Staplehurst rail crash

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The Staplehurst rail crash was a railway accident at Staplehurst, Kent, England, remembered for its effects on Charles Dickens. He was a passenger on the boat train returning from France with his mistress in a front, first class carriage on 9 June 1865.

The track was in the process of being renovated at Staplehurst, at a spot where the rails ran over a low cast iron girder bridge. The timing of the train, the Folkestone Boat Express, varied with the tides which governed the arrival of ships at the port. The foreman had mistakenly thought that the train would arrive later than it did, and the final two rails had not been replaced. The foreman had posted a lookout, but he was not far away enough to give adequate warning to the fast approaching train. It managed to reach the far side of the bridge by moving on the ballast, but the girder cracked and most of the carriages fell into the small brook below. Ten passengers were killed and 49 seriously injured. Dickens, and the manuscript of a novel in progress, were in one of the few carriages which did not fall:

On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage—nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn—to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding day, and Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone's red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:—THE END.
—Postscript to Our Mutual Friend, Dickens

This profound experience affected Dickens psychologically for the rest of his life. He wrote a short story some time after the accident, a ghost story called "The Signal-Man", in which one of the principal incidents is a rail crash. Though Dickens based his fictional crash upon the events of the terrible and well-known Clayton Tunnel accident of 1861 (23 dead, 176 injured), rather than the Staplehurst crash, it is reasonable to suppose that his personal involvement in the Staplehurst incident inspired the tale. It is also reasonable to suppose that the psychological effects of the crash helped to shorten his life; he died five years to the day after the accident.