SEPTEMBER 15, 1830. 3
CHAPTER I.
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 rail
road,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
4 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
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,
THE DUKE AND MR. HUSKISSON.
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 Rocket locomotive-the same famous
Rocket which a year previous had won the five hundred pounds
prize, and by so doing established forever the feasibility of
rapid steam locomotion came along upon the other track to take
its place at the watering station. It came up slowly and so silently
that its approach was hardly noticed; until, suddenly, an alarm
was given, and, as every one immediately ran to resume his place,
some commotion
6 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
naturally ensued. In addition to being lame, Mr. Huskisson
seemed also under these circumstances to be quite agitated, and,
instead of quietly standing against the side of the carriage and
allowing the Rocket to pass, he nervously tried to get
around the open carriage door, which was swinging out across the
space between the two tracks in such a way that the approaching
locomotive struck it, flinging it back and at the same time throwing
Mr. Huskisson down. He fell on his face in the open space between
the tracks, but with his left leg over the inner of the two rails
upon which the Rocket was moving, so that one of its wheels
ran obliquely up the limb to the thigh, crushing it shockingly.
As if to render the distressing circumstances of the catastrophe
complete, it so happened that the unfortunate man had left his
wife's side when he got out of his carriage, and now he had been
flung down before her eyes as he sought to reenter it. He was
immediately raised, but he knew that his hurt was mortal and his
first exclamation was, "I have met my death!" He was
at once placed on one of the state carriages, to which the Northumbrian
locomotive was attached, and in twenty-five minutes was carried
to Eccles, a distance of seventeen miles, where medical assistance
was obtained. He was far beyond its reach, however, and upon the
evening of the same day, before his companions of the morning
had completed their journey, he was dead. Some time after this
accident a great public
BROUGHAM AT LIVERPOOL. 7
dinner was given at Liverpool in honor of the new enterprise.
Brougham was then at the height of an unbounded popularity and
just taking the fatal step of his life, which led him out of the
House of Commons to the wool-sack and the Lords. Among the excursionists
of the opening day he had on the 16th, occasion to write a brief
note to Macvey Napier, editor of the Edingburgh Review, in
which he thus alluded to the fatal accident which had marred its
pleasure:"I have come to Liverpool only to see a tragedy.
Poor Huskisson is dead, or must die before to-morrow. He has been
killed by a steam carriage. The folly of seven hundred people
going fifteen miles an hour, in six carriages, exceeds belief.
But they have paid a dear price." He was one of the guests
at the subsequent dinner, and made a speech in which there was
one passage of such exquisite oratorical skill, that to read it
is still a pleasure. In it he at once referred to the wonders
of the system just inaugurated, and to the catastrophe which had
saddened its opening observances. "When," he said, "I
saw the difficulties of space, as it were, overcome; when I beheld
a kind of miracle exhibited before my astonished eyes; when I
saw the rocks excavated and the gigantic power of man penetrating
through miles of the solid mass, and gaining a great, a lasting,
an almost perennial conquest over the powers of nature by his
skill and industry; when I contemplated all this, was it possible
for me to avoid the reflections which crowded
8 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
into my mind, not in praise of man's great success, not in
admiration of the genius and perseverance he had displayed, or
even of the courage he had shown in setting himself against the
obstacles that matter afforded to his course-no! but the melancholy
reflection, that these prodigious efforts of the human race, so
fruitful of praise but so much more fruitful of lasting blessings
to mankind, have forced a tear from my eye by that unhappy casualty
which deprived me of a friend and you of a representative!"
Though wholly attributable to his own carelessness, the death
of so prominent a character as Mr. Huskisson, on such an occasion,
could not but make a deep impression on the public mind, The fact
that the dying man was carried seventeen miles in twenty-five
minutes in search of rest and medical aid, served rather to stimulate
the vague apprehension which thereafter for a time associated
itself with the new means of transportation, and converted it
into a dangerous method of carriage which called for no inconsiderable
display of nerve on the part of those using it. Indeed, as respects
the safety of travel by rail there is an edifying similarity between
the impressions which prevailed in England forty-five years ago
and those which prevail in China now; for, when as recently as
1875 it was proposed to introduce railroads into the Celestial
Empire, a vigorous native protest was fulminated against them,
in which, among other things scarcely less astounding,
THE PERIOD OF IMMUNITY. 9
it was alleged that "in all countries where railroads
exist they are considered a very dangerous mode of locomotion,
and, beyond those who have very urgent business to transact, no
one thinks of using them."
