There was no warning and no screech of brakes – just a huge bang, and then we were crashing. I was sitting with my back to the direction of travel, towards Paddington, and felt the impact through my seat, as well as hearing it. For a moment or two, it seemed that we might be all right, because the train continued on its way. But then we derailed, and the wheels started to plough over the sleepers and through the ballast beside the tracks. I became aware of a bright yellow light over my right shoulder, and realised that it was a fireball. It moved along the outside of the carriage from front to rear, and then was gone. The carriage tilted to its right and, out of the window to my left, which was now below me, I could see one or two small fires. A body drifted slowly past that same window. It was that of a middle-aged male. The body was intact, and the man’s eyes were closed. I was struck by the peaceful look on his face as he rolled slowly below us. I remember hoping that he was not hurt, and wondering where on Earth he had come from.

Back then, in 1999, by a strange coincidence, I was acting as junior counsel for Great Western Trains Ltd at the public inquiry into the Southall rail crash, which had taken place two years earlier, in September 1997, and killed seven people. Many weeks earlier, I had been chatting to Richard George, managing director of Great Western Trains Ltd, about his experience as a passenger in the Southall crash. He had demonstrated to me how he had got out of his seat and crouched in the aisle as the train had slowed.

Now, in the final stages of the Ladbroke Grove crash, I got up from my seat, again on a Great Western train, and with my legs apart and half-crouching like a snowboarder, copied the position he had demonstrated to me in Swindon all those weeks ago. It was not easy, because our carriage was now almost on its side. Then we stopped and there was silence. I thought I had better say something. After all, did I not know more about train crashes than the other passengers? I remembered Richard George telling me that the train was the safest place to be after a crash, because there may be another train in the area, or some live electric cabling. I shouted, and my voice sounded strange in the chaotic silence: “Don’t panic. And everyone stay in the carriage.”

Someone murmured disagreement, and a man sitting on the opposite side of the carriage, who would ordinarily have been a few feet beside me to my left, but was now some feet below me, said that we should not break the windows because there were fires burning on the track below. Then someone shouted from behind me that we could get out through the end of the carriage, and I became conscious that people were starting to move. I looked behind, and saw daylight through what had been the end of the carriage. There was no panic and no screams of pain. It was all rather orderly, as we started to make our way towards the daylight, using the sides of the seats, now horizontal instead of vertical, as our walkway.

Immediately in front of me a young woman stopped and asked me whether she should try to find her handbag. “I wouldn’t worry too much about your handbag,” I replied, glancing nervously at the fires burning on the track below us.

She said nothing more and started to move towards the daylight. I noticed that she seemed to be limping, and then glanced down and saw that she was wearing only one shoe. She climbed out ahead of me, and I was helped to the ground by two men who must have been among the first out of the carriage. I thanked them and walked into the dazzling sunshine and to the southern trackside. Immediately in front of our carriage, and lying on its side, was the carriage that had been in front of ours. Behind our carriage, and at a drunken angle to it, was another carriage, which I later learned was coach H, which we had swept past during the crash. On the track in front of our carriage was a blackened and smoking section of the train’s wheels. The locomotive was nowhere to be seen. The sirens had already started to sound as I walked up the bank.

As I stood in the sunshine, none of it seemed real. I was working on an inquiry into a train crash, and now apparently I had been involved in one. But I could not see what we had crashed into. The diesel locomotive seemed to have vanished. The previous week, I had heard vivid evidence from those who had experienced the Southall crash at first hand. For a moment, I wondered whether all of this was actually happening, or whether I was in the middle of a macabre and complicated dream, brought on by weeks of work on the Southall crash Inquiry.

I saw burned and blackened figures walking up and down the embankment. One man had terrible burns. The skin was hanging off his hands like a spider’s web, his face was black and bloodied and his trousers were in tatters. I asked another man, whose face was also black and bleeding, and who was obviously in pain, whether he wanted to sit down. He said he didn’t think so, because his back was terribly painful. Beside me, two women held each other and sobbed, their bodies shaking from top to toe.

