Local newspaper journalists were among the first at the scene of last week's fatal rail crash at Potters Bar.

Reporter Julian Hills, of the Hendon Times Group, drove to the railway station after a tip-off from a contact.

His first-person piece appeared on the Barnet & Potters Bar Times website the same evening while colleagues explored news angles as the story developed.

He described the "eerie sense of calm" and how observers did not yet know how serious the crash was - whether it was a low-speed shunt or something much worse with multiple fatalities.

With photographer John Macdonald-Fulton he gained access to a pub roof for a better view, and the priority was to then find the words to explain what had happened.

He said: "The idea was to get the stories on our website on Friday with our impressions of the scene and all the follow-up angles."

The paper publishes on a Thursday so this week's print edition will focus on the cause, as well as tackling the human angles with interviews, profiles and first-person pieces focusing on the nurses, doctors, police and fire officers involved, as well as local victims and those affected by the tragedy.

Julian said: "I was reading all the newspapers over the weekend and watching TV news to keep up with developments.

"If you are a journalist these are the stories that you want to be involved with. If you don't then you shouldn't be in the job."

This is his original story from the Barnet & Potters Bar Times:

I was one of the first reporters on the scene of what looks like being one of the worst train disasters in UK history.

I arrived in Darkes Lane at 1.45pm to be greeted by an eerie sense of calm, punctured only by the occasional emergency siren and mobile phones ringing.

The road underneath the station had been blocked off on both sides, with early reports of people trapped underneath the bridge and several serious casualties on the train itself filtering through to the gathered crowd.

At first, no-one knew what to think. Was it just a train that came off the tracks at slow speed with no serious injuries, or was it something much more horrific?

Memories of the Hatfield disaster, just a few miles up the same track, were in everyone's minds.

"No-one expects anything like this to happen," one shocked woman said. "Everyone is absolutely gutted."

Apart from police shouts of command, everyone was quiet, shocked and confused. There was no panic, no hysteria at all.

Walking up Wyllyotts Place from Darkes Lane towards the Old Manor pub and the Wyllyotts Centre, the full scale of the disaster became slowly apparent.

I could clearly see one carriage almost implausibly lodged between two platforms and the station canopy, with platform furniture and buildings destroyed, and sections of the train scattered around the tracks.

The first grim signs came when Times Group photographer John Macdonald-Fulton saw several casualties being carried away from the scene on stretchers.

More and more emergency vehicles flooded the area, keeping people away from the bridge, fearful it may collapse onto the road below. As minutes passed, there was a growing sense that this was more serious than anyone could have imagined.

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