The Moorgate tube crash occurred on 28 February 1975 at 8: 46am. 43 people died and 74 were injured after a train failed to stop at the line’s southern terminus. No fault was found with the train, and the inquiry concluded that the accident was caused by the actions of Leslie Newson, the 56-year-old driver.
About Moorgate tube crash in brief
The Moorgate tube crash occurred on 28 February 1975 at 8: 46 am on the London Underground’s Northern City Line. 43 people died and 74 were injured after a train failed to stop at the line’s southern terminus and crashed into its end wall. No fault was found with the train, and the inquiry by the Department of the Environment concluded that the accident was caused by the actions of Leslie Newson, the 56-year-old driver. A cause has never been established, and theories include suicide, that he may have been distracted, or that he was affected by conditions such as transient global amnesia or akinesis with mutism. In the aftermath of the crash, London Underground introduced a safety system that automatically stops a train when travelling too fast. After a long campaign by relatives of the dead, two memorials were unveiled in the vicinity of the station, one in July 2013 and one in February 2014. There were only fourteen deaths on the Underground between 1938 and 1975, twelve of which occurred in the 1953 Stratford crash. The Underground was one of the safest methods of transport in Britain in 1975. The station contains ten platforms; numbers 7 to 10 are deep level, and numbers 9 and 10 are used for the Northern City line service. At the end of platform 9 in 1975 was a red warning light atop a post, situated in front of a 61-centimetre-high sand drag placed to stop overrunning trains. There was a speed of 40 miles per hour on the line, and a limit of 15 miles hour on entry into the station prior to November 1966.
From November 1966 to November 1967, the Northern Line ran into Moorgates on the Old Street line, before levelling out for 71 metres to 9; a scissors crossover was located just prior to platform 9 prior to 9. The tunnel had been designed to accommodate larger main line rolling stock and so was wider than the standard tube width of 7 metres. A buffer, which had once been hydraulic but had not been functioning as such for some time, was at the front of the tunnel, at the end time of a solid wall of solid wall. The first carriage forced the first carriage into the roof of the Tunnel, but the middle remained on the trackbed; the 16-metre-long coach was crushed to 6. 1 metres. The second carriage was concertinaed at theFront as it collided with the first. The third rode over the rear of the second. The brakes were not applied and the dead man’s handle was still depressed when the train crashed. It took 13 hours to remove the injured from the wreckage, many of whom had to be cut free. It was a further four days to extract the last body, that of Newson; his cab, normally 91 centimetres deep, had been crushed to 15 centimetre. The post-mortem on Newson showed no medical reason to explain the crash. Northern City lines ended in October 1975 and British Rail services started in August 1976.
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This page is based on the article Moorgate tube crash published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 23, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
