Notes on Railroad Accidents

PREFACE

This volume makes no pretence whatever of being either an exhaustive or a scientific study of the subject to which it relates. It is, on the contrary, merely what its title signifies, – a collection of notes on railroad accidents. In the course of ten years service as one of the railroad commissioners of Massachusetts, I was called upon officially to investigate two very serious disasters, – that at Revere in 1871, and that at Wollaston in 1878, – besides many others less memorable. In connection with these official duties I got together by degrees a considerable body of information, which I was obliged to extract as best I could from newspapers and other contemporaneous sources. I have felt the utmost hesitation in publishing so crude and imperfect a performance, but finally decide to do so for the reason that, so far as I know, there is nothing relating to this subject in print in an accessible form, and it would, therefore, seem that these notes may have a temporary value.

During my term of public service, also, there have been four appliances, either introduced into use or now struggling for American recognition, my sense of the value of which, in connection with the railroad system, to both the traveling and general public, I could not easily overstate. These appliances are the Miller Platform and Buffer, the Westinghouse Brake, and the Interlocking and Electric Signal Systems. To bring these into more general use through reports on railroad accidents as they occurred was one great aim with me throughout my official life. I am now not without hopes that the printing of this volume may tend to still further familiarize the public with these inventions, and thus hasten their more general adoption.

Quincy, October 1, 1879.

It is a melancholy fact that there are few things of which either nature or man is, as a rule, more lavish than human life; – provided always that the methods used in extinguishing it are customary and not unduly obtrusive on the sight and nerves. As a necessary consequence of this wastefulness, it follows also that the results which ordinarily flow from the extinguishment of the individual life are pitiably small. Any person curious to satisfy himself as to the truth of either or both of these propositions can do so easily enough by visiting those frequent haunts in which poverty and typhoid lurk in company; or yet more easily by a careful study of the weekly bills of mortality of any great city. Indeed, compared with the massive battalions daily sacrificed in the perpetual conflict which mankind seems forever doomed to wage against intemperance, bad sewerage and worse ventilation, the victims of regular warfare by sea and land count as but single spies. The worst of it is, too, that if the blood of the martyrs thus profusely spilled is at all the seed of the church, it is a seed terribly slow of germination. Each step in the slow progress is a Golgotha.

In the case of railroad disasters, however, a striking exception is afforded to this rule. The victims of these, at least, do not lose their lives without great and immediate compensating benefits to mankind. After each new "horror," as it is called, the whole world travels with an appreciable increase of safety. Both by public opinion and the courts of law the companies are held to a most rigid responsibility. The causes which led to the disaster are anxiously investigated by ingenious men, new appliances are invented, new precautions are imposed, a greater and more watchful care is inculcated. And hence it has resulted that each year, and in obvious consequence of each fresh catastrophe, travel by rail has become safer and safer, until it has been said, and with no inconsiderable degree of truth too, that the very safest place into which a man can put himself is the inside of a first-class railroad carriage on a train in full motion.

The study of railroad accidents is, therefore, the furthest possible from being a useless one, and a record of them is hardly less instructive than interesting. If carried too far it is apt, as matter for light reading, to become somewhat monotonous; though, none the less, about these, as about everything else, there is an almost endless variety. Even in the forms of sudden death on the rail, nature seems to take a grim delight in an infinitude of surprises.

CHAPTER I.

