In 1830 an MP boarded the first train and never got off

On 15 September 1830, William Huskisson, Member of Parliament for Liverpool, boarded the inaugural run of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the line between the two cities, and did not come back alive. The locomotive Rocket ran him down at Parkside, the watering stop halfway along the route. He has been cited ever since as the first passenger killed in a railway accident.

The line was opening in front of ministers and diplomats, with people crowding both sides of the track. It was the first intercity railway to carry passengers and freight with steam locomotives over the whole route. Huskisson, sixty years old, was travelling in the carriage reserved for dignitaries, next to the Duke of Wellington, the British prime minister and an old political rival of his.

Halfway along, the trains stopped at Parkside to take on water. The company had asked passengers to stay inside, but several men got down to stretch their legs and talk on the track. Huskisson took the chance to go over to the duke's carriage: the two had been estranged for years. Wellington held out his hand and the gesture seemed to seal a reconciliation.

Then someone shouted that the Rocket was coming on the adjacent track. There was room to step aside, but Huskisson stayed by the open carriage door. He tried to climb in. The door swung outwards, threw him off balance and left him in the locomotive's path. A wheel crushed his leg.

Nobody had thought to have an ambulance at an inauguration. The men there tore a hut door off its hinges and used it as a stretcher. George Stephenson, the line's engineer, coupled a single carriage to a locomotive and took the injured man to Eccles, the first town on the route with medical help. The run covered fifteen miles in twenty-five minutes, some 58 kilometres an hour, and it was reported as a speed record.

Huskisson stayed conscious for part of the journey. The doctors could not save him and he died that same night at the Eccles vicarage, the parish priest's house, shortly after nine.

Labourers and onlookers had died before him in works and shunting. That is why calling him "the first railway death" needs a qualification: he was the first passenger whose death in a rail accident was widely recorded and turned into public news.

The company debated whether to call the day off and decided to carry on: the trains reached Manchester with the flags already lowered. Regular passenger services began on 17 September, two days after the accident.