Beginning the 800km overnight journey between London and Aberdeen, the travelers on National Express service 592 were already weary. It was wet and the coach did not set off from London Victoria coach station until 10:30pm on Wednesday. When it left London Heathrow airport -- half an hour late because of a problem with baggage -- many of the 65 passengers were on the edge of sleep.
And then disaster. Passenger Gordon Welsh, 73, a retired British Telecom technician who had been on the upper deck, told his daughter Jackie that the coach became destabilized on the curved slip road linking the M4 motorway to the northbound M25 motorway.
"Dad felt that they touched the kerb, he felt a bump," she said.
"The driver lost control and the bus had gone to the left," she added.
The vehicle toppled onto its side and slid across the carriageway, leaving two passengers dead and up to 60 injured. Many had limbs severed and others had to be cut free from the wreckage. One woman set out with her two children, a girl aged seven months and a three-and-a-half year old boy. All three are believed to have lost arms or legs. After the impact passengers, many of whom were not wearing seatbelts, were hurled on to hard surfaces, into each other and through windows. Glass and debris from the coach flew along the interior, causing dreadful injuries.
On Thursday, as the 40-year-old coach driver was arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving, one of the dead was named as Christina Toner, 76, of Dundee.
Welsh, who had been in London with relatives celebrating his golden wedding anniversary, saw his wife Audrey, 70, thrown past him out of her seat. She suffered a dislocated hip and fractured ribs.
A friend of one injured passenger, Eddie Loney, 37, who was returning to Scotland, said Loney had told him what he believed had happened when he visited him in hospital. Loney believed "the coach was going too fast, it was half an hour late leaving Heathrow and the driver was trying to make up for lost time. He was going around the bend and he had taken it too fast. He lost the back end one way and then the other way and then the third time it headed back towards the central reservation."
Michael Milbourne, 69, was traveling back to his home in Symington, Ayrshire, in south west Scotland, after spending time with relatives in London. He suffered a fractured vertebra.
His stepbrother James Lant, 51, spent all day with him at the hospital. Lant said: "He just said they were coming off the main road when the coach veered to the left then right and then it just lost control. There were people distressed all around him and inside the coach people were on top of one another. He was afraid the man next to him might have been dead because he had a glazed look on his face."
"He did say there was a possibility the coach was going a bit too fast in wet conditions. The driver might have been making up some time because they were running a bit late," he said.
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