Mourners look at flowers left for victims of the Ladbroke train crash which took place 25 years ago today (Picture: Neville Elder/Corbis/Getty Images)
Tony Jasper missed his train on October 5, 1999.
Having recently divorced, the then 47-year-old IT consultant was commuting into London from a house he’d bought in Oxfordshire.
His usual 7:10am train from Didcot Parkway was running late. A huge crowd of impatient commuters swarmed forward when it finally appeared. Tony decided to wait up for the next service – the 7:20am – so he would be able to find a seat.
At the same time, 48-year-old divorcee Jan Vaughn waited at Thatcham station, about 40 miles west of London.
She was working as an assistant benefit consultant in the city, but had also missed her train after a heavily-frosted car windscreen delayed her drive.
Jan, in coach C, and Tony, in coach E, were among 420 people on the First Great Western service bound for London Paddington. What happened on that fateful commute would leave everlasting mental and physical scars for those on board.
Speaking about the tragedy on an episode of Rescue, a podcast hosted by survival expert Donny Dust, Tony recalls: ‘There was a sudden bang. Then there was a second bang.
A firefighter checks the inside of a charred carriage of one of the two high-speed trains that collided (Picture: Olivier Morin/AFP)
Investigators combed the most badly damaged carriage in search of evidence – but also bodies (Picture: PA)
‘The third bang was accompanied with a massive orange ball of flame. And then that’s when I knew that we were seriously in trouble.
‘A fireball rolled past my window and then came the smoke. My thought at that time was “I’m going to get crushed. I’m gonna get burnt, or I’m gonna choke to death”.
‘It was probably about the fifth bang where the carriage was thrown up in the air.’
In coach C, Jan had briefly lost consciousness after hearing loud ‘screeching’.
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She had no idea if a bomb, train fault or collision had caused the explosion. Around her, panicked passengers battled in vain to open carriage doors as a worrying smell of diesel got stronger.
Tony, meanwhile, went into ‘rescue mode’. He smashed open a window by hitting the corner of the glass, a trick he had learned during workplace training during the era of IRA bomb threats.
Tony and Jan shared their memories of the incident on the podcast Rescue (Picture: Tony Jasper)
‘I started to climb out the window,’ he explains on the podcast.
‘My overriding passion then was to get as many people out as possible because they did not deserve to be in there. I shouted instructions for people to come out, feet first, tummy …read more
Source:: Metro
