as he got nearer he realised it had not. The driver made an emergency brake application but the train did not stop before reaching the diamond crossing. At that moment he saw the Liverpool train approaching at high speed and shouted a warning to a trainee driver who was also in the cab. They both jumped from the locomotive almost immediately before the Liverpool train collided with it. The locomotive of the Liverpool train was 86211 City of Milton Keynes. It hit the other locomotive 86429 The Times side-on, which finished up in the wreckage with its body twisted and split open. The passenger coaches were scattered in all directions and some had their ends badly damaged. Eric Goode, the driver of no. 86211, was killed. It was also reported that Nicaragua's ambassador to Britain, Francisco d'Escoto, was one of the injured passengers. Investigation After the accident, the driver went to the signal box and told the signalman "You had double flashing yellows and the route was set for Stoke". With "traditional" junction layouts in mind, flashing yellows would have meant that the route was set for him right through the junction, with at worst, the red signal on the far side. It was not; at Colwich the signalling system was designed for the 'diverging route' to be only the crossover from the Down Fast to the Down Slow, and the driver was not expecting to see a red signal before taking the Stoke line. In this respect railway nomenclature had unwittingly set a trap; he had after all seen a 'Junction Indicator' illuminated and thus assumed that his train had been routed across the junction. The public inquiry centred on whether the driver had had adequate training on the recently introduced flashing yellow signals and the implications at multiple junctions (Hall 1987). The driver admitting to signing for, but not actually reading, the Notice that referred to the installation of flashing yellows at Colwich the previous month. A contributory factor was the lack of flank protection given the layout at Colwich Junction. The accident would not have happened if the points had been set to route the train away from the diamond crossing, rather than head-on into the Liverpool train's path, as would have been normal practice in an older manual installation. This feature was not included in the junction design because it would have prevented a parallel movement