Notes On Railroad Accidents - free ebook by Charles Francis Adams

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...

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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

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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 &amp; 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,

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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 stat

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THE WOLLASTON ACCIDENT.

A large party of excursionists were returning from a rowing match on a special train consisting of two locomotives and twenty-one cars. There had been great delay in getting ready for the return, so that when it neared Wollaston the special was much behind the time assigned for it. Meanwhile a regular freight train had left Boston, going south and occupying the outward track. At Wollaston those in charge of this train had occasion to stop for the purpose of taking up some empty freight cars, whi

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ACCIDENTS AND CONSERVATISM.

The four accidents which have been referred to, including that of April 17, 1836, upon the Manchester &amp; Liverpool road, belong to one class. Though they covered a period of forty-two years they were all due to the same cause, the sudden derailment of a portion of the train, and its subsequent destruction because of the insufficient control of those in charge of it over its momentum. In the three earlier cases the appliances in use were much the same, for between 1836 and 1874 hardly any

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TELESCOPING AND THE MILLER PLATFORM.

The period of exemption from wholesale railroad slaughters referred to in a previous chapter and which fortunately marked the early days of the system, seems to have lasted some eleven years. The record of great catastrophes opened on the Great Western railway of England, and it opened also, curiously enough, upon the 24th of December, a day which seems to have been peculiarly unfortunate in the annals of that corporation, seeing that it was likewise the date of the Shipton-on-Cherwell disaster.

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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 th

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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

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OIL-TANK ACCIDENTS.

Similar in some of its more dramatic features to the Versailles accident, though originating from a wholly different cause, was the Abergele disaster, which at the time occupied the attention of the British public to the exclusion of everything else. It occurred in 1868, and to the "Irish mail," perhaps the most famous train which is run in England, if, indeed, not in the world. Leaving London shortly after 7 A.M. , the Irish mail was then timed to make the distance to Chester, 166 miles, in fou

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DRAW-BRIDGE DISASTERS.

It is difficult to see how on double track roads, where the occurrence of an accident on one line of tracks is always liable to instantly "foul" the other line, it is possible to guard against contingencies like that which occurred at New Hamburg. At the time, as is usual in such cases, the public indignation expended itself in vague denunciation of the Hudson River Railroad Company, because the disaster happened to take place upon a bridge in which there was a draw to permit the passage of vess

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THE NORWALK ACCIDENT.

The railroad at Norwalk crosses a small inlet of Long Island Sound by means of a draw-bridge, which is approached from the direction of New York around a sharp curve. A ball at the mast-head was in 1853 the signal that the draw was open and the bridge closed to the passage of trains. The express passenger train for Boston, consisting of a locomotive and two baggage and five passenger cars, containing about one hundred and fifty persons, left New York as usual at eight o'clock that morning. The l

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BRIDGE ACCIDENTS.

Great as were the terrors inspired by the Norwalk disaster in those comparatively early days of railroad experience, and deep as the impression on the public memory must have been to leave its mark on the statute book even to the present time, that and the similar disaster at the Richelieu river are believed to have been the only two of great magnitude which have occurred at open railroad draws. That this should be so is well calculated to excite surprise, for the draw-bridge precautions against

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THE PROTECTION OF BRIDGES.

Long, varied and terrible as the record of bridge disasters has become, there are, nevertheless, certain very simple and inexpensive precautions against them, which, altogether too frequently, corporations do not and will not take. At Ashtabula the bridge gave way. There was no derailment as there seems to have been at Tariffville. The sustaining power of a bridge is, of course, a question comparatively difficult of ascertainment. A fatal weakness in this respect may be discernable only to the e

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CAR-COUPLINGS IN DERAILMENTS.

Wholly apart from the derailment, which was the real occasion of the Des Jardines disaster, there was one other cause which largely contributed to its fatality, if indeed that fatality was not in greatest part immediately due to it. The question as to what is the best method of coupling together the several individual vehicles which make up every railroad train has always been much discussed among railroad mechanics. The decided weight of opinion has been in favor of the strongest and closest co

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THE REVERE CATASTROPHE.

