Charles Adams - Notes on Railroad Accidents

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.

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