It was a beautiful 27ºc Friday afternoon in June, and Dr Eleanor Prior, Eli to her friends and family, looked forward to rooftop drinks in London to celebrate some friends’ 40th birthdays on a rare night out.
The 41-year-old Bedford GP, who is a partner doctor at Goldington Avenue Surgery, had left her two young daughters at gymnastics with her husband, Chris. Dressed up in a glam green dress, she jumped in a taxi to the station.
What followed was a sequence of seemingly innocuous choices, a series of “sliding doors” moments, that would place her at the epicentre of a devastating train crash.
There was no warning
Speaking to the Bedford Independent, Eli recalled her journey that night.
Bypassing the automated machines, she prefers to use the ticket office, the man behind the counter advised Eli not to catch the 17:10 train. It was short, just four coaches, and “guaranteed to be packed”, he said.
Determined to meet her friends on time, she ignored the advice, walked to the very far end of the platform, and boarded the first carriage.
She bypassed seats she thought pregnant or elderly passengers might need, ultimately settling into an odd, exposed seat at the end of the aisle.
At 5:12pm, she sent a quick WhatsApp photo of her girls to a group chat. Moments later, as she tapped away on her phone updating a medical appraisal, her reality shattered.
At 5:15pm, two East Midlands Railway passenger trains collided on the Midland Main Line near Elstow, just south of Bedford.
“There was no warning,” she said.
A stationary train travelling from Nottingham to London St Pancras was struck from behind by a second train from Corby, the one Eli was on.
The next thing she knew, Eli was on the floor, her face pressed into the carriage carpet, staring at the underside of a seat. She had been thrown up to eight metres down the aisle.
Remembering the moment, she said: “It was almost like, you know, when you see in the movies where it’s slow motion and everything really slows down. It felt like that.”
Rising to her feet, her sandals falling off, Eli stumbled back toward the doors and sat back down.
Pure instinct
Driven by pure instinct, her first action, before even checking her own body, was to dial 999.
In a recording she has since heard, she clearly tells emergency services what happened, telling them they needed to “send everything”.
She then called her husband and, noticing her elbow had swollen drastically, the realisation of her own injuries began to set in.
“I knew that we had crashed. There was glass all over the floor. And I remember sitting there, and I called 999 and then called Chris.
“And I told him, ‘I think I’ve broken my arm.'”
After speaking to Chris, she looked around, still dazed.
“I remember sitting there, and there was a young girl sitting nearby, and she was just frozen. She was just staring at me, and I didn’t know what to do.
“And I sat there, and I thought, I’m panicking. I need to calm myself down. So I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Eli, you just need to breathe’.
“And that’s when I could hear all the screaming and people being horrendously upset.”
As two passengers, Eli thinks, from another carriage, forced the carriage doors open and those who could walk fled. She could have joined them and stepped out into the summer air.
Instead, she picked herself up, shouted that she was a doctor, and walked towards those who were injured.
Read: Princess Royal honours Magpas response to Bedford train collision
War zone
The rear of the carriage was carnage.
On the floor, beside where Eli had been sitting, lay a young woman, Jane (not her real name), who had been thrown into the seats ahead of her.
Another passenger had suffered a catastrophic degloving injury to her face and skull. Behind them, a mother and daughter; the mother had sustained horrific, open leg fractures.
Eli said: “I turned around and saw the absolute carnage behind me… and I was like, I can’t. I just can’t get off. No way can I get off this train.”
When Jane looked up from the floor and whispered, “Help me, I can’t feel my legs”, the Bedford GP stepped into what she described as a war zone.
Stripped of the sterile environment, equipment, and support of a hospital or her clinic at Goldington Avenue Surgery, Eli relied on her medical training and sheer adrenaline.
She held the hands of the trapped women, reassuring them as the sirens of emergency services on their way grew louder.
“I remember holding some of the injured passengers’ hands, saying, ‘it’s ok, they’re coming’. But now, when I hear sirens, they take me straight back to that point of me holding those ladies’ hands,” said Eli.
When 21-year-old Bedfordshire firefighter Millie Dudley became the first emergency responder to board the carriage, Eli instantly offered her services.
Millie handed her a trauma pack and asked her to apply tourniquets to the catastrophic leg wounds. It was only as Eli gripped the tourniquet that she looked down and realised her own hand was shattered.
But that didn’t mean she was going to stop helping those around her.
“I looked at my hand,” she remembers, “and I was just like, there’s no way I’m going to get the traction that I need to get. So unfortunately I had to go back to her, and I said, ‘Millie, I’ve broken my hand. I can’t do this. Give me another job.'”
At no point did Eli ask for her own medical attention.
