Letter: Train nightmare was more like a detailed witness account of crash

Between September 1979 and February 1982 I taught basic maths and English.

As an enthusiastic amateur railway historian, I found that an unexpected bonus of working in HMP Shrewsbury was that the windows of my classroom gave a grandstand view of the south approach to the railway station. During the summer months when the windows of the prison were open the station announcements could be clearly heard.

It was an interesting period in my life and many of the people I worked with, both staff and inmates, were rather more colourful characters. One inmate in particular sticks in my mind.

For the purposes of this account I will refer to him as Paul.

Paul was in his early 20s, but undernourishment made him look rather younger. He worked well on the literacy class I ran, but after a week or so I began to notice that he was becoming paler, thinner and very drawn-looking. "It's those old steam trains, Sir," he explained. "I daren't let myself fall asleep in my cell because every time I do I get nightmares about a train crashing and burning."

During the next few days, Paul was transferred to a training establishment for the rest of his sentence and with that I assumed his problems with nightmares about train crashes would come to an end.

My unease, however, was far from over.

I was aware that in the small hours of the morning of October 15, 1907, a terrible accident had taken place at Shrewsbury Station. The night train from Crewe to the West Country had jumped the track. The fire in the engine ignited the gas for the coach lighting and many of the injured trapped in the wreckage were incinerated where they lay. Twelve passengers, two guards, three post-office sorters and both members of the engine crew died in the accident. Thirty-one others were badly injured.

Paul's account of his nightmares seemed to be a detailed eye-witness description of an event which three-quarters of a century previously would probably have been in full view of the window of his cell.

Some of my more credulous friends, those who thrill to any rumour of supernatural phenomena, have tried to explain Paul's nightmares in terms of some sort of extra-temporal vibrations, initiated by the shock and horror of the accident, which lingered over the decades outside time and space and were accessed by a sixth sense possessed only by someone of Romany descent.

For myself I consider that the most probable explanation is that it was no more than an unsettling and eerie co-incidence.

David Burton

Wellington