Rail crash survivor: I thought it was a bomb

Surrey Police are appealing for witnesses to a collision on a road bridge which resulted in a cement mixer lorry leaving the road and landing on a carriage of a passing train before coming to rest on the rail embankment.

Local people say the narrow bridge, with a low wall, was an accident waiting to happen.

Five people were taken to hospital yesterday evening, two with serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Recovery teams are preparing to remove the wreckage, but service is not expected to resume until Monday at the earliest.

Today the cement mixer was still where it landed, after it bounced off the roof of yesterday’s 1505 Guildford to Waterloo train.

Local people say the narrow bridge, with a low wall, was an accident waiting to happen.

Collision investigators from Surrey Police are trying to piece together why the driver lost control on the bridge above and crashed through the brick wall.

Lula Parris was on the train, sitting metres from where the lorry hit the roof. She thought either the bridge had collapsed or it was a bomb.

She told Jane Deith, for Channel 4 News, she had been in the carriage next to where the cement mixer landed.

“All of a sudden, just behind us, there was this massive crash. It was like an earthquake – everything sort of shook.”

She continued: “We thought it might have been a bomb or anything, so we just started to run forward to the next carriage.”

Passengers began to calm down once they were informed that nobody had been killed, she said.

We thought it might have been a bomb, so we just started to run forward to the next carriage. Lula Parris, crash survivor

The 40 passengers were gathered in one carriage and told to sit there for two hours because police did not want them to see the two people who were trapped – and seriously hurt.

Those two people were the lorry driver and a 60 year old man – who are both stable in hospital.

The bridge from which a lorry fell was assessed as safe in the nationwide checks made after the Selby rail disaster nearly 10 years ago.

Melanie Johnson told Channel 4 News that the traffic across the bridge was immense. “Lorries are always thundering over the bridge,” she said.

Network Rail says the bridge passed safety checks when all rail bridges were checked after Gary Hart swerved his Land Rover on to the East Coast mainline near a motorway bridge 10 years ago, killing 10 on an express train.