THE FIRST CATASTROPHE. 43
CHAPTER V.
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. Upon
that day, in 1841, a train, while moving through a thick fog at
a high rate of speed, came suddenly in contact with a mass of
earth that had slid down upon the track from the slope of the
cutting. Instantly the whole rear of the train was piled up on
the top of the first carriage, which happened to be crowded with
passengers, eight of whom were killed on the spot while
44 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
seventeen others were more or less injured. The coroner's jury
returned a verdict of accidental death, and at the same time,
as if to give the corporation a forcible hint to look closer to
the condition of its roadway, a "deodand" of one hundred
pounds was levied on the locomotive and tender. This practice,
by the way, of levying a deodand in cases of railroad accidents
resulting in loss of life, affords a curious illustration of how
seldom those accidents must have occurred. The mere mention of
it now as ever having existed sounds almost as strange and unreal
as would an assertion that the corporations had in their earlier
days been wont to settle their differences by wager of battle.
Like the wager of battle, the deodand was a feature of the English
common law derived from the feudal period. It was nothing more
nor less than a species of fine, everything through the instrumentality
of which accidental death occurred being forfeited to the crown;
or, in lieu of the thing itself, its supposed money value as assessed
by a coroner's jury.* Accordingly, down to somewhere about the
year 1847, when the practice was finally abolished by act of Parliament,
we find
* "Deodand. By this
is meant whatever personal chattel is the immediate occasion of
the death of any reasonable creature: which is forfeited to the
king, to be applied to pious uses, and distributed in alms by
his high almoner; though formerly destined to a more superstitious
purpose. * * * Wherever the thing is in motion, not only that
part which immediately gives the wounds (as the wheel which runs
over his body,) but all things which move with it and help to
make the wound more dangerous, (as the cart and loading, which
increase the pressure of the wheel) are forfeited. "Blackstone,
Book 1, Chap. 8, XVI.
THE DEODAND.
45
in all cases of English railroad accidents resulting in death,
mention of the deodand assessed by coroner's juries on the locomotives.
These appear to have been arbitrarily fixed, and graduated in
amount as the circumstances of the particular accident seemed
to excite in greater or less degree the sympathies or the indignation
of the jury. In November, 1838, for instance, a locomotive exploded
on the Manchester & Liverpool road, killing its engineer and
fireman: and for this escapade a deodand of twenty pounds was
assessed upon it by the coroner's jury; while upon another occasion,
in 1839, where the locomotive struck and killed a man and horse
at a street crossing, the deodand was fixed at no less a sum than
fourteen hundred pounds, the full value of the engine. Yet in
this last case there did not appear to be any circumstances rendering
the corporation liable in civil damages. The deodand seems to
have been looked upon as a species of rude penalty imposed on
the use of dangerous appliances,a sharp reminder to the
corporations to look closely after their locomotives and - employees.
As, however, accidents increased in frequency it became painfully
apparent that "crowner's 'quest law" was not in any
appreciable degree better calculated to command the public respect
in the days of Victoria than in those of Elizabeth, and the ancient
usage was accordingly at last abolished. Certainly the position
of railroad corporations would now be even more hazardous than
it is, if, after every catastrophe
46 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
resulting in death, the coroner's jury of the vicinage enjoyed
the power of arbitrarily imposing on them such additional penalty
not exceeding the value of a locomotive, in addition to all other
liabilities, as might seem to it proper under the circumstances
of the case.
Recurring, however, to the accident of December 24, 1861, the
numerous casualties in that case were due to the crushing of the
rolling stock which was not strong enough to resist the shock
of the sudden stop. Under these circumstances the light, short
English carriages rode over each other and were broken to pieces;
under similar circumstances the longer and heavier cars then in
use in America would have "telescoped;" that is, the
platforms between the cars would have been broken off and the
forward end of each car riding slightly up on its broken coupling
would have shot in over the floor of the car before it, sweeping
away the studding and other light wood-work and crushing stoves,
seats and passengers into one inextricable mass, until, if the
momentum was sufficiently great, the several vehicles in the train
would be enclosed in each other somewhat like the slides of a
partially shut telescope.