THE DEATH OF MR. HUSKISSON

With a true dramatic propriety, the ghastly record, which has since grown so long, began with the opening of the first railroad, – literally on the very morning which finally ushered the great system into existence as a successfully accomplished fact, the eventful 15th of September, 1830, – the day upon which the Manchester & Liverpool railroad was formally opened. That opening was a great affair. A brilliant party, consisting of the directors of the new enterprise and their invited guests, was to pass over the road from Liverpool to Manchester, dine at the latter place and return to Liverpool in the afternoon. Their number was large and they filled eight trains of carriages, drawn by as many locomotives. The Duke of Wellington, then prime minister, was the most prominent personage there, and he with his party occupied the state car, which was drawn by the locomotive Northumbrian, upon which George Stephenson himself that day officiated as engineer. The road was laid with double tracks, and the eight trains proceeded in two parallel columns, running side by side and then again passing or falling behind each other. The Duke's train gaily led the race, while in a car of one of the succeeding trains was Mr. William Huskisson, then a member of Parliament for Liverpool and eminent among the more prominent public men of the day as a financier and economist. He had been very active in promoting the construction of the Manchester & Liverpool road, and now that it was completed he had exerted himself greatly to make its opening a success worthy an enterprise the far-reaching consequences of which he was among the few to appreciate. All the trains had started promptly from Liverpool, and had proceeded through a continued ovation until at eleven o'clock they had reached Parkside, seventeen miles upon their journey, where it had been arranged that the locomotives were to replenish their supplies of water. As soon as the trains had stopped, disregarding every caution against their so doing, the excited and joyous passengers left their carriages and mingled together, eagerly congratulating one another upon the unalloyed success of the occasion. Mr. Huskisson, though in poor health and somewhat lame, was one of the most excited of the throng, and among the first to thus expose himself. Presently he caught the eye of the Duke of Wellington, standing at the door of his carriage. Now it so happened that for some time previous a coolness had existed between the two public men, the Duke having as premier, with the military curtness for which he was famed, dismissed Mr. Huskisson from the cabinet of which he had been a member, without, as was generally considered, any sufficient cause, and in much the same way that he might have sent to the right-about some member of his staff whose performance of his duty was not satisfactory to him. There had in fact been a most noticeable absence of courtesy in that ministerial crisis. The two now met face to face for the first time since the breach between them had taken place, and the Duke's manner evinced a disposition to be conciliatory, which was by no means usual with that austere soldier. Mr. Huskisson at once responded to the overture, and, going up to the door of the state carriage, he and his former chief shook hands and then entered into conversation. As they were talking, the Duke seated in his car and Mr. Huskisson standing between the tracks, the Rocket locomotive – the same famous Rocket which a year previous had won the five hundred pounds prize, and by so doing established forever the feasibility of rapid steam locomotion – came along upon the other track to take its place at the watering station. It came up slowly and so silently that its approach was hardly noticed; until, suddenly, an alarm was given, and, as every one immediately ran to resume his place, some commotion naturally ensued. In addition to being lame, Mr. Huskisson seemed also under these circumstances to be quite agitated, and, instead of quietly standing against the side of the carriage and allowing the Rocket to pass, he nervously tried to get around the open carriage door, which was swinging out across the space between the two tracks in such a way that the approaching locomotive struck it, flinging it back and at the same time throwing Mr. Huskisson down. He fell on his face in the open space between the tracks, but with his left leg over the inner of the two rails upon which the Rocket was moving, so that one of its wheels ran obliquely up the limb to the thigh, crushing it shockingly. As if to render the distressing circumstances of the catastrophe complete, it so happened that the unfortunate man had left his wife's side when he got out of his carriage, and now he had been flung down before her eyes as he sought to reënter it. He was immediately raised, but he knew that his hurt was mortal and his first exclamation was, "I have met my death!" He was at once placed on one of the state carriages, to which the Northumbrian locomotive was attached, and in twenty-five minutes was carried to Eccles, a distance of seventeen miles, where medical assistance was obtained. He was far beyond its reach, however, and upon the evening of the same day, before his companions of the morning had completed their journey, he was dead. Some time after this accident a great public dinner was given at Liverpool in honor of the new enterprise. Brougham was then at the height of an unbounded popularity and just taking the fatal step of his life, which led him out of the House of Commons to the wool-sack and the Lords. Among the excursionists of the opening day he had on the 16th, occasion to write a brief note to Macvey Napier, editor of the Edinburgh Review, in which he thus alluded to the fatal accident which had marred its pleasure: – "I have come to Liverpool only to see a tragedy. Poor Huskisson is dead, or must die before to-morrow. He has been killed by a steam carriage. The folly of seven hundred people going fifteen miles an hour, in six carriages, exceeds belief. But they have paid a dear price." He was one of the guests at the subsequent dinner, and made a speech in which there was one passage of such exquisite oratorical skill, that to read it is still a pleasure. In it he at once referred to the wonders of the system just inaugurated, and to the catastrophe which had saddened its opening observances. "When," he said, "I saw the difficulties of space, as it were, overcome; when I beheld a kind of miracle exhibited before my astonished eyes; when I saw the rocks excavated and the gigantic power of man penetrating through miles of the solid mass, and gaining a great, a lasting, an almost perennial conquest over the powers of nature by his skill and industry; when I contemplated all this, was it possible for me to avoid the reflections which crowded into my mind, not in praise of man's great success, not in admiration of the genius and perseverance he had displayed, or even of the courage he had shown in setting himself against the obstacles that matter afforded to his course – no! but the melancholy reflection, that these prodigious efforts of the human race, so fruitful of praise but so much more fruitful of lasting blessings to mankind, have forced a tear from my eye by that unhappy casualty which deprived me of a friend and you of a representative!"

