Monday is the tenth anniversary of the Great Heck rail tragedy. MATT CLARK meets a man who cheated death on that fateful day.

PETER HINTZE was tucked up in bed on another cold, ordinary February morning. He had nothing much planned and the forecast wasn’t great. So he planned to remain indoors, stay warm and perhaps catch up on his paperwork.

But shortly after six, Peter woke with a start. It was a strange noise; having lived by the railway for 15 years, he knew just about every sound a train could make. But this one was different and he had never heard anything like it.

“There wasn’t a rattling or banging like you’d expect,” says Peter. “It was like something digging into the ground and a very unusual noise for that time of day. I thought: ‘What the hell is that?’.”

Peter jumped out of bed and peered into the gloom. It was still dark outside and occasional snow flurries had begun to fall, but in the murk he could just make out a gnarled shape.

“I had a nosey out and tried to see what was going on. I could see a metal strip reflecting some light and I thought: ‘There’s a truck come off, that’s what the noise was.’ “Then I saw my neighbour walking along and shouting, ‘Is anyone there?’. Well, I thought this doesn’t sound good, so I opened the window and shouted, ‘Hang on, I’m coming down’.”

The pair discovered more than a derailed truck. A freight train loaded with 1,000 tons of coal had careered into Peter’s garden before grinding to a halt feet from his front door.

At the time, Peter didn’t know an express was also involved, but by the bridge next to his house, a London bound Intercity 225 lay twisted; some carriages were on their side, others scattered in a field. One had been thrown into the air and was completely wrecked.

There were bogeys, couplings and personal belongings everywhere – as well as an eerie silence.

The train had collided with a Land Rover which veered off the nearby M62, down a 20 foot bank and on to the main East Coast line. Although partially derailed, the express managed to continue upright and in a straight line for half a mile.

But a set of points deflected it towards the opposite track and into the path of a northbound coal train.

Dawn slowly began to break and Peter could see the full extent of the crash.

So he dialled 999.

“I told them there had been a derailment at bridge seven in Great Heck. They took some details and I said: ‘You’ll need a full turnout, it’s a bad do is this’.”

First on the scene was a tender from Snaith.

“They stopped on the bridge, took a look down and one of them said: ‘Bloody hell what can we do here.’ They went into the field to help but really needed help from the specialists. It wasn’t long before more emergency services turned up though; they were coming in from all over.

“I remember going down to the back coach and these people were obviously thinking about whether they should get out. I said: ‘Stay where you are if nobody’s injured and we’ll get someone down to you’. I think I was concerned about getting the right people to them.”

As daylight arrived, Peter began to realise he was lucky to be alive. The train could – and perhaps should – have careered into his living room, but in a moment of providence in a day short of good fortune, it diverted after crashing into his garage.

“The coal train hits a bridge parapet, comes off and piles into the back of those garages over there. It knocked them out of line by about a foot or more with the weight of it and I think that stopped the train from swinging round. It went through my garden like a snow plough, demolishing everything up to this pampas grass here.

“There were wheels, springs and all sorts of stuff all over the garden – and coal; it was still coming out of the lawn months later.”

Peter’s car was unscathed, apart from a few scratches. When the train hit his garage, a large plastic pot had flown off a shelf and landed on top of the car. As the roof began to cave in, the pot saved the day.

His caravan and summerhouse didn’t fare so well when the trucks concertinaed into one another, crushing everything in their path. Peter points to new slates on his cottage where a lump of metal from the coal train flew into the air and made a hole in his roof.

“It all began to hit me when my girlfriend came over. I’d already rung to say I was all right but that everything was in a mess. She’d seen the news flashes and when she came over, got out of the car where the garage was, and just burst into tears. I think it was relief that I’d got away with it.”

Experts say the trains had a closing speed of 170mph, making the Great Heck crash the fastest in UK railway history. They “converged like the Titanic with the iceberg” said the judge at Gary Hart’s trial. Jurors at Leeds Crown Court decided Hart had fallen asleep at the wheel before his Land Rover plunged off the M62 on to the track.

He received a five-year jail sentence after being found guilty of causing the deaths of ten people by dangerous driving.

