Abbots Ripton is a village and civil parish in Cambridgeshire, England. Abbots Ripton is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being an historic county of England. Abbots Ripton lies approximately 4 miles (6 km) north of Huntingdon on the B1090.
The village is also notable as the location of the Abbots Ripton railway disaster in 1876 in which a Flying Scotsman train was wrecked during a blizzard. The disaster led to important safety improvements in railway signalling.
A coal train preceding the Flying Scotsman on the main East Coast up (south-bound) line was normally scheduled to be shunted into a siding at Abbots Ripton to allow the much faster Flying Scotsman to pass. Because of a very bad snowstorm, both the coal train and the Flying Scotsman were running late and the signalman at Holme, the next station north of Abbots Ripton, judged that the coal train needed to go into sidings at Holme if it was not to delay the Flying Scotsman. He therefore set his signal levers to danger so as to stop the coal train, but it continued on the main line until it reached Abbots Ripton, where as expected the signalman waved it on to his box with a hand lamp, and directed it to shunt. The goods train had nearly completed shunting into the Abbots Ripton siding when the Scotch express ran into it at speed. The wreckage obstructed the down (northbound) line and a second collision occurred some minutes later when a northbound express to Leeds crashed into the wreckage. Thirteen passengers died in the collisions, and 53 passengers and 6 traincrew members were injured.
The report of the Board of Trade investigation is available at www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BoT_AbbottsRipton1876.pdf. It is a model of accident reporting, with the thoroughness you would expect in today. I have created a character-readable transcript here: BoT_AbbotsRipton1876_Transcript.