A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  ANON

  Preventative measures in a crash...

  Many concussions give no warning of their approach, while others do, the usual premonitory symptoms being a kind of bouncing or leaping of the train. It is well to know that the bottom of the carriage is the safest place, and, therefore, when a person has reason to anticipate a concussion, he should, without hesitation, throw himself on the floor of the carriage. It was by this means that Lord Guillamore saved his life and that of his fellow passengers some years since, when a concussion took place on one of the Irish railways. His Lordship feeling a shock, which he knew to be the forerunner of a concussion, without more ado sprang upon the two persons sitting opposite to him, and dragged them with him to the bottom of the carriage; the astonished persons first imagined that they had been set upon by a maniac, and commenced struggling for their liberty, but in a few seconds they but too well understood the nature of the case; the concussion came, and the upper part of the carriage in which Lord Guillamore and the other two persons were was shattered to pieces, while the floor was untouched, and thus left them lying in safety; while the other carriages of the train presented nothing but a ghastly spectacle of dead and wounded.

  ANON

  from S. LEGG (ed.),

  The Railway Book (1952)

  A curious encounter between two John Perkins

  In March, we had another instance of the unwisdom of allowing lines of railway to cross each other at right angles on the level—“at grade,” to give the American expression. The accident took place at Bedford, where the Midland Company’s Line from Bedford to Hitchin, then in use as their main line to London, King’s Cross, crossed the Bedford and Bletchley Line, near the London and North-Western Bedford Station. The signals for the London and North-Western driver to cross, were not lowered, and he ought to have stopped clear of the crossing; but, failing to do so, he came into collision with the Midland train, running from Hitchin towards Bedford, for which the signals were lowered. One passenger was killed, and four injured. It was very singular, that both the North-Western driver and the Midland driver had the same name, “John Perkins!” The signals were badly placed originally, and had not been modernized; they had been passed by Colonel Yolland in 1857, who did not relish being reminded of the fact.

  ANON

  GEORGE ALLEY

  Along came the F.F.V., the fastest on the line,

  Running along the C & O road, just twenty minutes behind.

  A-running into Sewell yard, quartered on the line,

  Awaiting for strict orders from the station just behind.

  And when she blew for Hinton, her engineer was there.

  George Alley was his name, with bright and wavy hair;

  His fireman, young Jack Dickson, was standing by his side,

  Awaiting for strict orders and in the cab to ride.

  George Alley said to his fireman, “Jack, a little more steam;

  I intend to run old number 4, the fastest ever seen;

  So over this road I mean to fly, as angels’ wings unfold,

  And when we see the Big Bend Tunnel, they’ll hear my whistle blow.”

  George Alley said to his fireman, “Jack, a rock ahead I see,

  And I know that death is lurking there, awaiting for you and me;

  So from this car, dear Jack, you leap, your darling life to save,

  For I want you to be an engineer, when I’m sleeping in my grave.”

  George Alley’s mother came to him with a bucket on her arm;

  She said, “My darling boy, be careful how you run,

  For many a man has lost his life in trying to make lost time,

  But if you run your engine right, you’ll get there just on time.”

  George Alley said, “Dear Mother, you know I’ll take your heed.

  I know my engine, it’s all right, I know that she will speed.

  So over this road I mean to run with a speed unknown to all,

  And when I blow for Clifton Forge, they’ll surely hear my call.”

  Then up the road he hurtled, against the rock he crashed;

  The engine it turned over, poor George’s chest was mashed.

  George’s head in the firebox lay; the flames were rolling high.

  “I’m glad I was born for an engineer, on the C & O road to die.”

  George Alley’s mother came to him, in sorrow she did sigh,

  When she looked upon her darling boy and saw that he must die.

  “Too late, too late, dear Mother! My life is almost done,

  And I know that God will let me in when I’ve finished my last run.”

  The doctor said, “Dear George, my darling boy be still;

  Your life may yet be spared, if it is God’s precious will.”