Crushing in other countries and telescoping in America were
formerly the greatest, if not the worst, dangers to which travel
by rail was liable. As respects crushing there is little to be
said. It is a mere question of proportions,resisting strength
TELESCOPING. 47
opposed to momentum. So long as trains go at great speed it
is inevitable that they will occasionally be brought to a dead-stand
by running upon unexpected obstacles. The simple wonder is that
they do this so infrequently. When, however, now and again, they
are thus brought to a dead-stand the safety of the passenger depends
and can depend on nothing but the strength of the car in which
he is sitting as measured by the force of the shock to which it
is subjected. This matter has already been referred to in connection
with the Shipton and Wollaston accidents,* the last of which was
a significant reminder to all railroad managers that no matter
how strongly or with how careful a regard to scientific principles
cars may be constructed, just so long as they are made by human
hands it is easy to load on weight sufficient, when combined with
only a moderate momentum, to crush them into splinters.
Telescoping, however, was an incident of crushing, and a peculiarly
American incident, which is not without a certain historical interest;
for the particular feature in car construction which led directly
to it and all its attendant train of grisly horrors furnishes
a singular and instructive illustration of the gross violations
of mechanical principles into which practical, as opposed to educated,
mechanics are apt constantly to fall,and in which, when
once they have fallen, they steadily persist. The
*Ante pp. 18-19.
48 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
original idea of the railroad train was a succession of stage
coaches chained together and hauled by a locomotive. The famous
pioneer train of August 9, 1831, over the Mohawk Valley road was
literally made up in this way, the bodies of stagecoaches having
been placed on trucks, which "were coupled together with
chains or chain-links, leaving from two to three feet slack, and
when the locomotive started it took up the slack by jerks, with
sufficient force to jerk the passengers, who sat on seats across
the tops of the coaches, out from under their hats, and in stopping
they came together with such force as to send them flying from
their seats." On this trip, it will be remembered, the train
presently came to a stop, when the passengers upon it, with true
American adaptability, set their wits at once to the work of devising
some means of remedying the unpleasant jerks.* "A plan was
soon hit upon and put in execution. The three links in the couplings
of the cars were stretched to their utmost tension, a rail, from
a fence in the neighborhood, was placed between each pair of cars
and made fast by means of the packing yarn from the cylinders."
Here was the incipient idea of couplers and buffers improvised
by practical men, and for a third of a century it remained almost
unimproved upon, except by the introduction of a spring upon which
coupler and buffer played. The only other considerable change
made in the
* Railroads: their Origin and Problems, P.
49.
A PRACTICAL BLUNDER. 49
earlier days of car construction was by no means an improvement,
inasmuch as it introduced the new and wholly unnecessary danger
of telescoping.
The original passenger cars, however frail and light they may
have been, were at least, when shackled together in a train, continuous
in their bearings on each other,that is, their sills and
floor timbers were all on a level and in line, so that, if the
cars were suddenly pressed together, they met in such a way as
to resist the pressure to the extent of their resisting power,
and the floor of one did not quietly slide under or over that
of another. The bodies of these cars were about thirty-two inches
from the rails. This was presently found to be too low. In raising
the bodies of the cars, however, the mechanics of those days encountered
a practical difficulty. The couplings of the cars built on the
new model were higher than those of the old. They at once met,
and, as they thought, no less ingeniously then successfully overcame
this difficulty, by placing the couplings and draw-heads of their
new cars below the line of the sills. This necessitated putting
the platform which sustained the coupling also beneath the sills,
and in doing that they disregarded, without the most remote consciousness
of the fact, a fundamental law of mechanics. With a possible pressure,
both sudden and heavy to be resisted, the line of resistance was
no longer the line of greatest strength. During thirty years this
stupid blunder remained
50 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
uncorrected. It was as if the builders during that period had
from force of habit insisted upon always using as supports pillars
which were curved or bent instead of upright. At the close of
those thirty years also the railroad mechanics had become so thoroughly
educated into their false methods that it took yet other years
and a series of frightful disasters, the significance of which
they seemed utterly unable to take in, before they could be induced
to abandon those methods.
