Tucked away in a little corner of South Gloucestershire, just fifteen minutes from the outskirts of Bristol, is the village of Charfield – home to just over two thousand people, three pubs, two churches, a village hall and a handful of shops. The sleepy suburb has a railway running through it, but nowhere to board a train. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charfield railway station opened on the Bristol and Gloucester Railway in 1844, at the height of the British train boom.
It served the village for over 120 years and was, perhaps most notably, the site of a rail disaster in 1928 which claimed fifteen lives. At 5.20am on the morning of October 13, a night mail train was travelling southbound towards the station. Due to fog and an error by the driver, the train overran signals and smashed into a goods service in the sidings, being pushed into the path of an oncoming freight train. Gas used to light the mail train’s carriages ignited and 16 people were killed in the blaze.
The driver and fireman of the mail train were both charged with manslaughter, but were later acquitted. They both maintained that they had seen a green signal on their approach to the station, but an investigation deemed this to have been impossible.
