Accidents on Railways
The question of Railway Accidents involves the whole question of railway management in detail. Accidents may be called the weak points of the system, where imperfection is manifested, where failure crops out, and where the line of demarcation may be drawn between the practicable and the impracticable. “If the road is perfect,” says Captain Huish, “if the engine is perfect, if the carriages are perfect, and I will go on to say, if the signalman is perfect, and if everything about the railway is perfect, almost any amount of speed that can be got out of an engine may be done with safety. But we deal not with theoretical excellence, but with practical facts, and none of these things are perfect; and in a large machine like a railway they cannot always be kept perfect.”
Safety to life and limb is of course the most important consideration in the working of railway traffic. Yet the problem is substantially this:—There are upwards of one hundred and forty millions of passengers and seventy million tons of goods per annum conveyed over our railways; assumed that all these must be transported by railway, what is the best way to do it? It must at the best be by a species of compromise; there must be a limit to tentative measures, there must be a risk. “If you do not go at all,” says Mr. Seymour Clarke, “there is no risk of an accident; if you go one mile an hour it is more risky than if you stand still; it is a natural attendant upon all travelling, that there is a liability to accident of some sort.” And, again, Mr. Locke thinks “that where you have the certainty of inflicting an inconvenience on the public by a prospective advantage in the saving of an accident, you should be very careful how you entail perpetually recurring inconvenience for the sake of preventing an accident which may never arise.”
The Evidence adduced before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on railway accidents in 1858, from which the foregoing extracts have been made, has led the committee to the conclusion, that accidents on railways arise from three causes—inattention of servants; defective material, either in the works or the rolling stock; and excessive speed.
Of the accidents reported to the Board of Trade that happened in 1857, there appears to have been twice as many by collision between trains as by running off the rails; and of the accidents by collision, five-sixths took place between passenger-trains and goods trains; and only about one-sixth between passenger-trains one against another. It further appears that a very small proportion, not above one in twenty, of the accidents reported, have directly arisen from excessive speed, but in every case in conjunction with imperfections in the permanent way. It may be observed that the greater proportion, if not all of these accidents, may be traced primarily to the crowding of trains, timed for unequal speeds, and the want of punctuality, which involve the risk of every kind of accident as a consequence:—by a want of perfect manifestation or apprehension of signals, or by excessive speeds. As tentative measures, the free use of the electric telegraph for giving intelligence of the exact relative positions and circumstances of trains on the line, and the use of the most powerful brakes for bringing up the trains in the shortest practicable distance, are probably of the most urgent necessity. Perfect brakes are also indisputably promotive of safety in working traffic and in compensating for unavoidable irregularities. With the usual amount of braking power, a train at 50 miles per hour may not be stopped within 900 or 1200 yards. An instantaneous brake is not of course what is wanted; on the contrary, a length of 200 yards appears to be the shortest desirable space within which a train at 50 or 60 miles per hour should be stopped, so that the process of retardation should not be accompanied by risk of carriages riding over each other, or of violence to the passengers. This appears to have been accomplished by powerful systems of train-brakes. Steam-brakes applied to the locomotives and extended to the tenders, and even to the brake-vans, have been found beneficial and capable of stopping a train within half the usual distance.—Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th edit.