The two great dangers of telescoping and oscillation were directly
due to this system of car construction and of train coupling,and
telescoping and oscillation were probably the cause of one-half
at least of the loss of life and the injuries to persons incident
to the first thirty years of American railroad experience. The
badly built and loosely connected coaches of every train going
at any considerable rate of speed used then to swing and roll
about and hammer against each other after a fashion which made
the infrequent occurrence of serious disaster the only fair subject
for surprise. In case of a sudden stoppage or partial derailment,
the train stopped or went on, not as a whole, but as a succession
of parts, while the low platforms and slack couplings fearfully
increased the danger;for, if the train held together, the
cars in stopping were likely to break off the platforms, making
of what remained of them a sort of inclined plane over which the
car-bodies rode into each other at different
MILLER'S PLATFORM AND BUFFER. 51
levels; or, if the couplings, as was more probable, held and
the train did not part, the swaying and swinging of the loosely
connected cars was almost sure to throw them from the track and
break them in pieces. The invention through which this difficulty
was at last overcome, simple and obvious as it was, is fairly
entitled, so far as America at least is concerned, to be classed
among the four or five really noticeable advances which have of
late years been made in railroad appliances. It contributed unmistakably
and essentially to the safety of every traveller. Known as the
Miller platform and buffer, from the name of the inventor, it
was, like all good work of the sort, a simple and intelligent
recurrence to correct mechanical principles. Miller went to work
to construct cars in such a way as to cause them to come in contact
with each other in the line of their greatest resisting power,
while in coupling them together in trains he introduced both tension
and compression;that is he, in plain language, brought the
ends of the heavy longitudinal floor timbers of the separate cars
exactly on a line and directly bearing on each other, and then
forced them against each other until the heavy spring buffers
which played on those floor timbers were compressed, when the
couplers sprung together and the train then stood practically
one solid body from end to end. It could no more swing or crush
than a single car could swing or crush. It then only remained
to
52 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
increase the weight and to perfect the construction of the
vehicles to insure all the safety in this respect of which travel
by rail admitted.
Simple as these improvements were, and apparently obvious as
the mechanical principles on which they were based now seem, the
opposition for years offered to them by practical master-mechanics
and railroad men would have been ludicrous had it not been exasperating.
There was hardly a railroad in the country whose officers did
not insist that their method of construction was exceptional,
it was true, but far better than Miller's. It was maintained that
the slack couplings were necessary in order to enable the locomotives
to start the trains,
-that a train made up without the slack, on Miller's plan,
could not be set in motion, and that if it was set in motion it
must twist apart at every sharp curve etc. The ingenuity displayed
in thus inventing theoretical objections to the appliance far
exceeded that required for inventing it, and indeed no one who
has not had official experience of it can at all realize the objecting
capacity of the typical practical mechanic whose conceit as a
rule is measured by his ignorance, while his stupidity is unequalled
save by his obstinacy. Even when
Miller's invention for one reason or another was not adopted,
the principles upon which that invention was founded,the
principles of tension, cohesion and direct resistance,at
last forced their way into general acceptance. The long-urged
objection
THE "IMPOSSIBLE" IN PRACTICE. 53
that the thing was practically impossible was slowly abandoned
in face of the awkward but undeniable fact that it was done every
day, and many times a day. Consequently, as the result of much
patient arguing, duly emphasized by the regular recurrence of
disaster, it is not too much to assert that for weight, resisting
power, perfection of construction and equipment and the protection
they afford to travellers, the standard American passenger coach
is now far in advance of any other. As to comfort, convenience,
taste in ornamentation, etc., these are so much matters of habit
and education that it is unnecessary to discuss them. They do
not affect the question of safety.
A very striking illustration of the vast increase of safety
secured through this improved car construction was furnished in
an accident, which happened in Massachusetts upon July 15, 1872.
As an express train on the Boston & Providence road was that
day running to Boston about noon and at a rate of speed of some
forty miles an hour, it came in contact with a horse and wagon
at a grade crossing in the town of Foxborough. The train was made
up of thoroughly well-built cars, equipped with both the Miller
platform and the Westinghouse train-brake. There was no time in
which to check the speed, and it thus became a simple question
of strength of construction, to be tested in an unavoidable collision.