Reassigned, she began a brutal, systematic triage of the carriage, reassuring those expressing pain but paying more attention to those who were quiet.
“I was very worried about the quiet ones. I was worried they would die.”
“I can’t leave yet”
She relayed injury severities to the arriving crews, administered oxygen to Jane, who was struggling to breathe, and helped coordinate pain relief for the mother with the fractured femurs.
Eli didn’t leave the carriage until almost four hours after the collision, but even after the carriage was evacuated, she refused to leave the scene, stubbornly telling her worried husband on the phone, “I can’t leave yet.”
With her fractured hand, a battered knee, and a painful, blackening bruised back, she sat in the dirt of a freshly ploughed field beside Jane.
She monitored the young woman’s pulse, reported her vitals to major incident doctors and administered morphine.
Eli later heard that emergency services personnel started calling her the ‘GP in the green dress’.
Read: Rail minister visits Bedford to thank first responders, rail staff and volunteers
Not once did she leave Jane’s side until she was put into an ambulance. Even then, her care for Jane didn’t end.
She collected her boyfriend’s contact details so she could tell him exactly which hospital the ambulance was taking her to, ensuring Jane wouldn’t be lost and alone in the chaos of the major incident response.
Only then did Eli find Millie the firefighter to ask if she was permitted to leave, but not in an ambulance to hospital. Instead, she asked to be picked up by her husband, so an ambulance would be available for someone else.
Millie walked with her to a nearby roundabout to be picked up by Chris, who Eli said was “frantic” by then.
When she finally arrived at Bedford Hospital’s A&E, where she had worked during the pandemic, an army of familiar faces greeted her.
Off-duty doctors and nurses had seen the major incident alert and abandoned their dinners to rush back to the wards.
She was treated for fractured metacarpals, extensive bruising, and a head injury. She also had an ultrasound to rule out any internal bleeding.
True to form, by Tuesday, just three days later, with her arm in a plaster and her foot in a boot, Eli was back at her GP surgery to oversee a trainee’s final appraisal, dictating notes because she couldn’t type.
Pride of Britain
Months later, when Eli received a phone call from the Pride of Britain organisers, she immediately tried to decline the nomination.
“I felt very awkward about it. I’m not a person that likes the limelight… I’ve kind of felt like I’ve not deserved it. In my head, I did my job. And I did what I expect anybody else to do,” she told me.
But her community, and the emergency responders who witnessed her bravery, fiercely disagreed.
Read: Bedford schoolgirl awarded for heroism during “horrific” train crash
The outpouring of love from her Godington Avenue Surgery patients on social media brought her to tears, validating the deep connection she has built in the town over the last five years.
More profoundly, an air ambulance doctor who treated patients in the field that day tracked her down to thank her personally for her indispensable help in the critical minutes before full medical backup arrived.
Aftermath
It would later be found that the crash on 19 June 2026 resulted in one fatality, the driver of the moving Corby train.
162 passengers and crew members were also injured in the collision, ranging from minor cuts to very serious injuries.
Emergency services transported over 100 people to various hospitals in the region, including Bedford Hospital, with eight being placed in intensive care for several weeks afterwards.
Read: Bedford train crash report highlights technical faults and missed warnings
For Eli, healing is still an ongoing process.
She has had operations for her broken right hand, which needed a plate and five screws. She has also had treatment for her foot, knee and back, and still has no grip in her fingers.
But her injuries are not just physical.
Eli speaks openly about her EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) sessions, a structured psychotherapy that helps people heal from trauma and distress.
She is determined to champion mental health recovery with the same urgency as mending broken bones.
While Eli hasn’t been on a train since that day, she insists she will when the time is right.
Dr Eli Prior is a survivor, a healer, and despite her best efforts to deflect the praise, she is exactly the kind of hero Bedford knows her to be.
Watch the awards
You can watch Eli receiving her special recognition award at The Daily Mirror Pride of Britain Awards with P&O Cruises on Thursday, 22 October 2026 at 8pm on ITV1 and ITVX.
The event is a unique fixture on the national calendar as co-hosts Carol Vorderman and Ashley Banjo shine a light on inspiring people from all walks of life.
Winners are celebrated at a star-studded red carpet event, screened as a prime-time special on ITV and packed with heartfelt stories of resilience and emotion, celebrity surprises, and magical moments that will capture the nation’s imagination.
Since 1999, Pride of Britain, which airs exclusively on ITV1 and ITVX, has celebrated the truly extraordinary achievements of people of all ages.
From children of courage to lifesaving emergency workers, inspirational fundraisers and people who make the world a better place in local communities and on a national or even global scale.