It was some minutes before the fire on coach H took hold. Soon, there was a vast column of black smoke rising hundreds of feet into the air from the coach, and I watched transfixed as it burned. I suspect we stayed at the trackside for 20-30 minutes. The police arrived and started to take charge, and to create some order out of the jumbled events beside the railway line. Eventually, an officer directed the uninjured and the walking wounded to a nearby school.

Once there, I felt as useless as I had at the trackside, and tried not to get in the way. Some seriously injured passengers arrived. A woman was breathing through an oxygen mask. An elderly white-haired man was placed carefully on a blanket by some paramedics. Another woman had burns to her back, which were being bathed. I shall never forget the smell in that school: a mixture of oil, diesel and burned flesh. For days afterwards, when I thought about or relived the crash, I was able to summon back that same smell.

Many months later, I would hear the accounts of other survivors as they recounted their experience to Lord Cullen’s public inquiry. Until 8.09am, it had been a mundane morning for Philip Scotcher. He boarded the train at Kemble, and sat in coach B near the back of the train. He felt and heard the crash. He described a sort of scary, eerie silence once the train had come to a complete stop. Then came a call from further towards the front of the coach. People began to panic, and Scotcher stood on his seat and shouted for everyone to calm down. He left through a door on the north side of the train and jumped to the ground. He looked immediately to his right, and saw the smoking remains of what had been the front carriage of the Thames train coming out of London, which had smashed into us. He saw a woman lying on the ground, with half of her body in a pool of flames. Her clothing and her hair were on fire. He dropped his bag and ran over to answer her screams for help. He grabbed her hand and dragged her back about 10 metres or so away from the fire. He found a tiny block of wood, about the size of his hand, and patted out the fire that was on her body.

He left the woman in the care of the other man, returned to the burning Thames train, and grabbed a fire extinguisher. This soon ran out of water, and he threw it to one side. Scotcher looked into the inferno. He later described the scene to the inquiry:

“It was then I saw another gentleman, and he was sort of sitting right in the middle of the fire and he was just horrifically burning. He was completely slumped over, and I heard him moan or make a noise, so I made a dash and put my hand round his waist and I remember saying to him: ‘Please, please, you have to stand up. For both our sakes we have to walk out of here.’ I could tell he was a very big gentleman and once he did stand up it was apparent he was very tall, I think he is actually 6ft 7in and good sort of 18-20 stone, so I could not physically carry him.”

“Was he on fire?”

“Yes, he was.”

“What did you do with him once you had taken hold of him?”

“Well, we staggered back. I was then intending to take him towards the side of the track so that he could recover over there. We both then fell down.”

“Was he still on fire?”

“Yes, slightly, but not as much. By falling down he extinguished quite a bit of the fire on himself. I was then able to put out the other fire that was on his legs and feet and I think some small amounts on his upper body.”

“How did you put that fire out?”

“Just patted it very quickly with my hands. I then once again put my arm round him and said: ‘Please, please, you’re going to have to stand up. You’re going to have to walk out of here.’ All credit to him, he stood up and we walked the best we could.”

Once they got clear of the fire, Scotcher remained with the man, an American, Mike Adams, to comfort him, trying to make “absolute mindless chitchat about anything but the crash”. He looked after Adams until, after what seemed like a lifetime, the emergency services arrived.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rescue workers at the scene crash in west London. Photograph: Toby Melville/PA

Words do not exist adequately to describe what happened in coach H of the Great Western train. This was the carriage immediately behind the diesel locomotive, making it the front passenger carriage. Three men who were standing at the front of the coach died when they were propelled into the back of the locomotive. Two more, who were sitting in window seats at the very front of the coach were thrown out and died, and a sixth passenger, who hit her head and sustained injuries that were probably fatal, remained inside the carriage after it caught fire. Her body was found days later by the emergency services. Mercifully, it is almost certain that she was unconscious when the fire broke out, and would have known nothing of what happened.

In simple terms, the coach was derailed to the south, slewed through almost 180 degrees, tilted to its side, and then caught fire. But that simple description does not begin to convey what actually happened in the coach. For there was not one fire, but two. The first was a fireball that passed inside the carriage, causing horrific injuries to a handful of the passengers. That was followed by thick black smoke, which made the carriage go dark.

