Iclok - that will be the crash we were told about by the publican (Joe Coates) at the Hill Inn, it obviously happened a year before. It was a good job that the accident was not so severe because of access of getting to casualties, they were very lucky indeed as it was in the most out of the way area possible. I believe that passengers from the accident walked down the line to the Viaduct. Whilst there we walked up the line to the actual site of the accident.
Previously when the Settle/Carlisle line was being built, along with the Ribblehead Viaduct by the navvies, a prefabricated town had been constructed for them somewhere northwards between the Viaduct and Blea Moor (I haven't got my reference to hand). During the construction cholera struck and quite a few navvies died and were buried in the churchyard at Chapel-le-Dale.
Edit: Iclok - many apologies obviously senile dementia setting in fast! :confused: As you correctly said, our caving trip was in 1952 just three months after the accident.
Not only would it appear the rail line to be jinxed, but also the ownership of the Hill Inn at Chapel-le-Dale. A Derbyshire caving friend Chris Shepherd, who had been the first Quartermaster on the Sir Winston Churchill sail training ship when she was launched (the gentleman who had transported Jim and Rose Eyre in his Land Rover to and from Provatina, Greece on Jim's trip in 1967 and who had abandoned them with their baggage on an island in a river in Austria on the return trip - see Jim's book for details) bought the Inn after leaving the sea and moving from Donegal at the end of the 1960's. Jim phoned us just before we left on our Iran expedition to say that Chris committed suicide in July, 1971 and was buried in Chapel-le-Dale churchyard. Jim told us that most of the previous landlords of the Inn had also died in strange ways. On an earlier visit in the late 1950's we climbed Whernside and on the way up to the summit came across the propellor and some wreckage remaining of a Lancaster aircraft which had crashed in the 1940's (again I have no details). Seems a tragic area.