Howden rail accident
train wreck
The Howden rail accident in Yorkshire on 7 August 1840 killed five passengers. It occurred when a large piece of cargo, cast iron, fell from a wagon and derailed the following carriages. It happened on the Hull and Selby Railway as the train was travelling from Leeds to Hull. The crash was one of the first railway accidents to be investigated by the Railway Inspectorate. One of the worst accidents to have occurred on the new UK rail network, it was also a new phenomenon for the public; shipwrecks and coal mining accidents were more frequent.
Investigation
Sir Frederick Smith, the first head of the Railway Inspectorate (his formal job title was "Inspector-General of Railways") found that the casting had been insecurely lashed to the wagon, and was unstable for carrying by train. The casting was part of a weighing machine intended to be used at Hull Station, and itself weighed about 2.5 long tons (2.8 short tons). It measured 12 feet 6.75 inches (3.83 m) by 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m), and since the wagon was only 10 feet (3.0 m) by 7 feet 6 inches (2.29 m), it must have overhung the wagon when being carried. The casting fell from the wagon onto the rails when the train was about 3⁄4 mile (1.2 km) from Howden station.
Since the wagon was just behind the tender, the following passenger carriages were derailed.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q782940. Authority coordinates are 53.767, -0.881. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1840.
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This entry incorporates text from “Howden rail accident” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.