TELEGRAPHIC COLLISIONS.
And yet, even with the wires in active use, collisions will
occasionally take place. They have sometimes, indeed, even been
caused by the telegraph, so that railroad officials at two adjacent
stations on the same road, having launched trains at each other
beyond recall, have busied themselves while waiting for tidings of
the inevitable collision in summoning medical assistance for those
sure soon to be injured. In such cases, however, the mishap can
almost invariably be traced to some defect in the system under which
the telegraph is used;--such as a neglect to exact return messages
to insure accuracy, or the delegating to inexperienced subordinates
the work which can be properly performed only by a principal. This
was singularly illustrated in a terrible collision which took place
at Thorpe, between Norwich and Great Yarmouth, on the Great Eastern
Railway in England, on the 10th of September, 1874. The line had
in this place but a single track, and the mail train to Norwich,
under the rule, had to wait at a station called Brundell until the
arrival there of the evening express from Yarmouth, or until it
received permission by the telegraph to proceed. On the evening of
the disaster the express train was somewhat behind its time, and
the inspector wrote a dispatch directing the mail to come forward
without waiting for it. This dispatch he left in the telegraph
office unsigned, while he went to attend to other matters. Just then
the express train came along, and he at once allowed it to proceed.
Hardly was it under way when the unsigned dispatch occurred to him,
and the unfortunate man dashed to the telegraph office only to learn
that the operator had forwarded it. Under the rules of the company
no return message was required. A second dispatch was instantly sent
to Brundell to stop the mail; the reply came back that the mail was
gone. A collision was inevitable.
The two trains were of very equal weight, the one consisting of
fourteen and the other of thirteen carriages. They were both drawn
by powerful locomotives, the drivers of which had reason for putting
on an increased speed, believing, as each had cause to believe, that
the other was waiting for him. The night was intensely dark and
it was raining heavily, so that, even if the brakes were applied,
the wheels would slide along the slippery track. Under these
circumstances the two trains rushed upon each other around a slight
curve which sufficed to conceal their head-lights. The combined
momentum must have amounted to little less than sixty miles an
hour, and the shock was heard through all the neighboring village.
The smoke-stack of the locomotive drawing the mail train was swept
away as the other locomotive seemed to rush on top of it, while
the carriages of both trains followed until a mound of locomotives
and shattered cars was formed which the descending torrents alone
hindered from becoming a funeral pyre. So sudden was the collision
that the driver of one of the engines did not apparently have an
opportunity to shut off the steam, and his locomotive, though forced
from the track and disabled, yet remained some time in operation in
the midst of the wreck. In both trains, very fortunately, there were
a number of empty cars between the locomotives and the carriages in
which the passengers were seated, and they were utterly demolished;
but for this fortunate circumstance the Thorpe collision might well
have proved the most disastrous of all railroad accidents. As it
was, the men on both the locomotives were instantly killed, together
with seventeen passengers, and four other passengers subsequently
died of their injuries; making a total of twenty-five deaths,
besides fifty cases of injury.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more violent collision
than that which has just been described; and yet, as curiously
illustrating the rapidity with which the force of the most severe
shock is expended, it is said that two gentlemen in the last
carriage of one of the trains, finding it at a sudden standstill
close to the place to which they were going, supposed it had stopped
for some unimportant cause and concluded to take advantage of a
happy chance which left them almost at the doors of their homes.
They accordingly got out and hurried away in the rain, learning
only the next morning of the catastrophe in which they had been
unconscious participants.
The collision at Thorpe occurred in September, 1874. Seven months
later, on the 4th of April, 1875, there was an accident similar
to it in almost every respect, except fatality, on the Burlington
& Missouri road in Iowa. In this case the operator at Tyrone had
telegraphic orders to hold the east-bound passenger express at that
point to meet the west-bound passenger express. This order he failed
to deliver, and the train accordingly at once went on to the usual
passing place at the next station. It was midnight and intensely
dark, with a heavy mist in the air which at times thickened to rain.
Both of the trains approaching each other were made up in the way
usual with through night trains on the great western lines, and
consisted of locomotives, baggage and smoking cars, behind which
were the ordinary passenger cars of the company followed by several
heavy Pullman sleeping coaches. Those in charge of the east-bound
train, knowing that it was behind time, were running it rapidly,
so as to delay as little as possible the west-bound train, which,
having received the order to pass at Tyrone was itself being run at
speed. Both trains were thus moving at some thirty-five miles an
hour, when suddenly in rounding a sharp curve they came upon each
other. Indeed so close were they that the west-bound engineer had no
time in which to reverse, but, jumping straight from the gangway,
he afterwards declared that the locomotives came together before he
reached the ground. The engineer of the east-bound train succeeded
both in reversing his locomotive and in applying his airbrake, but
after reversal the throttle flew open. The trains came together,
therefore, as at Thorpe, with their momentum practically unchecked,
and with such force that the locomotives were completely demolished,
the boilers of the two, though on the same line of rails, actually,
in some way, passing each other. The baggage-cars were also
destroyed, and the smoking cars immediately behind them were more
or less damaged, but the remaining coaches of each train stood
upon the tracks so wholly uninjured that four hours later, other
locomotives having been procured but the track being still blocked,
the passengers were transferred from one set of cars to the other,
and in them were carried to their destinations. So admirably did
Miller's construction serve its purpose in this case, that, while
the superintendent of the road, who happened to be in the rear
sleeping car of one of the trains, merely reported that he "felt the
shock quite sensibly," passengers in the rear coaches of the other
train hardly felt it at all.
At Tyrone the wrecks of the trains caught fire from the stoves
thrown out of the baggage cars and from the embers from the
fire-boxes of the locomotives, but the flames were speedily
extinguished. Of the train hands three were killed and two injured,
but no passenger was more than shaken or slightly bruised. This
was solely due to strength of car construction. Heavy as the shock
was,--so heavy that in the similar case at Thorpe the carriages were
crushed like nut-shells under it,--the resisting power was equal to
it. The failure of appliances at one point in the operation of the
road was made good by their perfection at another.