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NOTES
ON
RAILROAD ACCIDENTS
BY
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR.
AUTHOR OF "RAILROADS: THEIR ORIGIN AND PROBLEMS."
NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
27 AND 29 WEST 23D STREET
COPYRIGHT
1879
By G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER. PAGE.
I THE DEATH OF MR. HUSKISSON 3
II THE ANGOLA AND SHIPTON ACCIDENTS 12
III THE WOLLASTON ACCIDENT 20
IV ACCIDENTS AND CONSERVATISM 27
V TELESCOPING AND THE MILLER PLATFORM 43
VI THE VERSAILLES ACCIDENT 58
VII TELEGRAPHIC COLLISIONS 66
VIII OIL-TANK ACCIDENTS 72
IX DRAW-BRIDGE DISASTERS 82
X THE NORWALK ACCIDENT 89
XI BRIDGE ACCIDENTS 98
XII THE PROTECTION OF BRIDGES 111
XIII CAR-COUPLINGS IN DERAILMENTS 117
XIV THE REVERE CATASTROPHE 125
XV REAR-END COLLISIONS 144
XVI NOVEL APPLIANCES 153
XVII THE AUTOMATIC ELECTRIC BLOCK SYSTEM 159
XVIII INTERLOCKING 182
XIX THE WESTINGHOUSE BRAKE 199
XX THE BATTLE OF THE BRAKES 216
XXI THE RAILROAD JOURNEY RESULTING IN
DEATH 230
XXII THE RAILROAD DEATH-RATE 241
XXIII AMERICAN AS COMPARED WITH FOREIGN
RAILROAD ACCIDENTS 250
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.
C. F. A. JR.
_Quincy, October 1, 1879._
NOTES
ON
RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
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.