Quite by coincidence, browsing the Big Bangs thread, I came across a reference to the
Soham train explosion. The coincidence being that it was the 75th anniversary yesterday. It's not exactly fair to describe the four main protagonists' very courageous deeds as unsung, at least locally, but I'd never previously heard of it. In a nutshell, one wagon on a bomb train caught fire, the driver noticed, and his fireman uncoupled the burning wagon from the rest of the train. They drove the burning wagon away, thus preventing a major catastrophe: the train had 44 wagons in total... The engine driver's survival is extraordinary: he was at the epicentre as five tons of high explosive bombs went off. Anyway, it's a good save by the wayback machine - that page is well worth ten minutes of your time, I found it full of fascinating detail.
Am prompted here, to tell of a remarkably similar happening (though in this case, happily occasioning minimal death / injury) some 9 / 10 months later: at the other end of England from Soham, and -- presumably because of the far less human damage done -- much less well-known. I, aged 70 and a keen railway enthusiast (with a greater interest in Britain's railway past, than its present), had known about Soham from childhood -- the other incident, I had never heard of until a few months ago.
It took place late on the evening of March 22nd 1945, at Bootle -- not the district of Liverpool, but the village of that name near the Cumbrian coast some way north of Barrow-in-Furness, on the secondary-main rail line which follows that coast from Barrow to Maryport and on thence to Carlisle. As a long southbound freight train was passing through Bootle station; the signalman stationed there, and the engine crew, noticed "a white glow coming from inside a wagon near the engine" -- one of seven wagons in the train which contained explosives: depth charges for naval use. The signalman set his signals to "danger" and immediately informed the next signalbox southward, so that they would halt any trains heading north toward the dangerous scene. The loco driver, Harold Goodall, brought the train to a standstill a safe distance beyond Bootle station. He and the fireman, Herbert Stubbs, uncoupled the burning wagon from the rest of the train, got back on the loco, and drove it and the remaining wagons onward out of danger.
With their not being aware that the signalman had "aborted" northbound trains; fireman Stubbs then proceeded forward to lay exploding detonators on the track, to warn any northbound train to stop -- while driver Goodall most courageously went back to the burning wagon, seemingly in the hope of tackling the fire. The wagon exploded, killing him instantly, and making a huge crater and destroying about 80 yards of track; but with his death being the incident's only one. (Here, the driver was killed and the fireman survived; at Soham, it was the other way around.) Stubbs subsequently received the George Medal and the Order of Industrial Heroism; Goodall got no decoration, with at that time the George Medal (unlike the George Cross) not being awarded posthumously.
I learned of this event, through recent reading of a book called
Tiny Stations, by one Dixe Wills: a travel journalist who has written various "thematic travelogues" re Great Britain. This -- the only book of his which I've read -- I found to contain much interesting material; but, for my taste, to be written in an irritatingly "camp" style, by a seemingly annoyingly "quirky" and "right-on" author.