#august8 — Public Fediverse posts

Forgotten Fatalities: the thread about the Granton railway disaster of 1860

Recent threads about the Scotland Street Tunnel and the Granton Breakwater inevitably involved me touching on the history of the railway that ran between these two places and brought to my attention a striking image of a forlorn-looking steam engine lying on its side on the Wardie foreshore. How this locomotive came to be here isn’t “in the books“, so of course I had to find out more.

The remains of the old railway embankment and sea wall at Lower Granton Road, where a bridge gave access beneath the tracks to Wardie Bay. CC-by-SA 3.0 Guinnog via Wikimedia

The answer to this anomaly was that it was the result of an accident which took place on the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway‘s (EP&D) short section of track on the southern side of the Firth of Forth between Trinity Station and Granton Harbour. This event on the evening of Sunday 8th August 1860 would claim the lives of four people, injure six more and cruelly impact upon one family in particular.

The EP&D ran from its start at Canal Street Station (beneath and at right angles to what we now call Edinburgh Waverley), by gravity down the steep incline of the Scotland Street tunnel to a station of that name at its foot. Here, steam engines were attached to trains to haul them the few miles to Granton, via Trinity, or North Leith, via Bonnington. At Granton passengers could continue their journey onward across the Firth of Forth to Burntisland, by connecting paddle steamer. North of the Forth the railway carried on north to Perth and to Dundee (via a further steamer from the harbour at Tayport), explaining the full name of the company.

Route map of the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway, south of the Forth, 1860.

On Sundays there were usually there were only two passenger trains a day each way to Granton. On the day of the accident the 4:30PM from Edinburgh ran the three mile trip hauled by engine No. 32. At the terminus the driver detached his engine and shunted the carriages back into the platform to where it would later form the 8:10PM return journey. This pattern only took place on the Sabbath; Monday to Saturday there were sixteen trains each way and a much quicker turnaround was required, undertaken in a rather frightening manner known as “fly shunting” whereby the carriages were “slipped” (detached) while the train was in motion and a well-timed throw of the points directed the engine one way and the freely coasting train the other into the platform. The guard at the rear in the brakevan was responsible for bringing the train to a controlled halt by which time the engine was already in the process of re-positioning itself so it could re-attach at the front of the train and haul it back the way it had come.

Granton Harbour and Pier, c. 1880, from Grant’s Old & New Edinburgh. The trains in the foreground are running on the railway embankment, Granton Middle Pier, where the station buildings are, lies beyond, with the steamers tied up alongside. Note the signalman standing behind the coal wagons with a flag raised.

There was nowhere at Granton for engines to wait for any period of time and so on No. 32 now returned the way it had come to while away the next few hours in the engine shed at Scotland Street. As it departed it began to pick up speed and ascend the gradient up to the embankment along the foreshore and parallel to Lower Granton Road. It crossed the bridge over the footpath access to Wardie Bay and passed over first one and then a second set of points as it rounded a gentle bend in the route. This is where disaster struck: as it approached a second, smaller, bridge (which carried it over the Wardie Burn, marked nowadays by a break in the seawall) the left-hand leading wheel of the engine jumped the rails and the locomotive derailed.

The break in the sea wall at Lower Granton Road marks the spot where a bridge once carried the railway across the Wardie Burn. The embankment here was more substantial in the past. Photo © Self

It continued to plough along the trackbed, derailed, for some 30 yards, ripping up tracks and sleepers and partially demolished the bridge. In doing so it was eventually tipped over the side when it hit the stone parapet. It fell a height of 9 feet down the embankment and then slithered 20 yards down the foreshore, coming to rest on its right hand side (not the left, as shown in the engraving, which may have either been reversed or show it during recovery).

Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan showing the route of the engine and its course during the accident. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

There were six people on the footplate when the crash happened of whom four were killed instantly; driver David Mathieson, his 9 year old son William Mackenzie Mathieson (out for an exciting Sunday trip), his brother-in-law and neighbour John Mackenzie and Andrew Morgan, a railway signalman hitching a lift back to Scotland Street. The fireman, James Bowling, had a lucky but painful escape, jumping from the tender as it left the tracks. He broke an arm and dislocated a shoulder amongst other injuries, but lived to tell the tale. A railway porter who was also cadging a lift, George Dall, found himself swimming in the waters of Wardie Bay from where he was pulled, miraculously unhurt.

