This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the List of rail accidents in the United Kingdom article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article.

Add new text under old text. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Start a new topic Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed Article policies Neutral point of view No original research Verifiability

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 12 months

This article is rated List-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Lists This article is within the scope of WikiProject Lists, an attempt to structure and organize all list pages on Wikipedia. If you wish to help, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.ListsWikipedia:WikiProject ListsTemplate:WikiProject ListsList ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale. Trains: in UK Low‑importance Trains Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. See also: WikiProject Trains to do list and the Trains Portal.TrainsWikipedia:WikiProject TrainsTemplate:WikiProject Trainsrail transport Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. Associated projects or task forces: /  This article is supported by WikiProject UK Railways (assessed as Mid-importance).

I tried to work out from the top of this talk-page what are the criteria for inclusion, but failed. My motivation was removal of a level-crossing accident at Appleford, sourced only to the Accident Archive. It was a very minor accident in which one person was injured. The accident archive site contains scanned copies of accident reports of just about every reportable incident on the UK railway system since 1840, amounting to well over 9000 incidents. Presumably there is no intention to record every one of them here, as our WP list is described as being of "significant" accidents. The accident reports in the accident archive site, while very reliable, are very much primary data. I would assume this list should be of accidents sufficiently notable to have made it into books or non-trivial newspaper articles (a good definition of "significant"). Anything that cannot be sourced except to a report by the rail investigators is probably not notable enough for the list. Elemimele (talk) 13:17, 13 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

I agree, if you read the archive discussions above, this has been discussed several times before but there was never an agreement. Maybe it's worth being WP:BOLD and trimming the list down to something more sensible. G-13114 (talk) 14:31, 13 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Agreed, I've trimmed a few more off the end of the post-privatisation list. I've done them individually or in small batches in case people need to revert. It can be tricky to assess notability. For example, Whitacre junction is sourced to a newspaper but I don't think it's notable. Any rail accident nowadays will generate an article in the local news (if it's in London, it'll be in the national news) with reports of "major disruption", but if it's just a minor mishap that closed the line for the rest of the day, with no one injured, just a lot of angry commuters, I am not sure it's notable. On the other hand, Ely West junction is sourced only to the accident report, but it closed all navigation on the river Ouse for three months and had extended coverage at least in the local newspapers, so its lack of sourcing here is plain laziness on the part of whoever added it. Elemimele (talk) 13:30, 14 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I've readded the Kirkby train crash and 2021 Salisbury rail crash which you removed because they have over 10 injuries and their own articles. Hope that's okay! greyzxq ^talk 13:43, 14 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Yes entirely, I should have checked those two. I should also have moved a better citation into this list, but I'm not sure which of the sources to use from their own articles. Elemimele (talk) 14:56, 14 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Just looked at the Kirkby train crash article and it says that one one person was injured, so feel free to remove that. I’ll probably check every entry now to make sure the numbers of injured and dead are actually correct. About the sources to use, just use any as long as they support the info you’re citing, remember you can use more than one source if needed! greyzxq ^talk 15:03, 14 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Cases such as Kirkby train crash which pass notability guidelines really ought to be listed for navigational purposes if nothing else. Garuda3 (talk) 15:38, 14 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I agree, and I was mistaken to remove Kirkby. There are some accidents with stand-alone articles that seem to me to be shaky, for example Spa Road Junction, which I've nominated for deletion. But I'm not a deletionist by nature. My belief is that many rail accidents have been truly notable, through their consequences for society at large, or because they shaped future politics and development of the rail industry. If we distill these out and present them to our readers, they learn something. If we hide them amongst a huge morass of minor buffer-bumps, we make it very hard for our readers to see the bigger picture: i.e. we're hiding trees in a forest. But I completely welcome those editors who correct me when I take a chainsaw to the wrong tree. Elemimele (talk) 22:02, 14 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

My recent edit to include a derailment from 2010 was reverted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_rail_accidents_in_the_United_Kingdom&oldid=prev&diff=1310735799 I totally understand why: nobody was injured, etc. But I've heard this derailment referred to in multiple places (interviews with both Josh Widdecombe and James Acaster (see refs on my edit), and from what I've seen is referred to in a book by James Acaster), and came here to look for it: this makes me think it counts as significant. Thoughts? Or should I just add it to JW & JA's pages? hjsb (talk) 09:38, 11 September 2025 (UTC)Reply

The redirect List of United Kingdom rail accidents by death toll has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 November 15 § List of United Kingdom rail accidents by death toll until a consensus is reached. JacobTheRox^{(talk | contributions)} 22:30, 15 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

I've spotted four instances of off-by-one errors in dates in this list while not looking particularly for that (I'm working through the list in section then decreasing death toll order for a non-Wikipedia project). Two have been wrong months, one the wrong day and one the wrong year - I've not looked for the reason for the discrepancies but all have been plausible as typos. Given this it's probably worth taking a systematic look to verify the information here is correct. Thryduulf (talk) 02:23, 11 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

Regarding the train had a green signal when the accident occurred - it is normal for a train approaching an AHB crossing to be shown a green aspect regardless of the state of the crossing. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways#Hoghton level crossing accident. Notifying JuniperChill. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:52, 20 July 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the info Redrose. I didn't know that AHBs are not linked to the signalling system. However, I would point out that the RAIB news story, as well as the BBC reference and ITV so WP:TRUTH applies. In any event, the source(s) do not specify that the LC and the signals were linked. JuniperChill (talk) 18:42, 20 July 2026 (UTC)Reply