Chris Goodall, a passenger in Coach H, described to the inquiry what happened: “I think other people have referred to the massive increase in temperature that took place within a few seconds. That is my observation as well. I do not believe, though, it was a result of fire inside the carriage at all close to me. I was aware at the time also of the air pressure, or the apparent air pressure inside the carriage falling, possibly as a result of the consumption of oxygen by the fire outside. So it was both very hot immediately and I had a strong sensation of fighting for breath very soon after the train had come to rest. So, at this stage, I felt that I was almost certainly going to be burned to death in the fire.”

Goodall escaped from the carriage, and then he turned around, intending to return to rescue any other passengers who might be trapped. As he did so, he caught sight of a man in the rear of what had been the power car. The man was trapped, and there were pools of fire on the ground around the power car. Goodall tried to free him, but very shortly afterwards, the man died. By now it was too late for him to help anyone else in coach H, as the carriage was engulfed in flames.

I had spent much of my career at the bar dealing with personal injury cases. Sprinkled among them were cases where the psychiatric or psychological consequences of an accident were more serious than any physical injuries. Eminent experts had devised diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the first of which was exposure to a life-threatening event. Many individuals caught up in transport disasters had been compensated for PTSD developed as a result of their experiences. So I knew a fair amount about the effects of accidents upon the human mind. How would I react? Was I to be immune from the mental effects of involvement in the crash? I watched myself, as if with a third eye, and waited.

Wednesday, the day after the crash, was full of relief. I had survived pretty well unscathed. The newspapers carried pictures of the carnage. If all the days had been like Wednesday, there would not have been much of a problem. But Wednesday became Thursday, and Thursday was, for me, the worst day. The beautiful weather of the previous two days had gone. At breakfast, the Times brought the sickening news that 28 people were now confirmed dead. It looked as if the death toll might rise to well over 100. The police apparently believed that the burnt out coach H might contain the remains of up to 70 people.

I did not know that these figures would soon be shown to be dramatically overstated. Guilt at having done so little to help, and exhaustion, swept across me. I lay down on my bed, watching the light patter of rain on the roof light in the bedroom. I felt the tears starting and I did not try to stop them. Later that morning, standing in the kitchen having just read an affecting story about one of the dead train drivers, I again started to sob.

Friday was another bad day, following another sleepless night. During the course of the morning, the police started to release the names of the dead, one of whom I knew, and had spoken to a minute or two before the crash as he made his way to the front of the train. I felt overwhelmed by it all, and had no idea how I could rise above it. I would try to concentrate on a conversation, but would find myself unable to do so. My mind would drift back to the sounds and the smells of the crash, ploughing through the ballast, leaving my seat to crouch in the aisle, shouting to the others in the carriage, watching the sad parade of the injured along the trackside. But as the days passed, and with the help of my loved ones, normality slowly returned.

A month after the crash, I was asked whether I would be prepared to represent Great Western at the public inquiry into the Ladbroke Grove crash to be chaired by Lord Cullen, a senior Scottish judge who had already presided over inquiries into the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion and the Dunblane shootings.

I needed time to consider. I was struggling to get over the crash, and the idea of reimmersing myself in it for months on end was unappealing. It also felt wrong to think of acting for a company involved in a crash I had been in, however blameless the company may have been. On the other hand, Jonathan Caplan QC, Great Western’s leading counsel, was unavailable for the Ladbroke Grove inquiry, having already been booked to spend most of 2000 at a criminal trial in Hong Kong. If I declined, Great Western would have to find a new team of barristers, and I would have to find other work that was unlikely to be as interesting, as well-paid or as high-profile.

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In the end, the decision was more or less made for me. A few days later, the government announced that part of the Cullen Inquiry would be fused with the Southall Inquiry, and that Lord Cullen and Prof John Uff (the chair of the Southall inquiry) would sit as joint chairs of an inquiry to consider railway safety issues. Caplan felt I should agree to act if I could cope with it emotionally. So I said yes, and booked myself in for a further year of railway crash work.

The first day of hearings was scheduled to be 10 May 2000. The usual van-load of documents arrived in my chambers in March, five months after the crash, and for the first time, I was able to understand what had happened aboard our train that morning. I started to read the experiences of others who had been in coaches in front of and behind mine.

