In the early hours of Saturday, 22nd May 1915, almost five hundred officers and men of the Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment) boarded a troop train at Larbert station, Stirlingshire, Scotland. They were all members of Battalion HQ, A and D Companies of the 1/7th (Leith Territorial) Battalion, and were en route for the port of Liverpool where they were to embark for Gallipoli.
At approximately 06.49, as most of the men dozed or slept peacefully in the locked carriages, their train was involved in a collision with a stationary goods train on the line at Quintinshill, a little north of Gretna Green. The signalman in charge at Quintinshill, James Tinsley, had quite simply forgotten about the empty coal train which was left standing there in the path of the 70 mph troop train, but the nightmare was about to become infinitely worse as, less than a minute later, he noticed the oncoming northbound express from London.
Tinsley was powerless to do anything other than watch in horror as the express ploughed into the wreckage of the other two trains. Many who had survived the first crash were killed of seriously injured by the second impact and the ferocious fire that followed. The troop train was telescoped down to 67 yards, a third of its original length. Fire engines from Carlisle took over three hours to arrive at the scene.
Casualties in the steel-structured, electric-lit carriages of the express were relatively light. Those in the wooden-framed troop train, with its gas lighting to fuel the flames, were appalling. During a roll-call at 11.30 that morning, less than sixty members of the Battalion were present to answer their names. The rest were dead, injured, or were away accompanying wounded comrades to hospital.
The final toll stood at 227 killed and 246 injured. The Royal Scots suffered the vast majority of casualties, with 215 killed, including 3 officers, 29 NCOs and 182 men out of a total of 485 on board. On that fateful day, the Battalion lost 42 per cent of its casualties for the whole of the war. The majority of the dead were buried at Rosebank Cemetery, Edinburgh.
The remnants of the Battalion eventually arrived in Gallipoli on 13th June, where it took part in the attacks on Gully Ravine and Achi Baba, but it is ironic that the majority of those young men originally on route for Gallipoli, a place of which they could scarcely have heard, perished so tragically on home soil. The Quintinshill crash remains to this day the worst disaster in the history of British railways.
This information taken from:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/hinckley8/train.html
