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It was Friday February 28 when a tube train failed to stop and crashed into the tunnel at Moorgate, in London killing 43 people and injuring 74 more. On the 50th anniversary, survivor Javier Gonzalez shares his incredible story
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Javier Gonzalez recounts tragic Moorgate tube crash in 1975
For half a century pensioner Javier Gonzalez has believed he is one of the luckiest men alive – after surviving the Moorgate tube crash that killed 43 people and injured 74 others.
Fifty years ago today, on Friday February 28 1975, he sat in the first carriage – which was pulverised and crushed down from 16 metres long to just 6.1 metres – as it crashed into the wall at 8.46am.
Then a 21-year-old student, he remembers the blank look on the lady’s face sitting across from him, before the lights went out and darkness engulfed the carriage. In that split second there was an almighty bang – then metal crunching and glass shattering.
No screams, just an eerie silence as Javier slipped into unconsciousness. “It was like any other morning, the carriage was busy but not packed,” 71-year-old Javier, of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, tells The Mirror. “I was sitting in the first coach just by the middle doors when suddenly I jolted forward.”
“Everything stopped – and in the time it takes to breathe in – the fraction of a second, I saw the glass shattering, heard the metal twisting and everything went black. I don’t remember what happened after that until I heard someone shout ‘is there anybody else there?’”
The Moorgate tube crash was the worst peacetime accident on the London Underground, crushing the first carriage, leaving the second folded at the front, as it collided with the first, with the third riding over the rear of the second. Rescuers had to walk over dismembered limbs and dead bodies and a number of people who were decapitated to find survivors.
Describing the scene as “worse than in a horror movie”, it took the emergency services 13 hours to remove the injured, many of whom had to be cut free from the wreckage. One rescuer said the front carriage that Javier was sitting in was “an indescribable tangle of twisted metal” where “the living and the dead were heaped together, intertwined among themselves and the wreckage.. writhing in agony.”
Javier was trapped there for five hours and is now thankful he passed out, as he didn’t have to witness the horrific carnage around him. The next thing he remembers was being pulled to safety. “A man asked if I could move and when I replied that I couldn’t, he told me to cover my face as he pulled me out of the wreckage,” he says. “I was slipping in and out of consciousness and I remember someone injecting something into my hand.
“I didn’t gain full consciousness until the following morning, the Saturday when I woke up in intensive care at St Bartholomew’s Hospital with splatters of other people’s blood on my clothes, covered in soot and with bits of broken glass in my hair. There was a nurse standing next to me and after asking me how I was feeling she passed me a newspaper. I remember there were images of the accident and my name was on the front page.
“I had amnesia and was confused and I was reading about an accident that was being described as worse than a warzone or a horror movie. Then I just remember feeling really thankful that God had not let me see it.”
Javier’s hip was fractured into 100 pieces and he had to have a steel rod inserted inside his leg. For the next six months he relied on crutches to walk, but he considers himself one of the lucky ones. And he was not left traumatised about using the tube, as he knew the chances of anyone having a second accident on the underground like that were extremely unlikely. The near death experience has also left him unafraid of dying.
“I could see underneath me a valley with a river, trees and people and it felt full of love. I wanted to go there but I also wanted to tell everyone about it,” Javier says, describing the moment when he thinks he nearly died. “The next minute I was being pushed down into a very dark area where I could hear screams, I could smell rotten smells, it was dark and hot. “I now know it wasn’t what was happening in the tunnel because everyone was either dead or rescued except for me and the two other people, who were trapped who had already passed.”
Just after the accident, when people were more sceptical about near death experiences, he says people listened to his story as if he had gone mad. He even heard someone in hospital say, ‘poor man, he’s gone nuts.’ Now the author of a book about his experience called A Ticket to Eternity, despite being plagued with medical problems since the accident – including blood clots, a brain tumour and recurring pain in his head – which even neurologists, he says, have not ruled out from being related to the crash, he feels grateful to be alive.
No fault was found with the train after an investigation. The brakes were not applied and the dead man’s handle was still depressed when it crashed. The inquiry by the Department of the Environment concluded that the accident was caused by the actions of Leslie Newson, the 56-year-old driver.
