Four safety recommendations now sit with Network Rail, after a train hit bricks from a collapsed wall.
A Great Western Railway train hit the obstruction at 58mph at Yarnton (just north of Oxford), at 1835 on February 10 2023. It had been on the single-track Cotswold line between Oxford and Hanborough, with a service to Hereford.
The train did not come off the rails and nobody was injured. But damage to the train meant it could not move, and passengers had to be evacuated into a rescue train, which was completed five and a half hours later.
The experienced driver, who did not have time to take any action before the impact, reported that the pile of bricks was ten metres long and 2.5 metres high. He applied the emergency brake one second after impact, coming to a stop 19 seconds and 290 metres later.
There were 365 passengers on the service. The crash happened in darkness and in an area with no external lighting.
The line was closed for 12 days and the road bridge closed for almost three weeks, following extensive work to stabilise the slope, the road above, and utility pipes under the road surface.
The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) found that the wing wall of a road bridge adjacent to the railway had collapsed when it was no longer able to withstand the load imposed by the embankment it was supporting.
RAIB found it was “known to be in poor condition” by Network Rail, but that “effective control measures had no