The terrible disaster which occurred in front of the little station-building at Revere, six miles from Boston on the Eastern railroad of Massachusetts, in August 1871, was, properly speaking, not an accident at all; it was essentially a catastrophe—the legitimate and almost inevitable final outcome of an antiquated and insufficient system. As such it should long remain a subject for prayerful meditation to all those who may at any time be entrusted with the immediate operating of railroads. It w

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REAR END COLLISIONS.

The annals of railroad accidents are full of cases of "rear-end collision," as it is termed. [11] Their frequency may almost be accepted as a very accurate gauge of the pressure of traffic on any given system of lines, and because of them the companies are continually compelled to adopt new and more intricate systems of operation. At first, on almost all roads, trains follow each other at such great intervals that no precaution at all, other than flags and lanterns, are found necessary. Then com

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NOVEL APPLIANCES.

The great peculiarity of the Revere accident, and that which gave a permanent interest to it, lay in the revelation it afforded of the degree in which a system had outgrown its appliances. At every point a deficiency was apparent. The railroads of New England had long been living on their early reputation, and now, when a sudden test was applied, it was found that they were years behind the time. In August, 1871, the Eastern railroad was run as if it were a line of stage-coaches in the days befo

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THE AUTOMATIC ELECTRIC BLOCK SYSTEM.

A realizing sense of the necessity of ultimately adopting some system of protection against the danger of rear-end collisions was, above all else, brought directly home to American railroad managers through the Revere disaster. In discussing and comparing the appliances used in the practical operation of railroads in different countries, there is one element, however, which can never be left out of the account. The intelligence, quickness of perception and capacity for taking care of themselves—

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INTERLOCKING.

In their management of switches, especially at points of railroad convergence where a heavy traffic is concentrated and the passage of trains or movement of cars and locomotives is unceasing, the English are immeasurably in advance of the Americans; and, indeed, of all other people. In fact, in this respect the American managers have shown themselves slow to learn, and have evinced an indisposition to adopt labor-saving appliances which, considering their usual quickness of discernment in that r

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THE WESTINGHOUSE BRAKE.

In March, 1825, there appeared in the pages of the Quarterly Review an article in which the writer discussed that railway system, the first vague anticipation of which was then just beginning to make the world restless. He did this, too, in a very intelligent and progressive spirit, but unfortunately secured for his article a permanence of interest he little expected by the use of one striking illustration. He was peculiarly anxious to draw a distinct line of demarcation between his own very rat

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THE BATTLE OF THE BRAKES.

The English battle of the brakes may be said to have fairly opened with the official report from Captain Tyler on the Shipton accident, in reference to which he expressed the opinion, which has already been quoted in describing the accident, that "if the train had been fitted with continuous brakes throughout its whole length there is no reason why it should not have been brought to rest without any casuality." The Royal Commission on railroad accidents then took the matter up and called for a s

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THE RAILROAD JOURNEY RESULTING IN DEATH.

One day in May, 1847, as the Queen of Belgium was going from Verviers to Brussels by rail, the train in which she was journeying came into collision with another train going in the opposite direction. There was naturally something of a panic, and, as royalty was not then accustomed to being knocked about with railroad equality, some of her suite urged the queen to leave the train and to finish her journey by carriage. The contemporaneous court reporter then went on to say, in that language which

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THE RAILROAD DEATH RATE.

In connection with the statistics of railroad casualties it is not without interest to examine the general vital statistics of some considerable city, for they show clearly enough what a large degree of literal truth there was in the half jocose proposition attributed to John Bright, that the safest place in which a man could put himself was inside a first-class railroad carriage of a train in full motion. Take the statistics of Boston, for instance, for the year 1878. During the four years 1875

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AMERICAN AS COMPARED WITH FOREIGN RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.

Up to this point, the statistics and experience of Massachusetts only have been referred to. This is owing to the fact that the railroad returns of that state are more carefully prepared and tabulated than are those of any other state, and afford, therefore, more satisfactory data from which to draw conclusions. The territorial area from which the statistics are in this case derived is very limited, and it yet remains to compare the results deduced from them with those derived from the similar e

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