  “Oh no!,” said George, “That cannot be. I want to die so free,

  I want to die on the engine I love, 143.”

  The doctor said, “George Alley, your life cannot be saved.

  Murdered upon the railway, to lie in a lonesome grave.”

  His face was covered up with blood, his eyes they could not see;

  The very last words George Alley said were “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

  ANON

  Dickens in danger

  Gad’s Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent.

  Tuesday, Thirteenth June, 1865.

  My Dear Mitton,

  I should have written to you yesterday or the day before, if I had been quite up to writing.

  I was in the only carriage that did not go over into the stream. It was caught upon the turn by some of the ruin of the bridge, and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner. Two ladies were my fellow-passengers, an old one and a young one. This is exactly what passed. You may judge from it the precise length of the suspense. Suddenly we were off the rail, and beating the ground as the car of a half-emptied balloon might. The old lady cried out “My God!” and the young one screamed. I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite and the young one on my left) and said: “We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don’t cry out.” The old lady immediately answered: “Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul I will be quiet.” We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon, “You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger must be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?” They both answered quite collectedly “Yes” and I got out without the least notion what had happened.

  Fortunately I got out with great caution and stood upon the step. Looking down I saw the bridge gone, and nothing below me but the line of rail. Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge out of the window, and had no idea that there was an open swampy field fifteen feet down below them, and nothing else! The two guards (one with his face cut) were running up and down on the down side of the bridge (which was not torn up) quite wildly. I called out to them: “Look at me. Do stop an instant and look at me, and tell me whether you don’t know me.” One of them answered, “We know you very well, Mr Dickens.” “Then,” I said, “nay good fellow, for God’s sake give me your key, and send one of those labourers here, and I’ll empty this carriage.” We did it quite safely, by means of a plank or two, and when it was done I saw all the rest of the train, except the two baggage vans, down in the stream. I got into the carriage again for my brandy flask, took off my travelling hat for a basin, climbed down the brickwork, and filled my hat with water.

  Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think he must have been flung clean out of his carriage), with such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I poured some water over his face and gave him some drink, then gave him some brandy, and laid him down on the grass, and he said: “I am gone,” and died afterwards. Then I stumbled over a lady lying on her back against a little pollard-tree, with the blood streaming over her face (which was lead colour) in a number of distinct litt
le streams from the head. I asked her if she could swallow a little brandy and she just nodded, and I gave her some and left her for somebody else. The next time I passed her she was dead. Then a man, examined at the inquest yesterday (who evidently had not the least remembrance of what really passed), came running up to me and implored me to help him find his wife, who was afterwards found dead. No imagination can conceive the ruin of the carriages, or the extraordinary weights under which the people were lying, or the complications into which they were twisted up among iron and wood, and mud and water.

  I don’t want to be examined at the inquest and I don’t want to write about it. I could do no good either way, and I could only seem to speak about myself, which of course I would rather not do. I am keeping very quiet here. I have a—I don’t know what to call it—constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time. I instantly remembered that I had the MS. of a number with me and clambered back into the carriage for it. But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake and am obliged to stop.

  Ever faithfully,

  Charles Dickens

  from Letters of Charles Dickens

  Collision at Thorpe

  A terminus collision 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 from 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 neighbouring villages. The smokestack 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.

  C. F. ADAMS

  from S. LEGG (ed.),

  The Railway Book (1952)