“The Recent Railway Accident at Granton Near Edinburgh, The Engine on the Beach”. London Illustrated News

Blacksmith Thomas Gillies, his wife and two children had been sitting on the sea wall below the embankment, enjoying their day of rest, when the engine came crashing down from above, passing inches away from where they sat. All were badly scalded by escaping steam but survived. A horse cab was summoned to take the injured away to the Royal Infirmary. Sheriff Gordon, Procurator Fiscal Paterson and Chief Constable List were on the spot within the hour. They appointed engineers Mr Hawkins and Mr Jardine to investigate, while the officials of the railway company appointed their own civil engineer, Mr Lorimer, to also make enquiries. The Board of Trade appointed Captain (R.E.) Henry Whatley Tyler, to write a formal report.

None of the investigating engineers found any fault in the permanent way, engine No. 32 or with the manner in which it was driven by Mathieson. Tyler noted that although there were minor defects along the way none “ would have caused a steady engine thus to leave the line“. The type of engine – built locally in Leith by R. & W. Hawthorn – had been used without problem for 15 years and the only derailment it had suffered had been caused by a fractured rail. He did however note that the engine was particularly light at 11½ tons, that it had poor weight distribution and that there was a very short wheelbase of just 6 feet. This made it liable to oscillate at higher speeds and Tyler’s educated guess was that the engine had been travelling fast enough (“but not imprudently so“) to set up such an oscillating motion. Without the weight of a following train to restrain such gymnastics it was able to jump enough to leave the rails at a position where the gauge between the tracks was slightly too wide.

A North British Railway (successor to the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee) 0-4-0 tender locomotive, No. 811, similar in overall size, configuration and styling to No. 32 which crashed at Granton.

Margaret Stewart Mackenzie, the driver’s wife, lost not only her husband but also her brother and eldest son that day. She was left a widow with three children to support; a 7 year old girl and boys aged 3 and 1 years. She was also four months pregnant and would give birth to a daughter, Sarah Clapperton Mathieson, that December. The members of the Mathieson and Mackenzie family – who all lived next door to each other on Duncan (now Dundonald) Street – were also interred alongside eachother at the Old Calton Burying Ground.

Old Calton Burying Ground, register for the burials of John Mckenzie, David Mathieson and William Mckenzie Mathieson

Given the loss of her husband and brother the Mathieson widow and children found themselves without any financial support and a public subscription was set up under the coordination of the Lothian Road United Presbyterian Church for their benefit. In September the Scotsman reported that “a woman who assumes different names and represents herself to the the wife of an elder of Lothian Road U.P. Church” was wanted by the police for fraudulently soliciting for donations to the fund. The 1881 census shows that Margaret Mathieson stayed on at 10 Duncan Street and was living there with her 80 year old mother (Margaret Mackenzie), two sons (David, 24, a clerk and John ,21, a piano tuner) and her daughter (Sarah, 20, a dressmaker). She was working as a laundress. Sarah Clapperton Mathieson married 4 years later to Robert Fotheringham and they moved nearby to Airlie Place and then Deanpark Street, with at least 6 children born. Margaret would join them next door at Airlie Place, where she died in 1911 aged 81, after 51 years a widow.

Marion Mathieson was about 64 years old when her son David died and lost her son and a grandson that day. The Caledonian Mercury reported the agonising news that this was her fourth son to die; one was knocked down in the street near the family home, another fell from Salisbury Crags and a third had drowned off Aberdeen where he was serving an apprenticeship. She was by this time a widow, living in a cottage in the village of Corstorphine where she would die in 1871.

Of the other victim, Signalman Morgan, he was buried at Warriston Cemetery. A correspondent called Fair Play wrote to the Scotsman soon after to ask for subscriptions for the case of “Mrs Morgan, a highly respectable widow“, the mother of the deceased signalman. He had been “her only hope of subsistence since he was 12 years of age” and that the “good feeling of the public” had overlooked her plight.

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