Cradled in a nurse’s arms, peacefully sucking on a bottle, blue-eyed baby Colin Garness was the ray of light in a dark, disaster story.
Hours earlier, on May 7, 1969, an express sleeper crashed at 84mph on our most notorious railway bend.
Six died and 103 were injured, including Colin’s parents. But, incredibly, their seven-month-old son escaped death by inches – with just one scratch on his forehead.
Firemen pulled him from the mangled compartment and took him to hospital for a check-up.
The following day the Daily Mirror introduced the world to “The Miracle Baby Found In The Train Wreck.”
Now 50 years old, Colin Garness says: “I count myself incredibly lucky to have survived.”
Speaking after we tracked him down half a century later, he adds: “We’d been in a sleeper compartment, dad on the top bunk, mum and me below. During the night I woke crying, and mum moved me to the end of the bed.
“She always said if she hadn’t done that I could have been crushed to death – and she counts her blessings.”
The accident, which would prove a landmark in railway safety, happened at around 1.30am as the train from London King’s Cross to Aberdeen sped north through Northumberland.
It all went wrong on the infamous “Morpeth Curve” where the railway line turns back on itself at 98 degrees – the tightest bend in Britain.
Five people were killed when a train derailed there in 1877 and the stretch had a 40mph limit.
On the morning of the 1969 crash The Aberdonian Express entered the curve at more than twice the limit after the driver lost concentration.
He braked too late and the 11 carriages careered off the track.
Two shot up the embankment, another was speared by a section of rail. The Mirror’s report the next day on the “Nightmare on a sleeper express” told how dazed passengers escaped.
A hero doctor, himself hurt, tended to the injured and dying before collapsing.
Eleven fire crews battled to free those who were trapped – including the Garness family.
Colin Senior, then 23, a mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm, and wife Jackie, 21, were returning home to Lossiemouth, Scotland, after taking their son to see Jackie’s parents in Nottingham.
Colin Junior, 50, now lives in Dundee with wife Anne and children Emily, 14, Elizabeth, 12, and Murray, 11.
Colin, who works as an operations supervisor on an offshore oil platform, explains: “I knew about what happened from a very early age, because my parents wanted to tell me how lucky I’d been.
“They’d picked up the Aberdonian Express in Grantham, settled into the sleeper compartment and gone off to sleep at about 10pm.
“Suddenly they were upside down and being thrown about. It must have been terrifying.
“Mum was trapped, but because she had moved me in the night I escaped. Dad broke his shoulder. I don’t know whether it was when he was trying to break the door to get them all out.
“Eventually people came and cut a hole in the cabin door and my dad managed to hand me out to them.
“I was carried off to a family who lived nearby, who very kindly looked after me until I was taken to hospital to be checked over. I was completely unharmed – just a bump on my head.”
As Colin was rushed to Newcastle upon Tyne, his mum Jackie was still trapped.
“She had to be cut out by the fire service,” he says. “She’d injured her back and has suffered back pain as a result.”
When Jackie was freed she was loaded into one of 36 ambulances on scene. Colin’s parents were taken to Ashington Hospital – 30 miles away from their baby son.
Staff reassured them little Colin was doing fine and next morning the Daily Mirror’s front page showed him happily taking a bottle from a nurse.
Later that day his dad was well enough to visit him, reporting to Jackie he was “looking chirpy”.
It was another 24 hours before Jackie was reunited with her baby, after two nurses took him to her.
And the Mirror was there to capture the moment with our reporter writing: “Jackie cried with relief when he was gently placed beside her on the pillow.”
A full inquiry was carried out by Colonel JRH Robertson, Permanent Secretary to the Environment
Department. He found the driver, Leslie Byers, 48, solely responsible.
He said he failed to brake as he was worrying about a letter from bosses asking him to explain why he was four minutes late on a earlier run.
The Colonel wrote: “Driver Byers relaxed his customary concentration and allowed his mind to become distracted.” But he added: “I was much impressed by Driver Byers.
“He struck me as a very good type of driver and a careful and conscientious man. He did not seek to excuse himself in any way.” He said the driver had attached too much importance to the routine notice and taken “the implied criticism too much to heart”.
In 1971 British Rail began putting floodlit warnings carrying the speed limit well before braking points.
They were dubbed “Morpeth boards”.
But technical issues meant they weren’t put on the curve itself until 1984 when a sleeper derailed at the same spot, injuring 35.
Colin says of the report: “I was impressed by how fair it was and how honest the driver had been. Dad doesn’t hold any ill will.
"He says ‘the guy was under pressure to make up time’. And imagine living with the knowledge your mistake led to six lives lost.”
He says of a scrapbook his parents kept about the tragedy: “I used to read it but in my teens I got a bit of ribbing for being ‘The Miracle Baby’.
“I didn’t think much about it after that until I showed my wife the book.
“Then, last week, without having registered the 50th anniversary, I got it out of the loft for my kids.” Showing them the pictures was tinged with sadness.
“Because there are probably still six families affected by the crash. I was just a very lucky baby.”