  The Ashtabula disaster, 1876

  A blinding north-easterly snow-storm, accompanied by a heavy wind, prevailed throughout the day which preceded the accident, greatly impeding the movement of trains. The Pacific express over the Michigan Southern & Lake Shore road had left Erie, going west, considerably behind its time, and had been started only with great difficulty and with the assistance of four locomotives. It was due at Ashtabula at about 5.30 o’clock P.M., but was three hours late, and, the days being then at their shortest, when it arrived at the bridge which was the scene of the accident the darkness was so great that nothing could be seen through the driving snow by those on the leading locomotive even for a distance of 50 feet ahead. The train was made up of two heavy locomotives, four baggage, mail and express cars, one smoking car, two ordinary coaches, a drawing-room car and three sleepers, being in all two locomotives and eleven cars, in the order named, containing, as nearly as can be ascertained, 190 human beings, of whom 170 were passengers. Ashtabula bridge is situated only about 1,000 feet east of the station of the same name, and spans a deep ravine, at the bottom of which flows a shallow stream, some two or three feet in depth, which empties into Lake Erie a mile or two away. The bridge was an iron Howe truss of 150 feet span, elevated 69 feet above the bottom of the ravine, and supported at either end by solid masonwork abutments. It had been built some fourteen years. As the train approached the bridge it had to force its way through a heavy snow-drift, and, when it passed on to it, it was moving at a speed of some twelve or fourteen miles an hour. The entire length of the bridge afforded space only for two of the express cars at most in addition to the locomotives, so that when the wheels of the leading locomotive rested on the western abutment of the bridge nine of the eleven cars which made up the train, including all those in which there were passengers, had yet to reach its eastern end. At the instant when the train stood in this position, the engineer of the leading locomotive heard a sudden cracking sound apparently beneath him, and thought he felt the bridge giving way. Instantly pulling the throttle valve wide open, his locomotive gave a spring forward and, as it did so, the bridge fell, the rear wheels of his tender falling with it. The jerk and impetus of the locomotive, however, sufficed to tear out the coupling, and as his tender was dragged up out of the abyss on to the track, though its rear wheels did not get upon the rails, the frightened engineer caught a fearful glimpse of the second locomotive as it seemed to turn and then fall bottom upwards into the ravine. The bridge had given way, not at once but by a slow sinking motion, which began at the point where the pressure was heaviest, under the two locomotives and at the west abutment. There being two tracks, and this train being on the southernmost of the two, the southern truss had first yielded, letting that side of the bridge down, and rolling, as it were, the second locomotive and the cars immediately behind it off to the left and quite clear of a straight line drawn between the two abutments; then almost immediately the other truss gave way and the whole bridge fell, but in doing so swung slightly to the right. Before this took place the entire train with the exception of the last two sleepers had reached the chasm, each car as it passed over falling nearer than the one which had preceded it to the east abutment, and finally the last two sleepers came, and, without being deflected from their course at all, plunged straight down and fell upon the wreck of the bridge at its east end. It was necessarily all the work of a few seconds.

&nbs
p; At the bottom of the ravine the snow lay waist deep and the stream was covered with ice some eight inches in thickness. Upon this were piled up the fallen cars and engine, the latter on top of the former near the western abutment and upside down. All the passenger cars were heated by stoves. At first a dead silence seemed to follow the successive shocks of the falling mass. In less than two minutes, however, the fire began to show itself and within fifteen the holocaust was at its height. As usual, it was a mass of human beings, all more or less stunned, a few killed, many injured and helpless, and more yet simply pinned down to watch, in the full possession of all their faculties, the rapid approach of the flames. The number of those killed outright seems to have been surprisingly small. In the last car, for instance, no one was lost. This was due to the energy and presence of mind of the porter, a negro named Steward, who, when he felt the car resting firmly on its side, broke a window and crawled through it, and then passed along breaking the other windows and extricating the passengers until all were gotten out. Those in the other cars were far less fortunate. Though an immediate alarm had been given in the neighboring town, the storm was so violent and the snow so deep that assistance arrived but slowly. Nor when it did arrive could much be effected. The essential thing was to extinguish the flames. The means for so doing were close at hand in a steam pump belonging to the railroad company, while an abundance of hose could have been procured at another place but a short distance off. In the excitement and agitation of the moment contradictory orders were given, even to forbidding the use of the pump, and practically no effort to extinguish the fire was made. Within half an hour of the accident the flames were at their height, and when the next morning dawned nothing remained in the ravine but a charred and undistinguishable mass of car trucks, brake-rods, twisted rails and bent and tangled bridge iron, with the upturned locomotive close to the west abutment.