In later years, an almost equally serious disaster happened to another Leeds coach, the “Express.” It was racing with the opposition “Courier,” which had been stopped at the bottom of the hill for the purpose of taking off the drag, and in the effort to pass was upset, with the result that a woman was killed on the spot, another was laid up for a year with a broken leg, and other passengers were more or less injured. Probably because of the evident recklessness displayed by the coachman, a deodand of £1,400 was laid on the coach. The mail-coaches were not so often involved in disasters as the stages. They had not the incentive to race, and smashes arising from this form of competition were infrequent. But other forms of accident threatened them and the stage-coaches alike. There were, for instance, fogs, and they were exceedingly dangerous. Penny, an old driver of the Edinburgh mail, was killed from this cause. Starting one foggy night, he grew nervous, and asked the guard, a younger and stronger man, to take the reins. He did so, and drove up a bank. The mail was upset, and Penny was killed. Snow and frost were the especial foes of the mails on the northern stretches of the Great North Road, just as widespread floods were in the Huntingdonshire and Nottinghamshire levels, by Ouse and Trent; so that no mail-coach was completely equipped which did not in the winter months carry a snow-shovel. But it was not always the north-country coaches that felt the fury of the snowstorms. The famous storm of December 1836 blocked all roads impartially. The Louth mail, which left the Great North Road at Norman Cross, had to be abandoned and the mails transferred to the lighter agency of a post-chaise, while numerous others were buried in the snow as far south as St. Albans.