriages, nor
did any one in them apparently make an effort to escape.
Though the collision took place before one o’clock, in spite of the
efforts of a large gang of men who were kept throwing water on the line,
the perfect sea of flame which covered the line for a distance of some
forty or fifty yards could not be extinguished until nearly eight o’clock
in the evening, for the petroleum had flowed down into the ballasting of
the road, and the rails were red-hot. It was, therefore, small occasion
for surprise that when the fire was at last gotten under, the remains of
those who lost their lives were in some cases wholly undistinguishable,
and in others almost so. Among the thirty-three victims of the disaster,
the body of no single one retained any traces of individuality; the faces
of all were wholly destroyed, and in no case were there found feet or
legs or anything approaching to a perfect head. Ten corpses were finally
identified as those of males, and thirteen as those of females, while the
sex of ten others could not be determined. The body of one passenger,
Lord Farnham, was identified by the crest on his watch, and, indeed, no
better evidence of the wealth and social position of the victims of this
accident could have been asked for than the collection of articles found
on its site. It included diamonds of great size and singular brilliancy;
rubies, opals, emeralds; gold tops of smelling bottles, twenty-four
watches—of which but two or three were not gold—chains, clasps of bags,
and very many bundles of keys. Of these, the diamonds alone had
successfully resisted the intense heat of the flame; the settings were
nearly all destroyed.