The shocking day a high speed train derailed in Northallerton

Well, they’ve brought industry, and they’ve put the town on the map in the most peculiar ways.

For example, on August 28, 1979, Northallerton was the scene of the first high speed derailment by the newly introduced InterCity125, as these remarkable pictures from Rodney Wildsmith, of Great Ayton, show.

As the 13:00 King’s Cross to Edinburgh service approached Northallerton at about 70mph, “low gearbox lubricant” caused one set of wheels in the lead engine, No 43110, to lock. This caused the wheels behind it to skid until they snapped off the line causing the whole train, carrying 450 passengers, to derail.

The driver immediately applied the brakes and stopped the train within 550 metres at the start of the station platform.

The InterCity125 service had only been introduced to the East Coast Main Line in May 1978, and this was its first potentially serious incident. However, there was much relief in railway circles that the whole train had remained upright and had performed pretty well in the trying circumstances.

The Northallerton InterCity125 derailment on August 28, 1979. Picture: Rodney Wildsmith

Many of the passengers were shocked by the rapid and noisy deceleration, but only one, a lady, required hospital treatment – she was kept in overnight with concussion.

LAST week we told how Northallerton’s railways came about, starting in 1838 when the first stretch of the first mainline in the world was bulldozed through Castle Hills to the west of town. The line was opened on an embankment made from the soil from Castle Hills in 1841 and was soon followed by the first stretch of the Wensleydale Railway in 1848. Then, in 1852, came the low level Leeds Northern Railway, from Ripon to Stockton, which weaved its way beneath the mainline.

We featured three pictures from the days of steam from the JW Armstrong Trust collection showing the Longlands “tunnel” – the “tunnel” is 55 yards long and so some sources refer to it as a “long bridge” – which southbound trains from Stockton went through to join the mainline.

The eagle-eyed will have noticed that in the foreground of each of those three pictures there was a white milepost – well, actually it is a quarter-of-a-milepost. Railways were always measured from their starting point which in the case of the Leeds Northern Railway was Wortley Junction in Leeds. It then went through Harrogate and Ripon before, 42¼ miles later, it was nearing the Longlands Tunnel, as marked by the milepost.

The south Northallerton quarter-of-a-milepost is now in a garden in Darlington

The Leeds Northern was closed by Beeching in 1967 and its track lifted, although the milepost was salvaged and is now in the Darlington garden of Richard Barber, who looks after the Armstrong Trust collection of pictures.

TOM BANFIELD of Thornton-le-Beans quite rightly queried our imprecise caption on the picture taken in 1964 from a signal box to the north of Northallerton station. The picture does not show the north-south mainline. Instead, the cameraman was facing north-west and was looking at the four tracks of the coal depot, which was beside the station. The Beechwood care home on Romanby Road is today on the site of the coal depot.

On the right of the picture are two lines leading into the linoleum factory, which was once Northallerton’s biggest employer.

It was started beside the railway in the 1860s to make tarpaulin, sail cloth and brattice cloth (a strong, tar-coated, fire resistant cloth used as a partition in coalmines), and then it moved into making linoleum – a new invention in which linseed oil is applied to a canvas backing.

The principal investor in the factory was Sir George Elliot, a Conservative MP from 1874 to 1895. Sir George’s father, also Sir George, was an extraordinary Durham mine owner who had started out as a trapper boy in a pit near Gateshead aged nine. Putting his wages towards night school classes, the first Sir George rose to be a surveyor on the first stretch of mainline between Darlington and York in the 1830s.

The view from the signal box at Northallerton station in 1964, looking north-west into the town, showing the coal drops on the left and the linoleum factory on the right

He owned mines from Wales to Nova Scotia, plus the company which laid the first permanent cable across the Atlantic.

The second Sir George, who lived at Langton Hall near Great Langton, was the last MP for Northallerton, serving from 1874 until the town was placed in the Richmondshire constituency in 1885. He lost the first Richmondshire election but when his Liberal foe, Sir Frederick Milbank of Thorp Perrow, fell ill, he was re-elected.

He remained in the Commons until 1895 when he was suffering bad health as a result of a hunting fall. He went to Nice to recover in the warm air of the south of France, but contracted typhoid which led to pneumonia and he died aged 51 in November 1895.