Reading the statements brought back the sounds and smells of the crash. All of the guilt I had felt as the numbers of supposed dead and injured had escalated in the days after the crash came back to me. What I had not appreciated until now was that passengers in all parts of our train except coach A had been in danger. Some had been unable to open doors. In one carriage, there had been a fair amount of panic.

As I read these harrowing accounts, my stomach churned. I should not be doing this case. But it was too late to get out of it. I read, too, of the selflessness and heroism of many of the passengers. Other difficult questions nagged at my conscience. What had I been doing while all of this was going on?

In early April, Lord Cullen held the first of two meetings for the passengers to provide their input into the inquiry process. Only the passengers, not the lawyers, were permitted to speak. Since I was both, I could choose, but I had no desire to draw attention to myself and wanted to hear what others had to say. I sat at the back and kept silent. For the first time since the morning of the crash, I saw some of its consequences. I saw a woman wearing a transparent face mask being helped out of the meeting room. She looked to be in agonising pain. A youngish man who had been on the Thames train stood up to say something. He was wearing a black body corset and was obviously in pain. I knew many more by sight, both passengers and lawyers. Some of the reality of the horror of the crash, a horror I had largely escaped, seeped into me. Once again, I felt I should not be doing this case. I was too close to it and the memories were all too raw. I started to dread the first phase of the hearings, during which the passengers would tell Lord Cullen of what happened on that fateful morning.

The hearings duly started on 10 May at the Methodist Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, with a day-long opening statement by Robert Owen QC, counsel to the inquiry. He dealt in detail with the crash and the subsequent fire. I felt sick as he did so, and tried to concentrate upon staring at the computer screen in front of me and blotting out his words. I was fascinated and repelled in equal measure. He confirmed that the driver of our train, Brian Cooper, was in no way to blame for the accident.

By the end of the first week of the evidence, I felt 10 years older. The inquiry heard the evidence from passengers on the Great Western train first, starting at the rear, in coach A, and moving steadily forwards. The witnesses from our train gave their evidence, in the main, without anger or rancour. The experience was still fresh for them, and often tears welled up in their eyes, or they had to stop to compose themselves before telling of the more horrendous aspects of their ordeal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Overhead electrical equipment near Paddington, often described by train drivers as being like ‘spaghetti’. Photograph: Reuters

For me, hearing the evidence of those who had been in the Thames train was like hearing about a different crash. I had not seen the Thames train at any stage, as we had been passing through the fireball when it would have been visible to me. Twenty-four of the 31 people who died had been travelling in the Thames train. Of these, all but one had been in the front carriage. Only six people from that carriage, which had been obliterated in the crash, had survived. One witness who had been trapped in the wreckage was a young Australian, Majella Lyons. She had been given a glimpse of hell:

“I just remember a big thump, a crash, and I was jolted up in my seat and then it became more intense. The whole time I kept thinking that we had perhaps hit something. I just assumed it was going to stop, it was going to stop, it was going to stop, but it just kept crashing. I was thrown up and down on my back and everything came in on top of me and I was cocooned under rubbish, under rubble. But there was a first impact which jolted me up and then the further impact which threw me down on to the floor, I assume, under seats and stuff.”

“Was the train still moving?”

“Yes. As it was moving I could see things just smashing down on top of me, and I can remember seeing things coming toward me as I was flying and, as I landed, I just saw everything come in and it suddenly got very dark. There were two metal supports and I was just being jolted from side to side by those, but my legs from here down were completely pinned in. I could not see, but lots of rubble and chairs and things. So I was in a little cocoon held up by the two bars and stuff falling down.”

“Could you hear other people?”

“At the time I think I heard someone say things like: ‘Not again.’ But then at the actual impact, that might have been after, but at the impact it was just a lot of noise and too much noise to hear people. But then when it stopped, there was this silence. It was everybody, I assume, just thinking, trying to understand, come to terms with what had happened. Then there was moaning, lots of moaning and screaming and calling out and lots of noise.”

“Were you able to move?”

“No, I could not. My left leg, I could just move my toes, so I knew they were OK. My right foot I could actually bend up and down, but then both of those became numb. But I had the feeling that I could feel my feet, my toes and my fingers and I knew my arms and my torso were still there, so I knew I had not been cut in half and I was just so thankful – I could not believe that I was alive.”

