Category: History - Other

Notes on Railroad Accidents

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 Septe...

Chapters

23. CHAPTER XXIII.

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...

17. CHAPTER XVII.

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 Ameri...

14. CHAPTER XIV.

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, prop...

18. CHAPTER XVIII.

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...

4. CHAPTER IV.

The four accidents which have been referred to, including that of April 17, 1836, upon the Manchester & Liverpool road, belong to one class. Though they covered a period of fort...

19. CHAPTER XIX.

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 the...

5. CHAPTER V.

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...

20. CHAPTER XX.

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 op...

11. CHAPTER XI.

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 be...

21. CHAPTER XXI.

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...

8. CHAPTER VIII.

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...

10. CHAPTER X.

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...

22. CHAPTER XXII.

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 enou...

1. CHAPTER I.

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 ush...

15. CHAPTER XV.

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...

6. CHAPTER VI.

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 imag...

2. CHAPTER II.

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...

13. CHAPTER XIII.

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 f...

9. CHAPTER IX.

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 t...

3. CHAPTER III.

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 rea...

7. CHAPTER VII.

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 a...

12. CHAPTER XII.

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...

16. CHAPTER XVI.

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...