On April 6, 1896, a new steam train was making its second round-trip journey down Britain’s highest mountain in Wales, having transported its first set of passengers successfully. Suddenly, the rack failed, the locomotive ran down the hillside, and one traveler fell off and died from his injuries. Meanwhile, a second train, oblivious of the crash ahead in the fog, collided with the wreckage. Such a disaster might have put an end to further development of the transport system connecting the region with Snowdon’s peak, but instead, the Snowdon Mountain Railway was rebuilt and re-opened a year later.
To this day, the facility has been serving tourists, being in commercial operation for over a century. According to the official record of a UK Parliament inquiry into the incident, the engineers concluded that the locomotive had climbed on the rack because the newly laid track had sunk under the weight of the vehicle. Probably, the combination of snow melting and the load on the rails affected the instability of the locomotive, which was too heavy for the road.
