Fifty years have passed since the 4.56pm steam train to Ramsgate missed a red signal in the fog.

The tragic collision that followed, killing 90 people and injuring 176, remains one of the worst railway disasters in British history, yet few remember the event that brought scenes of panic and confusion back to postwar Britain.

Survivors and relatives who lost loved ones gathered for the first time yesterday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Lewisham rail crash. Some have been haunted for half a century by the scenes that emerged from the wreckage, of dazed office workers staggering through the debris, of bloodied Teddy Boys and Christmas shoppers trapped and crying for help from inside the crushed carriages.

More than a thousand passengers had crowded on to the two trains that collided under a railway bridge near St John’s station, Lewisham, in the evening rush hour.

Unable to see the signal through the fog, the driver of the Ramsgate train slammed into a stationary train bound for Hayes, forcing one of its carriages to jackknife into the bridge supports above. The bridge collapsed, its girders crushing carriages that otherwise would have been unaffected by the smash. Although a third train managed to stop before approaching the gaping crossover, both it and the broken steel structure hung perilously over the wreckage as rescuers picked through the debris by lamplight.

Newspapers reported “scenes as terrible as those many remembered from the war”. “The hissing of the steam mingled with the screams of a woman who lay trapped in the wreckage,” one report read. “One woman, with a Cockney voice, offered cups of tea to rescuers, at considerable risk to herself, unperturbed by the threat of the train carriage hanging above her.”

Days later, when demolition experts were still untangling the metal, The Times pointed out a note in a nearby newsagents from the family of a toddler who was killed in the crash. It said simply: “Please cancel Graham’s Tiny Tots comic.”

David Curtis, now 69, watched the accident unfold from a nearby signal box. Like every witness, the pensioner from Beckenham recalls the exceptionally thick fog that night.

“You could put your hand in front of your face and not see it. You’d see the filth swirling in the air. I could see the train gradually coming down the line. It went past one signal and went past the next. I was just thinking has he seen it? Is he going to stop?

“One passenger stumbled into the signal box, in obvious shock. He was wearing a light-coloured raincoat. When he turned around I could see it was covered in blood,” he said.

John Perry, a civil engineer, found scenes of panic that he had not seen since the Second World War when he arrived at the scene. “I remember the fog, people were milling around, there were cries, of course, of people who were trapped, cries of grief. It was rather like the Blitz.”

For the best part of 40 years, Graham Milne never spoke of the trauma that he witnessed as an 11-year-old Boy Scout. He used the first aid skills he had just learnt to tend the injured and dying.

“Suddenly there was an almighty screeching of brakes and a lot of noise and throwing about. I grabbed the first aid kit from the guard’s van and did what I could,” he said.

With his voice breaking, Mr Milne, now a taxi driver from Mottingham, South London, said that he was unable to talk of the incident until recently, but that he was glad that there had been no official memorial until the service yesterday in St John’s Church, Lewisham.

“It would have been too traumatic. It’s something I don’t really want to remember,” he said.

The Lewisham rail disaster is the worst British train crash of the past 50 years. The three-train smash in Gretna Green in 1915, in which 227 died, was the worst rail disaster in Britain.

Yet, it has been forgotten for too long according to Bridget Baker, who lost her father, Rainald Wells, in the tragedy. Attending the service, she said: “At that time things were done very differently and there was no sort of memorial event. We still, after all these years, feel the need for one.”

The crash, which pushed through the introduction of an automated warning system that had been delayed by financial setbacks for years, also devastated William Trew, 61, the driver of the train, who was later accused of manslaughter. The charges against him were dropped eventually.

“In the current climate, it would have been the management of the railways that would have been in the dock,” said Peter Tatlow, the author of 50 Years on: Restoring the Traffic, a book about the disaster.“I just feel it wasn’t fair that the driver was expected to see all these signals and be held accountable when things went wrong.”

Toll on the tracks

Quintinshill, Dumfries 227 people died in a three-train crash near Gretna Green in May 1915

Hither Green, South London 49 people died in a 70mph derailment in November 1967

Moorgate, London 43 people died in a Tube crash in February 1975

Clapham Junction, South London 35 people died in a three-train crash in December 1988

Ladbroke Grove 31 people died in a two-train crash in October 1999

Falkirk, Scotland 13 people died in a derailment in July 1984

Ealing, West London 10 died in a derailment in December 1973

Lockington, East Riding 9 people died when a train hit a van on a crossing in July 1986

Potters Bar 7 people died in a crash in May 2002

Southall, West London 7 people died in a two-train collision in September 1997

Paisley, Glasgow 7 people died in a two-train crash in April 1979

Nuneaton, Warwicks 7 people died in a derailment in June 1975

Morpeth, Northumberland 6 died in a derailment in May 1969

Purley, Surrey 5 people died after two trains collided in March 1989

Hatfield 4 people died in a derailment in October 2000

Source: Times archive

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