230 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE RAILROAD JOURNEY RESULTING IN DEATH.
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 the opposite direction.
There was naturally something of a panic, and, as royalty was
not then accustomed to being knocked about with railroad equality,
some of her suite urged the queen to leave the train and to finish
her journey by carriage. The contemporaneous court reporter then
went on to say, in that language which is so peculiarly his own,"
But her Majesty, as courageously as discreetly, declined to set
that example of timidity, and she proceeded to Brussels by the
railway." In those days a very exaggerated idea was universally
entertained of the great danger incident to travel by rail. Even
then, however, had her Majesty, who was doubtless a very sensible
woman, happened to be familiar with the
THE DAYS OF STAGE COACHES 231
statistics of injuries received by those traveling respectively
by rail and by carriage, she certainly never on any plea of danger
would have been induced to abandon her railroad train in order
to trust herself behind horse-flesh. By pursuing the course urged
upon her, the queen would have multiplied her chances of accident
some sixty fold. Strange as the statement sounds even now, such
would seem to have been the fact. In proportion to the whole number
carried, the accidents to passengers in "the good old days
of stage-coaches" were, as compared to the present time of
the railroad dispensation, about as sixty to one. This result,
it is true, cannot be verified in the experience either of England
or of this country, for neither the English nor we possess any
statistics in relation to the earlier period; but they have such
statistics in France, stretching over the space of more than forty
years, and as reliable as statistics ever are. If these French
statistics hold true in New England,and considering the
character of our roads, conveyances, and climate, their showing
is more likely to be in our favor than against us,if they
simply hold true, leaving us to assume that stage-coach traveling
was no less safe in Massachusetts than in France, then it would
follow that to make the dangers of the rail of the present day
equal to those of the highway of half a century back, some eighty
passengers should annually be killed and some eleven hundred injured
within the limits of Massachusetts alone. These
232 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
figures, however, represent rather more than fifty times the
actual average, and from them it would seem to be not unfair to
conclude that, notwithstanding the great increase of population
and the yet greater increase in travel during the last half-century,
there were literally more persons killed and injured each year
in Massachusetts fifty years ago through accidents to stage-coaches
than there are now through accidents to railroad trains.
The first impression of nine out of ten persons in no way connected
with the operations of railroads would probably be found to be
the exact opposite to this. A vague but deeply rooted conviction
commonly prevails that the railroad has created a new danger;
that because of it the average human being's hold on life is more
precarious than it was. The first point-blank, bald statement
to the contrary would accordingly strike people in the light not
only of a paradox, but of a somewhat foolish one. Investigation,
nevertheless, bears it out. The fact is that when a railroad accident
comes, it is apt to come in such a way as to leave no doubt whatever
in relation to it. It is heralded like a battle or an earthquake;
it fills columns of the daily press with the largest capitals
and the most harrowing details, and thus it makes a deep and lasting
impression on the minds of many people. When a multitude of persons,
traveling as almost every man now daily travels himself, meet
death in such sudden and such awful shape, the event smites the
imagination.
ACCIDENTS THEN AND NOW. 233
People seeing it and thinking of it, and hearing and reading
of it, and of it only, forget of how infrequent occurrence it
is. It was not so in the olden time. Every one rode behind horses,if
not in public then in private conveyances,and when disaster
came it involved but few persons and was rarely accompanied by
circumstances which either struck the imagination or attracted
any great public notice. In the first place, the modern newspaper,
with its perfect machinery for sensational exaggeration, did not
then exist,having itself only recently come in the train
of the locomotive;and, in the next place, the circle of
those included in the consequences of any disaster was necessarily
small. It is far otherwise now. For weeks and months the vast
machinery moves along, doing its work quickly, swiftly, safely;
no one pays any attention to it, while millions daily make use
of it. It is as much a necessity of their lives as the food they
eat and the air they breathe. Suddenly, somehow, and somewhere,at
Versailles, at Norwalk, at Abergele, at New Hamburg, or at Revere,at
some hitherto unfamiliar point upon an insignificant thread of
the intricate iron web, an obstruction is encountered, a jar,
as it were, is felt, and instantly, with time for hardly an ejaculation
or a thought, a multitude of human beings are hurled into eternity.
