Remember When - 'Leith Battalion' soldiers lost their lives in five-train smash just outside Gretna

"I REMEMBER seeing the funeral procession starting in Dalmeny Street at the Drill Hall. There were pipe bands and hundreds of horses and carriages carrying coffins.

"I ran up Leith Walk trying to follow it, but the street was mobbed by people and soldiers lining the route. I eventually found myself down at the cemetery gates sitting there.

"I really didn't appreciate the sadness of it all being the age I was – it was just a spectacle."

As an eight-year-old, there is no way May Stewart (nee Patterson) could have understood what she was witnessing that day, back in 1915. But now, aged 102, the Leither, who grew up in Cables Wynd, knows only too well what the words "Gretna Rail Disaster" mean.

Ninety-five years to the day, on Saturday, 22 May, 1915, a crash involving five trains occurred at Quintinshill, near Gretna, killing 227 people – most of them territorial soldiers from the "Leith Battalion", the 7th Battalion Royal Scots who had been heading for the Great War battlefields.

To this day it remains Britain's worst rail disaster.

As the Evening News reported that day, "the scene had all the horrors of war", as fire ripped through the wreckage, spurring locals to run to the track side with water, bandages and mattresses to try to help those pulled from the debris.

Of the 500 soldiers on the train, 215 died. Twelve civilians were also killed, yet the intense heat of the fire meant only 133 bodies were recovered – and only 83 could be identified.

In the city, growing crowds of anxious relatives gathered in Dalmeny Street at the battalion's Drill Hall headquarters, waiting for news of their loved ones.

Even more people arrived at the scene on Sunday when word spread of the soldiers' return, until eventually thousands congregated on Dalmeny Street and Leith Walk, down to Central Station where the train carrying the dead bodies was expected to arrive.

"The bodies were conveyed by rail to Leith in four vans," the Evening News reported. "And were borne then to ambulances or funeral vehicles which carried them in small numbers at a time by way of Leith Walk to the Drill Hall."

Mrs Stewart remembers hearing of the crash when visiting her Auntie Eva in James Court. A commotion outside the house spurred her dad John to find out what people were talking about.

"A few days later he visited a friend whose husband had been due to leave on a train to go to war – her husband was killed."

A funeral service for those Edinburgh men killed in the Gretna Rail Disaster took place on Tuesday, 25 May, 1915.