THE VERSAILLES ACCIDENT.
Going back once more to the early days, a third of a century
since, before yet the periodical recurrence of slaughter had
caused either train-brake or Miller platform to be imagined as
possibilities, before, indeed, there was yet any record of what
we would now consider a regular railroad field-day, with its long
train of accompanying horrors, including in the grisly array death
by crushing, scalding, drowning, burning, and impalement,--going
back to the year 1840, or thereabouts, we find that the railroad
companies experienced a notable illustration of the truth of the
ancient adage that it never rains but it pours; for it was then
that the long immunity was rudely broken in upon. After that time
disasters on the rail seemed to tread upon one another's heels
in quick and frightful succession. Within a few months of the
English catastrophe of December 24, 1841, there happened in France
one of the most famous and most horrible railroad slaughters
ever recorded. It took place on the 8th of May, 1842. It was the
birthday of the king, Louis Philippe, and, in accordance with the
usual practice, the occasion had been celebrated at Versailles by a
great display of the fountains. At half past five o'clock these had
stopped playing, and a general rush ensued for the trains then about
to leave for Paris. That which went by the road along the left bank
of the Seine was densely crowded, and so long that two locomotives
were required to draw it. As it was moving at a high rate of speed
between Bellevue and Meudon, the axle of the foremost of these
two locomotives broke, letting the body of the engine drop to the
ground. It instantly stopped, and the second locomotive was then
driven by its impetus on top of the first, crushing its engineer and
fireman, while the contents of both the fire-boxes were scattered
over the roadway and among the _débris_. Three carriages crowded
with passengers were then piled on top of this burning mass and
there crushed together into each other. The doors of these carriages
were locked, as was then and indeed is still the custom in Europe,
and it so chanced that they had all been newly painted. They blazed
up like pine kindlings. Some of the carriages were so shattered that
a portion of those in them were enabled to extricate themselves, but
the very much larger number were held fast; and of these such as
were not so fortunate as to be crushed to death in the first shock
perished hopelessly in the flames before the eyes of a throng of
lookers-on impotent to aid. Fifty-two or fifty-three persons were
supposed to have lost their lives in this disaster, and more than
forty others were injured; the exact number of the killed, however,
could never be ascertained, as the piling-up of the cars on top of
the two locomotives had made of the destroyed portion of the train
a veritable holocaust of the most hideous description. Not only did
whole families perish together,--in one case no less than eleven
members of the same family sharing a common fate,--but the remains
of such as were destroyed could neither be identified nor separated.
In one case a female foot was alone recognizable, while in others
the bodies were calcined and and fused into an indistinguishable
mass. The Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to inquire
whether Admiral D'Urville, a distinguished French navigator, was
among the victims. His body was thought to be found, but it was so
terribly mutilated that it could be recognized only by a sculptor,
who chanced some time before to have taken a phrenological cast of
the skull. His wife and only son had perished with him.
It is not easy now to conceive the excitement and dismay which this
catastrophe caused throughout France. The railroad was at once
associated in the minds of an excitable people with novel forms
of imminent death. France had at best been laggard enough in its
adoption of the new invention, and now it seemed for a time as if
the Versailles disaster was to operate as a barrier in the way of
all further railroad development. Persons availed themselves of the
steam roads already constructed as rarely as possible, and then in
fear and trembling, while steps were taken to substitute horse for
steam power on other roads then in process of construction.
The disaster was, indeed, one well calculated to make a deep
impression on the popular mind, for it lacked almost no attribute of
the dramatic and terrible. There were circumstances connected with
it, too, which gave it a sort of moral significance,--contrasting
so suddenly the joyous return from the country _fête_ in the
pleasant afternoon of May, with what De Quincey has called the
vision of sudden death. It contained a whole homily on the familiar
text. As respects the number of those killed and injured, also,
the Versailles accident has not often been surpassed; perhaps
never in France. In this country it was surpassed on one occasion,
among others, under circumstances very similar to it. This was the
accident at Camphill station, about twelve miles from Philadelphia,
on July 17, 1856, which befell an excursion train carrying some
eleven hundred children, who had gone out on a Sunday-school picnic
in charge of their teachers and friends.
It was the usual story. The road had but a single track, and the
train, both long and heavy, had been delayed and was running behind
its schedule time. The conductor thought, however, that the next
station could yet be reached in time to meet and there pass a
regular train coming towards him. It may have been a miscalculation
of seconds, it may have been a difference of watches, or perhaps
the regular train was slightly before its time; but, however it
happened, as the excursion train, while running at speed, was
rounding a reverse curve, it came full upon the regular train, which
had just left the station. In those days, as compared with the
present, the cars were but egg-shells, and the shock was terrific.