It is no cause for surprise that such an event makes the community
in which it happens catch its breadth; neither is it unnatural
that people should think more of the few who are killed, of
234 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
whom they hear so much, than of the myriad who are carried
in safety and of whom they hear nothing. Yet it is well to bear
in mind that there are two sides to that question also, and in
no way could this fact be more forcibly brought to our notice
than by the assertion, borne out by all the statistics we possess,
that, irrespective of the vast increase in the number of those
who travel, a greater number of passengers in stagecoaches were
formerly each year killed or injured by accidents to which they
in no way contributed through their own carelessness, than are
now killed under the same conditions in our railroad cars. In
other words, the introduction of the modern railroad, so far from
proportionately increasing the dangers of traveling, has absolutely
diminished them. It is not, after all, the dangers but the safety
of the modern railroad which should excite our special wonder.
What is the average length of the railroad journey resulting
in death by accident to a prudent traveler?What is the average
length of one resulting in some personal injury to him?These
are two questions which interest every one. Few persons, probably,
start upon any considerable journey, implying days and nights
on the rail, without almost unconsciously taking into some consideration
the risks of accident. Visions of collision, derailment, plunging
through bridges, will rise unbidden. Even the old traveler who
has enjoyed a long immunity is apt at times, with some little
apprehension,
AFFECTATION IN STATISTICS. 235
to call to mind the musty adage of the pitcher and the well,
and to ask himself how much longer it will be safe for him to
rely on his good luck. A hundred thousand miles, perhaps, and
no accident yet!Surely, on every doctrine of chances, he
now owes to fate an arm or a leg;perhaps a life. The statistics
of a long series of years enable us, however, to approximate with
a tolerable degree of precision to an answer to these questions,
and the answer is simply astounding;so astounding, in fact,
that, before undertaking to give it, the question itself ought
to be stated with all possible precision. It is this:Taking
all persons who as passengers travel by rail,and this includes
all dwellers in civilized countries,what number of journeys
of the average length are safely accomplished, to each one which
results in the death or injury of a passenger from some cause
over which he had no control?The cases of death or injury
must be confined to passengers, and to those of them only who
expose themselves to no unnecessary risk.
When approaching a question of this sort, statisticians are
apt to assume for their answers an appearance of mathematical
accuracy. It is needless to say that this is a mere affectation.
The best results which can be arrived at are, after all, mere
approximations, and they also vary greatly year by year. The body
of facts from which conclusions are to be deduced must cover not
only a definite area
236 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
of space, but also a considerable lapse of time. Even Great
Britain, with its 17,000 miles of track and its hundreds of millions
of annual passenger journeys, shows results which, one year with
another, vary strangely. For instance, during the four years anterior
to 1874, but one passenger was killed, upon an average, to each
11,000,000 carried; while in 1874 the proportion, under the influence
of a succession of disasters, suddenly doubled, rising to one
in every 5,500,000, and then again in 1877, a year of peculiar
exemption, it fell off to one in every 50,000,000. The percentage
of fatal casualties to the whole number carried was in 1847-9
five fold what it was in 1878. If such fluctuations reveal themselves
in the statistics of Great Britain, those met with in the narrower
field of a single state in this country might well seem at first
glance to set all computation at defiance. During the ten years,
for example, between 1861 and 1870, about 200,000,000 passengers
were returned as carried on the Massachusetts roads, with 135
cases of injury to individuals. Then came the year of the Revere
disaster, and out of 26,000,000 carried, no less than 115 were
killed or injured. Seven years of comparative immunity then ensued,
during which, out of 240,000,000 carried, but two were killed
and forty-five injured. In other words, through a period of ten
years the casualties were approximately as one to 1,500,000; then
during a single year they rose to one in 250,000, or a seven-fold
increase; and then
THE NORMAL AVERAGE. 237
through a period of seven years they diminished to one in 3,400,000
a decrease of about ninety per cent.