On this subject, however, of the dangers incident to journeys
by rail, a writer of nearly half a century back, who has left
us one of the earliest descriptions of the Manchester & Liverpool
road, thus reassured the public of those days, with a fresh quaintness
of style which lends a present value to his words: "The occurrence
of accidents is not so frequent as might be imagined, as the great
weight of the carriages" (they weighed about one-tenth part
as much as those now in use in America) "prevents them from
easily starting off the rails; and so great is the momentum acquired
by these heavy loads moving with such rapidity, that they easily
pass over considerable obstacles. Even in those melancholy accidents
where loss of life has been sustained, the bodies of the unfortunate
sufferers, though run over by the wheels, have caused little irregularity
in the motion, and the passengers in the carriages have not been
sensible that any impediment has been encountered on the road."
Indeed, from the time of Mr. Huskisson's death, during a period
of over eleven years, railroads enjoyed a remarkable and most
fortunate exemption from accidents. During all that time there
did not occur a single disaster resulting in any considerable
loss of life; an immunity which seems to have been
10 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
due to a variety of causes. Those early roads were, in the
first place, remarkably well and thoroughly built, and were very
cautiously operated under a light volume of traffic. The precautions
then taken and the appliances in use would, it is true, strike
the modern railroad superintendent as both primitive and comical;
for instance, they involved the running of independent pilot locomotives
in advance of all night passenger trains. Through all the years
between 1830 and 1841, nevertheless, not a single really serious
railroad disaster had to be recorded. This happy exemption was,
however, quite as much due to good fortune as to anything else,
as was well illustrated in the first accident at all serious in
its character, which occurred,an accident in its every circumstance,
except loss of life, almost an exact parallel to the famous Revere
disaster which happened nearly forty years later in Massachusetts.
It chanced on the Manchester & Liverpool Railway on December
23, 1832. The second-class morning train had stopped at the Rainhill
station to take in passengers, when those upon it heard through
the dense fog another train, which had left Manchester forty-five
minutes later, coming towards them at a high rate of speed. When
it first became visible it was but one hundred and fifty yards
off, and a collision was inevitable. Those in charge of the stationary
train, however, succeeded in getting it under a slight headway,
and in so much diminished the shock of the collision; but, notwithstanding,
the last five carriages were injured, the one at the end being
totally
LUCK. 11
demolished. Though quite a number of the passengers were cut
and bruised, and several were severely hurt, one only, strange
to say, was killed.
Indeed, the luckfor it was nothing elseof those
earlier times was truly amazing. Thus on this same Manchester
& Liverpool road, as a first-class train on the morning of
April 17, 1836, was moving at a speed of some thirty miles an
hour, an axle broke under the first passenger coach, causing the
whole train to leave the track and throwing it down the embankment,
which at that point was twenty feet high. The cars were rolled
over, and the passengers in them tumbled about topsy-turvey; nor,
as they were securely locked in, could they even extricate themselves
when at last the wreck of the train reached firm bearings. And
yet no one was killed. Here the corporation was saved by one chance
in a thousand, and its almost miraculous good fortune has since
received numerous and terrible illustrations. Among these two
are worthy of a more than passing mention. They happened one in
America and one in England, though with some interval of time
between them, and are curious as illustrating very forcibly the
peculiar dangers to which those travelling by rail in the two
countries are subjected under almost precisely similar circumstances.
The American accident referred to was that popularly known on
account of its exceptionally harrowing details as the "Angola
horror," of December 18, 1867, while the English accident
was that which occurred at Shipton-on-Cherwell on December 24,
1874.
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