The Angel of Platform Six
Local hospitals and emergency services found themselves involved in one of the worst civilian disasters in the UK when three trains ploughed into one another at Harrow and Wealdstone Station in 1952.
A thick autumn mist meant the 7.31am Tring-Euston service was seven minutes late pulling into the station with 800 commuters squeezed into the nine-carriage train.
It was about to pull out when a second train travelling southbound at 60mph ploughed into the back of it having jumped several red signal lights. A third train travelling in the opposite direction hit wreckage on the adjoining track seconds later.
More than 100 people lost their lives and more than 300 were injured in the second worst rail crash in British history.
Emergency services found a scene of absolute carnage with crushed and upturned carriages piled on top of one another or strewn across the platform and tracks.
One of the first on the scene was nurse Lieutenant Abbie Sweetwine who the Daily Mirror later called the ‘Angel of Platform Six.’
Abbie was part of an American medical team from RAF Ruislip who rushed to the scene.
Sweetwine helped triage patients on an adjoining platform administering blood and morphine to the seriously wounded and reassurance and tea to those traumatised by the event.
She used her lipstick to mark an ‘X’ on patients who had been treated and an ’M’ on those given morphine for the benefit of ambulance and hospital teams
The crash ushered in a new era of rail safety with the introduction of an Automatic Warning System.