Though wholly attributable to his own carelessness, the death of so prominent a character as Mr. Huskisson, on such an occasion, could not but make a deep impression on the public mind. The fact that the dying man was carried seventeen miles in twenty-five minutes in search of rest and medical aid, served rather to stimulate the vague apprehension which thereafter for a time associated itself with the new means of transportation, and converted it into a dangerous method of carriage which called for no inconsiderable display of nerve on the part of those using it. Indeed, as respects the safety of travel by rail there is an edifying similarity between the impressions which prevailed in England forty-five years ago and those which prevail in China now; for, when as recently as 1875 it was proposed to introduce railroads into the Celestial Empire, a vigorous native protest was fulminated against them, in which, among other things scarcely less astounding, it was alleged that "in all countries where railroads exist they are considered a very dangerous mode of locomotion, and, beyond those who have very urgent business to transact, no one thinks of using them."

On this subject, however, of the dangers incident to journeys by rail, a writer of nearly half a century back, who has left us one of the earliest descriptions of the Manchester & Liverpool road, thus reassured the public of those days, with a fresh quaintness of style which lends a present value to his words: "The occurrence of accidents is not so frequent as might be imagined, as the great weight of the carriages" (they weighed about one-tenth part as much as those now in use in America) "prevents them from easily starting off the rails; and so great is the momentum acquired by these heavy loads moving with such rapidity, that they easily pass over considerable obstacles. Even in those melancholy accidents where loss of life has been sustained, the bodies of the unfortunate sufferers, though run over by the wheels, have caused little irregularity in the motion, and the passengers in the carriages have not been sensible that any impediment has been encountered on the road."

Indeed, from the time of Mr. Huskisson's death, during a period of over eleven years, railroads enjoyed a remarkable and most fortunate exemption from accidents. During all that time there did not occur a single disaster resulting in any considerable loss of life; an immunity which seems to have been due to a variety of causes. Those early roads were, in the first place, remarkably well and thoroughly built, and were very cautiously operated under a light volume of traffic. The precautions then taken and the appliances in use would, it is true, strike the modern railroad superintendent as both primitive and comical; for instance, they involved the running of independent pilot locomotives in advance of all night passenger trains. Through all the years between 1830 and 1841, nevertheless, not a single really serious railroad disaster had to be recorded. This happy exemption was, however, quite as much due to good fortune as to anything else, as was well illustrated in the first accident at all serious in its character, which occurred, – an accident in its every circumstance, except loss of life, almost an exact parallel to the famous Revere disaster which happened nearly forty years later in Massachusetts. It chanced on the Manchester & Liverpool Railway on December 23, 1832. The second-class morning train had stopped at the Rainhill station to take in passengers, when those upon it heard through the dense fog another train, which had left Manchester forty-five minutes later, coming towards them at a high rate of speed. When it first became visible it was but one hundred and fifty yards off, and a collision was inevitable. Those in charge of the stationary train, however, succeeded in getting it under a slight headway, and in so much diminished the shock of the collision; but, notwithstanding, the last five carriages were injured, the one at the end being totally demolished. Though quite a number of the passengers were cut and bruised, and several were severely hurt, one only, strange to say, was killed.

