Dover Telegraph and Cinque Ports General Advertiser, Saturday 25 August 1849.

Final accident on the North Kent Railway.

The half-past eight o'clock train from London arrived on Sunday evening safely at Woolwich, the station of which place was much crowded on both sides. The entrance to the platform debouches on the down train. This train has just begun to start for Gravesend when a frightful scream was heard - a woman have fallen from the platform between the carriages. The last two carriages passed over her chest. For a moment the concourse of people seem too horrified to pick her up. She was, however, conveyed into the station, but soon died. As the wheels of the carriage went over her, they were distinctly seen to rise and fall. On Tuesday, Mr. C. J. Carttar, Coroner for Kent, held an inquest at the "Castle Tavern," Woolwich, touching the death of the deceased, Hannah Murphy, who, it appears, was the wife of a labouring man.

From the evidence that appeared that the deceased, with her husband, and three or four friends, natives of the Emerald Isle, had been enjoying themselves at Woolwich during the afternoon, and, after paying visits to half a dozen different public houses, were returning to the railway station in order to proceed to London, when, by some accident, they got separated. The deceased, imagining that her husband had taken his tickets and gone through the station, hastened after him, as she supposed, and finding a train alongside the platform, she grasped hold of one of third-class carriages, in order to obtain a seat within it. The train was in motion at the time, and the deceased, continuing to hold on, was dragged along a few paces, and then fell between two carriages, in such a position that a part of the train passed over her chest, and caused instant death. It appeared that the train deceased attempted to get into was going to Gravesend from London, and just in the opposite direction to that in which deceased wanted to go. Evidence having been given to show that every proper precaution was taken for the preservation of the passengers from injury, the Coroner remarked that the accident appeared to him to have a risen entirely through the woman's own negligence. The poor creature appeared to have missed her husband, and without knowing whether the carriage alongside the platform belonged to the up or down train, she had run forward and attempted to get into one of them whilst it was in motion. No regulation of any railway company could possibly avert acts of this kind on the part of headstrong passengers, and he felt it due to the South Eastern Company to say that, as far as his experience went, he believed their regulations were equal to those of any company in the kingdom; they carried, he believed, over the Greenwich branch, more passengers than any other railway in the kingdom, especially at Easter and Whitsuntide, and, as far as he knew he believed they had never before had a fatal accident to a passenger upon their line. Mr Finnegan, the Superintendent of the company, who was in attendance, said it was quite true, they never had. The jury expressed themselves satisfied, and returned a verdict of "Accidental Death.