Taking, however, the very worst of years,the year of
the Revere disaster, which stands unparalleled in the history
of Massachusetts,it will yet be found that the answer to
the question as to the length of the average railroad journey
resulting in death or in injury will be expressed, not in thousands
nor in hundreds of thousands of miles, but in millions. During
that year some 26,000,000 passenger journeys were made within
the limits of the state, and each journey averaged a distance
of about 13 miles. It would seem, therefore, that, even in that
year, the average journey resulting in death was 11,000,000 miles,
while that resulting either in death or personal injury was not
less than 3,300,000.
The year 1871, however, represented by no means a fair average.
On the contrary, it indicated what may fairly be considered an
excessive degree of danger, exciting nervous apprehensions in
the breasts of those even who were not constitutionally timid.
To reach what may be considered a normal average, therefore, it
would be more proper to include a longer period in the computation.
Take, for instance, the nine years, 1871-79, during which alone
has any effort been made to reach statistical accuracy in respect
to Massachusetts railroad accidents. During those nine years,
speaking
238 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
in round numbers and making no pretence at anything beyond
a general approximation, some 303,000,000 passenger journeys of
13 miles each have been made on the railroads and within the state.
Of these 51 have resulted in death and 308 in injuries to persons
from causes over which they had no control. The average distance,
therefore, traveled by all, before death happened to any one,
was about 80,000,000 miles, and that travelled before any one
was either injured or killed was about 10,800,000.
The Revere disaster of 1871, however, as has been seen,
brought about important changes in-the methods of operating the
railroads of Massachusetts. Consequently the danger incident to
railroad traveling was materially reduced; and in the next eight
years (1872-9) some 274,000,000 passenger journeys were made within
the limits of the state. The Wollaston disaster of October, 1878,
was included in this period, during which 223 persons were injured
and 21 were killed. The average journey for these years resulting
in any injury to a passenger was close upon 15,000,000 miles,
while that resulting in death was 170,000,000.
But it may fairly be asked,What, after all, do these
figures mean?They are, indeed, so large as to exceed comprehension;
for, after certain comparatively narrow limits are passed the
practical infinite is approached, and the mere adding of a few
more ciphers after a numeral conveys no new idea. On
WHAT THE STATISTICS MEAN. 239
the contrary, the piling up of figures rather tends to weaken
than to strengthen a statement, for to many it suggests an idea
of ridiculous exaggeration. Indeed, when a few years ago a somewhat
similar statement to that just made was advanced in an official
report, a critic undertook to expose the fallacy of it in the
columns of a daily paper by referring to a case within the writer's
own observation in which a family of three persons had been killed
on their very first journey in a railroad car. It is not, of course,
necessary to waste time over such a criticism as this. Railroad
accidents continually take place, and in consequence of them people
are killed and injured, and of these there may well be some who
are then making their first journey by rail; but in estimating
the dangers of railroad traveling the much larger number who are
not killed or injured at all must likewise be taken into consideration.
Any person as he may be reading this page in a railroad car may
be killed or injured through some accident, even while his eye
is glancing over the figures which show how infinitesimal his
danger is; but the chances are none the less as a million to one
that any particular reader will go down to his grave uninjured
by any accident on the rail, unless it be occasioned by his or
her own carelessness.
Admitting, therefore, that ill luck or hard fortune must fall
to the lot of certain unascertainable persons, yet the chances
of incurring that ill fortune are so small that they are not materially
increased
240 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
by any amount of traveling which can be accomplished within
the limits of a human life. So far from exhausting a fair average
immunity from accident by constant traveling, the statistics of
Massachusetts during the last eight years would seem to indicate
that if any given person were born upon a railroad car, and remained
upon it traveling 500 miles a day all his life, he would, with
average good fortune, be somewhat over 80 years of age before
he would be involved in any accident resulting in his death or
personal injury, while he would attain the highly respectable
age of 930 years before being killed. Even supposing that the
most exceptional average of the Revere year became usual, a man
who was killed by an accident at 70 years of age should, unless
he were fairly to be accounted unlucky, have accomplished a journey
of some 440 miles every day of his life, Sundays included, from
the time of his birth to that of his death; while even to have
brought him within the fair liability of any injury at all, his
daily journey should have been some 120 miles. Under the conditions
of the last eight years his average daily journey through the
three score years and ten to entitle him to be killed in an accident
at the end of them would be about 600 miles.
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