Indeed, the luck – for it was nothing else – of those earlier times was truly amazing. Thus on this same Manchester & Liverpool road, as a first-class train on the morning of April 17, 1836, was moving at a speed of some thirty miles an hour, an axle broke under the first passenger coach, causing the whole train to leave the track and throwing it down the embankment, which at that point was twenty feet high. The cars were rolled over, and the passengers in them tumbled about topsy-turvey; nor, as they were securely locked in, could they even extricate themselves when at last the wreck of the train reached firm bearings. And yet no one was killed. Here the corporation was saved by one chance in a thousand, and its almost miraculous good fortune has since received numerous and terrible illustrations. Among these two are worthy of a more than passing mention. They happened one in America and one in England, though with some interval of time between them, and are curious as illustrating very forcibly the peculiar dangers to which those travelling by rail in the two countries are subjected under almost precisely similar circumstances. The American accident referred to was that popularly known on account of its exceptionally harrowing details as the "Angola horror," of December 18, 1867, while the English accident was that which occurred at Shipton-on-Cherwell on December 24, 1874.

CHAPTER II.

THE ANGOLA AND SHIPTON ACCIDENTS

On the day of the Angola accident the eastern bound express train over the Lake Shore road, as it was then called, consisted of a locomotive, four baggage, express and mail cars, an emigrant and three first-class passenger coaches. It was timed to pass Angola, a small way station in the extreme western part of New York, at 1.30 P.M., without stopping; but on the day in question it was two hours and forty-five minutes late, and was consequently running rapidly. A third of a mile east of the station there is a shallow stream, known as Big Sister creek, flowing in the bottom of a ravine the western side of which rises abruptly to the level of the track, while on the eastern side there is a gradual ascent of some forty or fifty rods. This ravine was spanned by a deck bridge of 160 feet in length, at the east end of which was an abutment of mason work some fifty feet long connecting with an embankment beyond. It subsequently appeared that the forward axle in the rear truck of the rear car was slightly bent. The defect was not perceptible to the eye, but in turning round the space between the flanges of the wheels of that axle varied by three-fourths of an inch. As long as the car was travelling on an unbroken track, or as long as the wheels did not strike any break in the track at their narrowest point, this slight bend in the axle was of no consequence. There was a frog in the track, however, at a distance of 600 feet east of the Angola station, and it so happened that a wheel of the defective axle struck this frog in such a way as to make it jump the track. The rear car was instantly derailed. From the frog to the bridge was some 1200 feet. With the appliances then in use the train could not be stopped in this space, and the car was dragged along over the ties, swaying violently from side to side. Just before the bridge was reached the car next to the last was also thrown from the track, and in this way, and still moving at considerable speed, the train went onto the bridge. It was nearly across when the last car toppled off and fell on the north side close to the abutment. The car next to the rear, more fortunate, was dragged some 270 feet further, so that when it broke loose it simply slid some thirty feet down the embankment. Though this car was badly wrecked, but a single person in it was killed. His death was a very singular one. Before the car separated from the train, its roof broke in two transversely; through the fissure thus made this unfortunate passenger was partly flung, and it then instantly closed upon him.

The other car had fallen fifty feet, and remained resting on its side against the abutment with one end inclined sharply downward. It was mid-winter and cold, and, as was the custom then, the car was heated by two iron stoves, placed one at each end, in which wood was burned. It was nearly full of passengers. Naturally they all sprang from their seats in terror and confusion as their car left the rails, so that when it fell from the bridge and violently struck on one of its ends, they were precipitated in an inextricable mass upon one of the overturned stoves, while the other fell upon them from above. A position more horrible could hardly be imagined. Few, if any, were probably killed outright. Some probably were suffocated; the greatest number were undoubtedly burned to death. Of those in that car three only escaped; forty-one are supposed to have perished.

