Looking Back - Moorgate Tube Crash

On this day in 1975, the 0837 London Underground train left Drayton Park for Moorgate station, packed with commuters travelling to work. At 0846 the train rattled into Moorgate at 30 miles per hour, the worst ever Tube disaster was about to unfold. The train failed to stop, overshot the platform, entered a dead-end tunnel, crashed through a sand barrier and into a brick wall. Eye witnesses, waiting on Platform 9, said that as the train entered the station it appeared to shudder and accelerate. The front three carriages were mangled together with the last three in tact at the platform. Police, London Underground staff, fire crews, doctors and nurses from St Bartholomew's Hospital, and members of the Salvation Army, were confronted with total darkness and a huge amount of dust and soot, as they arrived at the scene to commence rescue operations. The only journalist allowed into the tunnel, Gerald Kemp of the Daily Telegraph, described the scene as "a horrible mess of limbs and mangled iron." The rescue teams, working in intense heat of about 120 degrees, spent all day freeing the dead and injured from the atrocious conditions. It was not until 11 pm that the last survivor was brought out. The final death toll was 43, including the driver, Leslie Newson, 55, who had worked for London Underground since 1969 and was described as careful and conscientious. Scores more people were injured, many seriously. A subsequent investigation confirmed that the brakes had not been applied. Nothing was wrong with the train, the signals, or the track. The Moorgate crash was to remain a mystery.