“What about your head?”

“Well, my head was smashed right down on to the floor. Yes, I could move it a bit, yes.”

“Did you think that you may have damaged your skull?”

“Yes. It was such a heavy force and I was lying down for hours and hours. I actually thought there was – in impact there was a big rush of hot fluids from the person on top of me, I presume it was blood, so I felt wet and hot, and my head was down and so it was covered in liquid and glass and stuff. A while later a light spilt in. They were trying to break through the side of the carriage. Eventually I saw some light to my left and they were telling me – I could hear their voices so I knew they were over there, so I put my hand through and they grabbed my hand. It was amazing. They just held my hand, tightening my hand, putting it in a drip and stuff. But first of all they passed through an oxygen mask.”

“I think then someone was holding your hand for the three or four hours that it took to free you?”

“Yes, I had a few different people, I think. I am not sure. I had different people. There were ambulance and also fire brigade, and they were absolutely amazing. They were the most compassionate people and they were wonderful.”

Day after day, the pieces of the jigsaw were slowly but steadily revealed and put into place. During the middle section of the inquiry, a series of Railtrack witnesses dealt with the history of the signalling system in the 0-2 mile area west of Paddington. It was a lamentable story, and revealed inertia and incompetence on a worrying scale.

The immediate cause was straightforward enough. SN109 was the most notorious signal on that part of the railway network. It had only been installed a few years previously, but already it had been “spadded” – railway talk for a train going through a red light without stopping, “signal passed at danger” – on numerous occasions. Michael Hodder, driver of the Thames train, had driven through a red light at SN109, then carried on until his route took him on to the fast main line coming into London. But why? He was an inexperienced train driver, but he was an intelligent and level-headed man. Either he had not seen SN109 at all, or he must have thought that the signal allowed him to proceed.

The construction of a new line to Heathrow airport in the early 1990s had required the erection of electrical equipment, and this was carried on overhead cables above the trains. Train drivers had to try to pick out the signal that governed the passage of their train through a maze of overhead electrical equipment, which they often described as being like spaghetti. SN109 was passed at red with worrying frequency. In October 1995, there was a crash at Royal Oak, near Paddington, and an inquiry was held to determine the causes. A Railtrack engineer submitted a report analysing the causes of the high number of spads in the Paddington area and suggesting 11 possible improvements.

In the following years, committees were set up, talking shops opened, any number of suggestions were made and reports written, but, on the ground, virtually nothing happened to improve the situation. Railtrack was supposed to convene a signal sighting committee to investigate any signal that had been spadded more than once within a set timeframe. Six of the spads at SN109 should have resulted in the convening of a signal sighting committee. Not once did that happen.

Thus when Hodder set off from platform nine on the morning of 5 October 1999, he was driving a route that was known to be very difficult for train drivers. He had qualified as a driver just 14 days before the crash. In various respects, his training had been inadequate. He had not been instructed directly about the risk of spadding at particular signals. He had not attended a spad awareness day. The tests he had taken to become a train driver had not included questions about the area between Paddington and Ladbroke Grove.

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None of this provided a full explanation for why he had not seen or reacted to the red signal. I have never had any doubt about the answer, even though the evidence from experts at the inquiry was equivocal. All my memories of the crash were drenched in the bright sunlight of that morning. It was cloudless, and the sun would have shone directly on to the east-facing signals that controlled Hodder’s journey out of London. Anyone who has driven a car will have experienced the effect that sunlight can have on traffic lights, making it difficult or impossible to appreciate the colour that is actually illuminated.

The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed to me not only that Hodder had misread SN109 as yellow, but that he had also misread the signal before it, which also pointed east. He had accelerated through SN109, and continued driving for 700 metres, unaware of what he had done. Just seconds before the crash, as his route took him on to the main line, he would have seen the Great Western high-speed train bearing down upon him at a little over 80mph. He applied the emergency brake, but it was hopeless. For a moment, he may have looked at Brian Cooper sitting behind the controls of the Great Western train. Neither man would have believed what was happening as the two trains closed in on each other. Seconds later, both were dead. Hodder’s fateful journey had taken a little under three and a half minutes.

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