This was a case of derailment aggravated by fire. It is safe to say that with the improved appliances since brought into use, it would be most unlikely to now occur under precisely the same circumstances on any well-equipped or carefully operated road. Derailments, of course, by broken axles or wheels are always possible, but the catastrophe at Angola was primarily due to the utter inability of those on the train to stop it, or even greatly to check its speed within any reasonable distance. Before it finally stood still the locomotive was half a mile from the frog and 1,500 feet from the bridge. Thus, when the rear cars were off the track, the speed and distance they were dragged gave them a lateral and violently swinging motion, which led to the final result. Though under similar circumstances now this might not happen, there is no reason why, circumstances being varied a little, the country should not again during any winter day be shocked by another Angola sacrifice. Certainly, so far as the danger from fire is concerned, it is an alarming fact that it is hardly less in 1879 than it was in 1867. This accumulative horror is, too, one of the distinctive features of American railroad accidents. In other countries holocausts like those at Versailles in 1842 and at Abergele in 1868 have from time to time taken place. They are, however, occasioned in other ways, and, as their occurrence is not regularly challenged by the most risky possible of interior heating apparatus, are comparatively infrequent. The passenger coaches used on this side of the Atlantic, with their light wood-work heavily covered with paint and varnish, are at best but tinder-boxes. The presence in them of stoves, hardly fastened to the floor and filled with burning wood and coal, involves a degree of risk which no one would believe ever could willingly be incurred, but for the fact that it is. No invention yet appears to have wholly met the requirements of the case. That they will be met, and the fearful possibility which now hangs over the head of every traveller by rail, that he may suddenly find himself doomed without possibility of escape to be roasted alive, will be at least greatly reduced hardly admits of question.

Turning now from the American to the English accident, it is singular to note how under very similar circumstances much the same fatality resulted from wholly different causes. It happened on the day immediately preceding Christmas, and every train which at that holiday season leaves London is densely packed, for all England seems then to gather away from its cities to the country hearths. Accordingly, the ten o'clock London express on the Great Western Railway, when it left Oxford that morning, was made up of no less than fifteen passenger carriages and baggage vans, drawn by two powerful locomotives and containing nearly three hundred passengers. About seven miles north of Oxford, as the train, moving at a speed of some thirty to forty miles an hour, was rounding a gentle curve in the approach to the bridge over the little river Cherwell, the tire of one of the wheels of the passenger coach next behind the locomotive broke, throwing it off the track. For a short distance it was dragged along in its place; but almost immediately those in charge of the locomotives noticed that something was wrong, and, most naturally and with the very best of intensions, they instantly did the very worst thing which under the circumstances it was in their power to do, – they applied their brakes and reversed their engines; their single thought was to stop the train. With the train equipped as it was, however, had these men, instead of crowding on their brakes and reversing their engines, simply shut off their steam and by a gentle application of the brakes checked the speed gradually and so as to avoid any strain on the couplings, the carriages would probably have held together and remained upon the road-bed. Instead of this, however, the sudden checking of the two ponderous locomotives converted them into an anvil, as it were, upon which the unfortunate leading carriage already off the rails was crushed under the weight and impetus of those behind it. The train instantly zig-zagged in every direction under the pressure, the couplings which connected it together snapping, and the carriages, after leaving the rails to the right and left and running down the embankment of about thirteen feet in height, came to a stand-still at last, several of them in the reverse order from that which they had held while in the train. The first carriage was run over and completely destroyed; the five rear ones were left alone upon the road-bed, and of these two only were on the rails; of the ten which went down the embankment, two were demolished. In this disaster thirty-four passengers lost their lives, and sixty-five others, besides four employés of the company, were injured.