31 to Aberystwyth became a tragedy

On Monday night, Jonah Evans was relaxing on a train, watching a Netflix drama, completely unaware that he would be involved in a fatal accident.

“The train driver comes running through the doors and shouts: 'Get ready, get ready, we're coming across another train,'” says the 25-year-old.

He only had a few seconds to get into position before impact.

“I thought… 'It's been a good ride, it's been a good life'.”

One passenger diedFour were seriously injured and another eleven people had to be treated in hospital after the accident.

The artist and graphic designer had just spent a weekend celebrating his birthday with friends in Bristol and was on his way home to Borth, Ceredigion, when the crash occurred at around 7:30pm BST.

He says that after his train hit a stationary train, everything felt like it was in slow motion.

Passengers on the 6.31pm westbound Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth service were thrown from their seats. Mr Evans was uninjured apart from whiplash.

“It was terrible to see all these people upset… it feels like a fever dream,” he says.

“This one girl was actually crying, she was sitting at a table and the blow hit her right in the middle of her body and she started vomiting,” he says.

“She started crying quite a bit… it was pretty awful.”

He recalled seeing people around him with rib injuries, one person with a dislocated or broken arm, and another person who had lost some teeth.

Another passenger was Bethan Evans knocked unconscious on the same train as Mr Evans, recalled waking up to find passengers “flying out of their seats”.

“The last thing I remember is reading one of my books and looking at the time,” she says.

“I saw a few people with broken bones calling emergency CPR and a lot of personnel running.”

Anthony Hurford, who was on the other train – the 7.09pm train from Machynlleth to Shrewsbury – was found himself on the floor “I wonder what the hell happened.”

“The word that keeps coming to mind is really just brutal,” he told BBC Breakfast.

“Somehow my body bent the leg of a table, tearing it from its bolts attached to the wall.

“Suddenly I was lying on the floor with my laptop scattered in front of me.”

Tudor Evans, 66, from Capel Dewi in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, who was in the second car, died after the accident – which occurred near the village of Llanbrynmair in Powys.

On Thursday, his friend Iestyn Leyshon told the Newyddion S4C app that he and his wife had “just started traveling after years of work and then this tragedy happened”.

The couple was returning from a holiday in Italy at the time of the accident.

His family thanked the people for “kind messages and support” and asked for privacy.

The accident occurred on the Cambrian Line on a single track, near an alternate loop where opposing trains can pass each other.

The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) said initial evidence suggested the accident occurred at a speed of around 24km/h (15mph).

It said a team of inspectors had been dispatched to the site and that the initial inspection found evidence that wheel-rail adhesion was relatively low, suggesting the train may have skidded when braking.

It said minor liability was the subject of ongoing investigations.

But what is low liability?

“This is the colloquial way of saying that the wheels of the trains are not gripping the top of the rail properly, causing a slipping situation,” says railway engineer and rail and transport writer Gareth Dennis.

“So when the brakes are applied, the train just slides along the rail.”

He says it could have been caused by fallen leaves, “or sometimes there are very strange combinations of fog and rain which can end up with a slightly oily surface on the railhead that is extremely slippery.”

“It will be interesting to understand why we ended up in a situation where the rail was so slippery when a train collided with another train,” he says.

“We have systems in place to prevent this and they haven’t worked. So we need to understand why that is and that may require some introspection from the industry.”

“The reason rail accidents make such big headlines is because they are extremely rare events, and that's a good thing,” says Mr Dennis.

The National Rail website states that train travel “remains one of the safest forms of transport in the UK”.

One of the most high-profile train accidents in the UK last year occurred in September 2023, when the Flying Scotsman collided with stationary wagons Two people were injured at Aviemore train station in the Scottish Highlands.

The last train accident in Wales occurred in 1991 in the Severn Tunnel, which provides travel between South West England and South Wales.

On 7 December 1991 the London Paddington to Cardiff Central route was stopped at a signal at the tunnel entrance at 08:30.

The train driver was informed of a signal failure and asked to proceed with caution, but about three miles into the tunnel the train was struck by a Class 155 Sprinter on the Portsmouth to Cardiff route.

A total of 185 people were injured in the collision, five of whom were seriously injured.

It is not yet clear when we will find out exactly what happened on Monday.

Network Rail route manager Nick Millington says the investigation will be “complex”.

Jan Chaudhry-van der Velde, TfW's chief operating officer, says a full report would take several months to process.

Mr Dennis says it is imperative that clear answers are given to the public.

“To reassure the public, the industry needs to be honest and not hide behind 'well the regulator said this, the regulator said that' and be honest with the public about how this happened,” he says.

He says that after the RAIB delivers its final report, the industry should “respond constructively and in a way that shows some degree of remorse that something went wrong”.

“Because something went wrong here,” he says.

“Something went wrong that two trains crashed into each other and people were injured and worse happened.”