Qualla: Woerden Train Disaster

Woerden Train Disaster: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arch, Public domain. Raymond Albert Miller was nineteen, an able seaman from Spennymoor in County Durham, and he had picked the worst possible moment to step out to the toilet. The train was a British military furlough service running from Hanover to the Hook of Holland, carrying 151 servicemen and family members back toward the ferries that would take them home. It was 8:10 p.m. on 21 November 1960. The track outside Woerden had a temporary 40 km/h speed restriction posted because of repair works. The train was doing 90 km/h. When the carriages folded against each other in what railwaymen call the concertina effect, Raymond Miller was standing in the fourth coach with the door of the lavatory cubicle behind him.

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Image: Arch | Public domain

Woerden Train Disaster: A British Train on Dutch Rails

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janwillemvanaalst, CC BY-SA 4.0. Furlough trains were a fixture of post-war Europe. The British Army of the Rhine kept tens of thousands of soldiers stationed in occupied and then allied Germany, and every leave period the ferry routes between the Hook of Holland and Harwich filled with khaki and family-sized su...

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Image: Janwillemvanaalst | CC BY-SA 4.0

Woerden Train Disaster: Eleven Carriages, Six Off the Rails

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harry Pot for Anefo, CC BY 4.0. What happened next took perhaps three seconds. The train broke just behind the second carriage. Six of the eleven coaches derailed, several tilting partially onto their sides. The fourth carriage telescoped into the third in the concertina effect, the kind of slow steel folding t...

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Image: Harry Pot for Anefo | CC BY 4.0

Woerden Train Disaster: Soldiers as Rescuers

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harry Pot for Anefo, CC BY 4.0. Some of the uninjured British servicemen helped pull people from the wreckage in the dark. Others were marched to Woerden railway station to be out of the way. Around a hundred staff from Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the Dutch national railway, arrived through the night with oxy-acety...

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Image: Harry Pot for Anefo | CC BY 4.0

Woerden Train Disaster: Eighteen Months Later

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harry Pot for Anefo, CC BY 4.0. The cause was straightforward. A driver missed a speed restriction. The fix should have been straightforward too — better signage, better signalling, perhaps an automatic system that could enforce speed limits without depending on a tired driver's eyes. The Dutch railways studied...

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Image: Harry Pot for Anefo | CC BY 4.0