The engine struck the wagon, and instantly destroyed it. The horse
had already cleared the rails when the
54 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
wagon was struck, but, a portion of his harness getting caught
on the locomotive, he was thrown down and dragged a short distance
until his body came in contact with the platform of a station
close to the spot of collision. The body was then forced under
the cars, having been almost instantaneously rolled and pounded
up into a hard, unyielding mass. The results which ensued were
certainly very singular. Next to the locomotive was an ordinary
baggage and mail car, and it was under this car, and between its
forward and its hind truck, that the body of the horse was forced;
coming then directly in contact with the truck of the rear wheels,
it tore it from its fastenings and thus let the rear end of the
car drop upon the track. In falling, this end snapped the coupling
by its weight, and so disconnected the train, the locomotive going
off towards Boston dragging this single car, with one end of it
bumping along the track. Meanwhile the succeeding car of the train
had swept over the body of the horse and the disconnected truck,
which were thus brought in contact with its own wheels, which
in their turn were also torn off; and so great was the momentum
that in this way all of the four passenger cars which composed
that part of the train were successively driven clean off their
rolling gear, and not only did they then slide off the track,
but they crossed a railroad siding which happened to be at that
point, went down an embankment three or four feet in height, demolished
a fence, passed into an adjoining
1854 AND 1874. 55
field, and then at last, after glancing from the stump of a
large oak-tree, they finally came to a stand-still some two hundred
feet from the point at which they had left the track. There was
not in this case even an approach to telescoping; on the contrary,
each car rested perfectly firmly in its place as regarded all
the others, not a person was injured, and when the wheel-less
train at last became stationary the astonished passengers got
up and hurried through the doors, the very glass in which as well
as that in the windows was unbroken. Here was an indisputable
victory of skill and science over accident, showing most vividly
to what an infinitesimal extreme the dangers incident to telescoping
may be reduced.
The vast progress in this direction made within twenty years
can, however, best perhaps be illustrated by the results of two
accidents almost precisely similar in character, which occurred,
the one on the Great Western railroad of Canada, in October, 1854,
the other on the Boston & Albany, in Massachusetts, in October,
1874. In the first case a regular train made up of a locomotive
and seven cars, while approaching Detroit at a speed of some twenty
miles an hour, ran into a gravel train of fifteen cars which was
backing towards it at a speed of some ten miles an hour. The locomotive
of the passenger train was thrown completely off the track and
down the embankment, dragging after it a baggage car. At the head
of the passenger portion of the train were two second-class cars
filled with emigrants ; both of these
56 RAILROAD ACC1DENTS.
were telescoped and demolished, and all their unfortunate occupants
either killed or injured. The front of the succeeding first-class
car was then crushed in, and a number of those in it were hurt.
In all, no less than forty-seven persons lost their lives, while
sixty others were maimed or severely bruised. So much for a collision
in October, 1854. In October, 1874, on the Boston & Albany
road, the regular New York express train, consisting of a locomotive
and seven cars, while going during the night at a speed of forty
miles an hour, was suddenly, near the Brimfield station, thrown
by a misplaced switch into a siding upon which a number of platform
freight cars were standing. The train was thoroughly equipped,
having both Miller platform and Westinghouse brake. The six seconds
which intervened, in the darkness, between notice of displacement
and the collision did not enable the engineer to check perceptibly
the speed of his train, and when the blow came it was a simple
question of strength to resist. The shock must have been tremendous,
for the locomotive and tender were flung off the track to the
right and the baggage car to the left, the last being thrown across
the interval between the siding and the main track and resting
obliquely over the latter. The forward end of the first passenger
coach was thrown beyond the baggage car up over the tender, and
its rear end, as well as the forward end of the succeeding coach,
was injured. As in the Foxborough case, several of the trucks
were jerked out from under
1854 AND 1874. 57
the cars to which they belonged, but not a person on the train
was more than slightly bruised, the cars were not disconnected,
nor was there even a suggestion of telescoping.
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