The locomotives struck each other, and, after rearing themselves
up for an instant, it is said, like living animals, fell to the
ground mere masses of rubbish. In any case the force of the shock
was sufficient to hurl both engines from the track and lay them side
by side at right angles to, and some distance from it. As only the
excursion train happened to be running at speed, it alone had all
the impetus necessary for telescoping; three of its cars accordingly
closed in upon each other, and the children in them were crushed;
as in the Versailles accident, two succeeding cars were driven upon
this mass, and then fire was set to the whole from the ruins of the
locomotives. It would be hard to imagine anything more thoroughly
heart-rending, for the holocaust was of little children on a party
of pleasure. Five cars in all were burned, and sixty-six persons
perished; the injured numbered more than a hundred.[5]
[5] A collision very similar to that at Camphill occurred upon the
Erie railway at a point about 20 miles west of Port Jervis on the
afternoon of July 15, 1864. The train in this case consisted of
eighteen cars, in which were some 850 Confederate soldiers on their
way under guard to the prisoner's camp at Elmira. A coal train
consisting of 50 loaded cars from the hanch took the main line at
Lackawaxen. The telegraph operator there informed its conductor that
the track was clear, and, while rounding a sharp reversed curve,
the two trains came together, the one going at about twelve and the
other at some twenty miles an hour. Some 60 of the soldiers, besides
a number of train hands were killed on the spot, and 120 more were
seriously injured, some of them fatally.
This disaster occurred in the midst of some of the most important
operations of the Rebellion and excited at the time hardly any
notice. There was a suggestive military promptness in the subsequent
proceedings. "T. J. Ridgeway, Esq., Associate Judge of Pike County,
was soon on the spot, and, after consultation with Mr. Riddle [the
superintendent of the Erie road] and the officer in command of the
men, a jury was impanneled and an inquest held; after which a large
trench was dug by the soldiers and the railway employés, 76 feet
long, 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep, in which the bodies were at once
interred in boxes, hastily constructed--one being allotted to four
rebels, and one to each Union soldier." There were sixteen of the
latter killed.
Of this disaster nothing could be said either in excuse or in
extenuation; it was not only one of the worst description, but
it was one of that description the occurrence of which is most
frequent. An excursion train, while running against time on a
single-track road, came in collision with a regular train. The
record is full of similar disasters, too numerous to admit of
specific reference. Primarily of course, the conductors of the
special trains are as a rule in fault in such cases. He certainly
was at Camphill, and felt himself to be so, for the next day he
committed suicide by swallowing arsenic. But in reality in these
and in all similar cases,--both those which have happened and those
hereafter surely destined to happen,--the full responsibility
does not rest upon the unfortunate or careless subordinate;--nor
should the weight of punishment be visited upon him. It belongs
elsewhere. At this late day no board of directors, nor president,
nor superintendent has any right to operate a single track road
without the systematic use of the telegraph in connection with its
train movements. That the telegraph can be used to block, as it is
termed, double-track roads, by dividing them into sections upon no
one of which two trains can be running at the same time, is matter
of long and daily experience. There is nothing new or experimental
about it. It is a system which has been forced on the more crowded
lines of the world as an alternative to perennial killings. That
in the year 1879 excursion trains should rush along single-track
roads and hurl themselves against regular trains, just as was done
twenty-three years ago at Camphill, would be deemed incredible were
not exactly similar accidents still from time to time reported.
One occurred near St. Louis, for instance, on July 4, 1879. The
simple fact is that to now operate single-track roads without the
constant aid of the telegraph, as a means of blocking them for every
irregular train, indicates a degree of wanton carelessness, or an
excess of incompetence, for which adequate provision should be made
in the criminal law. Nothing but this appeal to the whipping-post,
as it were, seems to produce the needed mental activity; for it is
difficult to realize the stupid conservatism of ordinary men when
brought to the consideration of something to which they are not
accustomed. On this very point of controlling the train movement
of single-track roads by telegraph, for instance, within a very
recent period the superintendent of a leading Massachusetts road
gravely assured the railroad commissioners of that state, that he
considered it a most dangerous reliance which had occasioned many
disasters, and that he had no doubt it would be speedily abandoned
as a practice in favor of the old time-table and running-rules
system, from which no deviations would be allowed. This opinion
was expressed, also, after the Revere disaster of 1871, it might
have been supposed, had branded into the record of the state the
impossibility of safely running any crowded railroad in a reliance
upon the schedule.[6] Such men as this, however, are not accessible
to argument or the teachings of experience, and the gentle stimulant
of a criminal prosecution seems to be the only thing left.
[6] Chapter XIV, XVI.