But the outcome could have been very different. John Prescott, then Deputy Prime Minister, visited the scene and described the disaster as the tragic outcome of a ‘remarkable set of coincidences’.

Hart’s vehicle left the motorway just yards before a safety barrier which would have prevented it going down the embankment and the express, although still moving after hitting the car, only crashed after it was deflected by points into the oncoming freight train.

In an iniquitous twist of fate, the coal train shouldn’t have been there at all. It had been released 20 minutes early that morning and Peter says had it not been, the express would probably have stayed upright. It was still running on part of the track and the marks he saw suggested it was travelling in a straight line.

“It was just foul luck. The express would have been waggling after the points but I think it would have been able to stop if the freightliner had set off at its normal time.”

Firefighters from four forces attended the scene with some passengers found thanks to thermal imaging equipment and digital video cameras. The last survivor was brought out just after 1pm, seven hours after the crash.

Most of the 82 seriously injured and ten fatalities were travelling in the first five coaches and tragic though the Great Heck rail crash was, it could have been even worse. The early morning express from Newcastle had only 99 passengers and staff on board; some 20 per cent of its capacity.

“On that day, the whole village was in shock, especially when they started showing it on the news; it was surreal to see my house on the TV. Once the media got hold of it they came from all over the place. There was a Dutch crew, CNN and ABC from America, all sorts. You’ve never seen anything like it.

“Today the crash is as vivid as it was ten years ago and now if I hear a train grind to a halt in the night I’ll think: ‘Bloody hell, what’s happened now’.”


Background

Gary Hart was found guilty on ten counts of causing death by dangerous driving and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Hart, left, attempted to sue the Department for Transport for a contribution to the damages he was liable to pay GNER and the victims on the grounds that the safety barrier was inadequate, but the case was dismissed.

Campaigners have since drawn attention to the length of the crash barriers alongside the road. According to the Health and Safety Executive’s final report, the Land Rover left the road some 24 metres before the barrier started. However, a 2003 Highways Agency review of crash barriers on bridges over railways concluded that only three bridges nationwide were in need of upgrading. The bridge at Great Heck was not one of them.

The driver of Freight train 66521, Stephen Dunn, and the GNER driver, John Weddle, were killed. From the Intercity 225, six passengers and two other train crew, Raymond Robson, a train guard; and Paul Taylor, a chef, also died. Survivors of the accident included a train-driving instructor, James Hill, who was travelling in the Freight train cab.

Freight train 66526 has since been named ‘Driver Steve Dunn’ and carries a plaque to his memory, as does the commemorative garden in the field where the express came to rest. Mr Dunn’s son, James, who was nine at the time of the crash, is now learning to become a train driver.

In a strange coincidence, the passenger locomotive was also involved in the Hatfield rail crash some months earlier. It escaped with only slight damage on both occasions. Following a technical upgrade of the Class 91 fleet, which led to all locomotives having 100 added to the number 91023, was renumbered 91132, not 91123, to appease superstitious drivers.

An unusual aspect of the emergency response was the need to carry out disinfecting procedures at the scene due to the foot and mouth epidemic at the time of the incident.


Mike Laycock was one of the first reporters to arrive at the scene of the Selby train crash. He recalls the day carnage came to a field alongside the East Coast Mainline

THE scene was surreal, like a set for a film. As I drove over a humpback bridge across the railway line, there were police cars and ambulances everywhere, and a helicopter clattered overhead.

Then I looked down an embankment into a field and could hardly believe my eyes. The navy blue carriages of a GNER train, normally so sleek, lay across the grass, twisted, shattered and in at least one case, crushed. Further across the field lay a bogey, ripped away from the rest of a carriage.

Some passengers must have died, I figured grimly, but it was impossible to tell how many at that stage. It was hard to see how anyone in the crushed carriage could have survived. I set about going round the village, door to door, to see what residents knew of the crash.

A bitterly cold wind whipped snow showers across the village. One passenger later told me how he watched snow flakes drift on to him through a gaping hole in the roof.

As the morning wore on, scores of TV, radio and press journalists arrived in the village, followed later by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. As he stood on the bridge to give an impromptu and somewhat chaotic press conference, reporters strained to hear what he was saying.

It was a day I will never forget.