By the 1920s, the linoleum factory employed 320 people and, despite killing two of them in an explosion in 1923, it was a crucial part of the town’s economy.

It closed in 1938, but its huge Alverton Works, which stretched from Romanby Road to Malpas Road, remained to provide workshops for small manufacturing companies – a mattress spring maker sprang up there in 1947, for example. The increasingly derelict works survived until 1999 when they were demolished, the land was decontaminated and new developments, including a doctors’ surgery and the council archive department, came onto their site.

CASTLE HILLS was a mysterious mound to the west of Northallerton which the East Coast Main Line ploughed through. It has long been thought that the Romans used the mound as an encampment or a beacon – Agricola, the Roman general, is said to have stayed on the hillock in 82AD when trying to pacify the Scots.

Throughout the centuries, Roman artefacts have turned up in the area. In 1743, an urn was dug up at Castle Hills which inspired the vicar of Northallerton, the Reverend John Balguy, to write a poem which began:

“Trifling mortal tell me why

Thou has disturbed my urn.”

When the railway went through in 1838, urns and coins come tumbling out, as well as a “votive altar”, left as an offering to a god. Michael Riordan, in his History of Northallerton, records that the stone had a Latin inscription carved on it which read: “Being present Flavius, Hyronimianus, of the Sixth Legion, Victorious”.

The Sixth Legion came to England in 122AD, but the whereabouts of its altar have been unknown since the late 19th Century.

However, two sarcophaguses were discovered at Castle Hills and they have ended up in Darlington.

The sarcophagus at Rockliffe Hall in Hurworth is believed to have come from Castle Hills at Northallerton

In Hurworth, the Rockliffe estate, in the shadow of the Tees Viaduct, was effectively the builders’ yard for the construction of the line down to Northallerton, so the sarcophaguses were probably taken there and then they became the possessions of the two leading railway families, the Peases and the Backhouses.

We believe the Peases’ sarcophagus went to the Beechwood mansion in the centre of Darlington. When it was converted into the United bus headquarters (it is now the site of the Sainsbury’s supermarket off Victoria Road), the sarcophagus was taken to West Cemetery, where it can still be seen.

The Backhouses’ sarcophagus remained at Rockliffe, and is now in the grounds of the five-star hotel beside Middlesbrough FC’s training ground.

The lavish Rockliffe estate was the home of banker Alfred Backhouse. He didn’t have any children of his own, but when his brother died young, Alfred adopted one of his sons, James Edward. Indeed, when James Edward married into the Barclay family on October 2, 1873, Alfred gave James Edward an extravagant wedding present: Hurworth Grange, a classic Victorian mansion designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the leading architect of the day.

Because the winters in Hurworth are so famously harsh, James Edward had a villa in Bordighera, in north-west Italy, where he wintered for the sake of his health. There he fell in with a romantic, literary set, which gave him a connection to Rudyard Kipling who we believe stayed with him at Hurworth Grange in 1890.

Hurworth Grange in 1955, where Rudyard Kipling is said to have stayed in 1890

James Edward took Kipling, 25, to visit his family in Rockliffe and there Kipling clapped eyes on the Castle Hills sarcophagus. It inspired him, as we mentioned last week, to write a poem entitled The Roman Centurion’s Song, which was published in 1911.

“A minor quibble,” says Joanne Aston, of Thirsk. “You state that Kipling's poem is about a Roman soldier 'left to die ... when his legion went home'.

“Actually, the poem is a desperate plea by the soldier, who is now 'rooted in British soil', to be allowed to stay. The last verse is:

Legate, I come to you in tears – My cohort ordered home!

I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?

Here is my heart, my soul, my mind – the only life I know.

I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

Joanne is, of course, completely correct, and Kipling, nowadays a controversial figure because of his imperialism, was thinking as much of the British Empire as he was of the Romans when he wrote his poem.

Rudyard Kipling in 1930. Forty years earlier, he is said to have visited Hurworth and been inspired by a sarcophagus from Northallerton

She could have raised a major quibble about whether there is any truth in the story. It has certainly been oft repeated down the years in Hurworth circles, so it would be nice to think that a railway find from Northallerton has a place in literary history.

• If you have anything to add to today's column, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk