THEY probably kept the incident quiet at the time, which wouldn’t have happened if the fertiliser had hit the fan all those years ago. Because the ensuing blast would have left a fair sized hole in Middle England and Martin Jones would certainly not be still around to tell the tale.

It was one of those scenarios that used to crop up in London’s Burning or Casualty. Except this one would have topped the lot.

Thankfully, nuclear disasters are virtually unheard of in the UK, but this was uncomfortably close.

Back in the 1970s, Martin, who is now 65 and lives at Brockhill, near Redditch, was a train driver for London Midland working out of the huge railway complex at Saltley, near Birmingham.

More than 3,000 people were employed there. Today, in a changing industrial landscape, everything has gone.

The train journey itself should have been routine – the sort of trip he made several times a week driving freight and passenger services all over the country.

But this time, the 11th wagon of a 35-wagon freight train derailed as it went over a set of points.

Martin, who was on this occasion second or assistant driver, said: “The wagon toppled over, but remained linked to the ones in front and behind and was dragged along the track on its side.

“In the cab, we didn’t know anything about it. The weight of the train and the noise and the fact we kept going forward all combined to obscure what had happened.”

It wasn’t until the train went through a small station, long closed, that the drama became a crisis. “The rogue wagon was lying outwards and hit the end of the platform,” said Martin.

“Suddenly all hell let loose behind us. There was a terrific noise as metal hit concrete and all the wagons began crunching together in a pile.”

That would have been bad enough, but what the two men in the cab of the locomotive that day knew was that among the wagons being smashed and crumpled into twisted wrecks was one containing nuclear waste.

“We knew it was there, but we weren’t quite sure in the carnage which one it was,” he said.

Looking back it might seem incredible – although it often takes an accident to point out the obvious – but in those days waste from the nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria was still being transported on general freight trains.

The process was to take nuclear waste from Sellafield down to ships in the Severn Estuary and then make the return journey with empty flasks.

When the train crashed, the wagon actually carried a flask from which the waste had been emptied.

However, as Martin pointed out, there would probably have been some residues of waste remaining – and any presented a danger.

Of course there were no mobile phones and so he had to race to a call box to alert the emergency services.

“The police were there within five minutes and soon the place was crawling with police and firefighters. Scientists appeared to check for nuclear leaks.”

Fortunately the wagon with the flask wasn’t the one that had tipped over, but it was right at the centre of the mangled wreckage.

Incredibly, the container had remained airtight. “After that, they created special trains for nuclear waste,” said Martin.

He had always wanted to be a train driver since he was a lad. The Aberystwyth to Devil’s Bridge narrow gauge steam railway passing right by his house provided the inspiration.

“I used to watch them and think, ‘I want to do that’,” he said. And he did. For nearly 50 years, Martin Jones worked on the railways, latterly out of Worcester Shrub Hill, first with Central Trains and then London Midland on routes covering the Midlands and the West.

To mark his retirement, London Midland organised a gathering at Severn Valley Railway at Kidderminster, where Martin drove one of the old steam locomotives he would have started on all those years ago.

“It was brilliant,” he said. “Very nostalgic and it really rolled the years back.”

Martin was born at Birkenhead but his family moved to Wales when he was a child and that’s where the train bug bit.

“When I left school I went straight on to the railways,” he said. “I started off as an engine cleaner, then worked my way up to fireman (the man shovelling coal into a steam loco’s fire box). But in 1965 I was made redundant, so I moved to Saltley to find work.”

By 1970, he had achieved his boyhood ambition of becoming a train driver, albeit driving diesels, which had by then taken over from steam.

“The operation at Saltley was huge, 24 hours a day and there were three turntables,” he said.

We’d go in all directions, to Bristol, York, Cambridge. The York run was probably the longest, about 150 miles.”

In 1993, Martin moved to work out of Worcester Shrub Hill, which took in routes to Cardiff, Swindon and the south west. Eventually, he retired on his 65th birthday just nine weeks short of completing 50 years on the railways. Which was a lot better than going out with a bang in the 1970s.