IN THE early morning sleet-ridden gloom I stood on the bridge overlooking the railway at Great Heck and counted the carriages.

I was on the phone to my boss who was scrambling to head north from London. In railway parlance I was telling him there was “one off”, then two, three, four and five... Actually boss, they’re all off.

Every single one. Each coach of the nine-carriage train was off the rails, either straddling the track, on its side, twisted crazily down the embankment, or lying broken in the field below.

This was ten years ago today and only an hour after the 0445 Newcastle to King’s Cross train had hit a Land Rover and trailer that had veered off the M62 motorway on to the tracks below, causing the leading vehicle to derail, then carry on for a third of a mile down the track to collide with a coal train coming in the opposite direction – a combined weight of about 2,250 tonnes coming together at a sickeningly horrific closing speed of 142 miles per hour.

Ten people lost their lives and 82 were injured. No comfort whatsoever to those involved, but for modern train carriage design it would have been so many more...

This was yet another train crash – the fourth in a five-year period between 1997 and 2002 that saw 59 people die at locations most now synonymous with infamy – Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, and Potters Bar. But Great Heck was different because out of all of them this was one that the railway couldn’t be blamed for.

Indeed, less than a year later the bereaved families and injured from Great Heck looked on at Leeds Crown Court as the Land Rover driver was jailed for five years for causing ten deaths by dangerous driving.

At the time of Great Heck I was working for the railway in York and it was our team that tried in some small – very small – way to ease the pain for the local community and later the families of the dead and injured. We had already swung into action four months earlier at Hatfield, and were dealing with the fall-out from Southall and Ladbroke Grove.

Just over a year later we would incur the not inconsiderable and totally understandable wrath and angst of those involved at Potters Bar.

But how do you try and help someone that ends up with a locomotive in their back garden? What do you say to a wife who wants to see the place where her husband died so she can pay her deeply personal respects? What do you do to help a remote community come to terms with a human and physical tragedy of enormous proportions that befell them on their previously innocuous doorstep? And how do you offer support and comfort to the partners, parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters whose lives have been shattered because their loved one climbed aboard a train that fateful morning?

If the tragedy of Great Heck marked the beginning of a mountainous journey for them then we joined them for a short while in the foothills.

We tried to be a buffer, a punch bag, protective during the crown court trial ordeal, supportive when it came to the gruelling, distressing, first anniversary and the opening of the memorial garden developed on a small wedge of railway land overlooking the crash site.

Over the intervening ten years the garden has provided some succour and peace to those whose lives were changed on that day. It has matured into a place of beauty where early flowering daffodils poke their heads through the soil in time for each anniversary, where individual memorial plaques still tell a poignant personal story beneath the weathering.

The epicentre that is the heart of the tragedy like this sends out aftershocks that ripple on for years and touch so many people. In the beginning it was the emergency services who performed the initial rescue, the teams of doctors and nurses who swung into action at not just one hospital but several.

The local residents who bravely helped the stricken in those horrifying first minutes. The police and investigators who sifted the minutiae of evidence to find out exactly what happened in the hope it’s never repeated. The railway staff whose job it was to make the line good again. Their families who saw them coming home after another gruelling day on site, eyes dulled from the things they had seen.

Then as time moves on it’s the doctors and counsellors offering professional help and support to those struggling to come to terms with their new, unasked for lives. The ongoing support for the injured coming to terms with years of pain. The judiciary ensuring that justice is seen to be done.

And in the midst of it all are the memories. Of lives and opportunities lost. Of pain and sorrow, but yes, of uplifting moments too – the unsung actions, the strength of character and the small kindnesses that mark the resilience of the human condition.

Sharing a small part of this with those so deeply and irrevocably affected by Great Heck has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I fervently wish I never had cause to meet those people. But I am so, so very glad that I did.