In this accident some eighty persons are supposed to have lost their lives, while over sixty others were injured. The exact number of those killed can never be known, however, as more than half of those reported were utterly consumed in the fire; indeed, even of the bodies recovered scarcely one half could be identified. Of the cause of the disaster much was said at the time in language most unnecessarily scientific;—but little was required to be said. It admitted of no extenuation. An iron bridge, built in the early days of iron-bridges,—that which fell under the train at Ashtabula, was faulty in its original construction, and the indications of weakness it had given had been distinct, but had not been regarded. That it had stood so long and that it should have given way when it did, were equally matters for surprise. A double track bridge, it should naturally have fallen under the combined pressure of trains moving simultaneously in opposite directions. The strain under which it yielded was not a particularly severe one, even taken in connection with the great atmospheric pressure of the storm then prevailing. It was, in short, one of those disasters, fortunately of infrequent occurrence, with which accident has little if any connection. It was due to original inexperience and to subsequent ignorance or carelessness, or possibly recklessness as criminal as it was fool-hardy.
Besides being a bridge accident, this was also a stove accident,—in this respect a repetition of Angola. One of the most remarkable features about it, indeed, was the fearful rapidity with which the fire spread, and the incidents of its spread detailed in the subsequent evidence of the survivors were simply horrible. Men, women and children, full of the instinct of self-preservation, were caught and pinned fast for the advancing flames, while those who tried to rescue them were driven back by the heat and compelled helplessly to listen to their shrieks. It is, however, unnecessary to enter into these details, for they are but the repetition of an experience which has often been told, and they do but enforce a lesson which the railroad companies seem resolved not to learn. Unquestionably the time in this country will come when through trains will be heated from a locomotive or a heating-car. That time, however, had not yet come. Meanwhile the evidence would seem to show that at Ashtabula, as at Angola, at least two lives were sacrificed in the subsequent fire to each one lost in the immediate shock of the disaster.[8]
But a few days more than a year after the Ashtabula accident another catastrophe, almost exactly similar in its details, occurred on the Connecticut Western road. It is impossible to even estimate the amount of overhauling to which bridges throughout the country had in the meanwhile been subjected, or the increased care used in their examination. All that can be said is that during the year 1877 no serious accident due to the inherent weakness of any bridge occcurred on the 70,000 miles of American railroad. Neither, so far as can be ascertained, was the Tariffville disaster to be referred to that cause. It happened on the evening of January 15, 1878. A large party of excursionists were returning from a Moody and Sankey revival meeting on a special train, consisting of two locomotives and ten cars. Half a mile west of Tariffville the railroad crosses the Farmington river. The bridge at this point was a wooden Howe truss, with two spans of 163 feet each. It had been in use about seven years and, originally of ample strength and good construction, there is no evidence that its strength had since been unduly impaired by neglect or exposure. It should, therefore, have sufficed to bear twice the strain to which it was now subjected. Exactly as at Ashtabula, however, the west span of the bridge gave way under the train just as the leading locomotives passed onto the tressel-work beyond it: the ice broke under the falling wreck, and the second locomotive with four cars were precipitated into the river. The remaining cars were stopped by the rear end of the third car, resting as it did on the centre pier of the bridge, and did not leave the rails. The fall to the surface of the ice was about ten feet. There was no fire to add to the horrors in this case, but thirteen persons were crushed to death or drowned, and thirty-three others injured.[9]
Naturally the popular inference was at once drawn that this was a mere repetition of the Ashtabula experience,—that the fearful earlier lesson had been thrown away on a corporation either unwilling or not caring to learn. The newspapers far and wide resounded with ill considered denunciation, and the demand was loud for legislation of the crudest conceivable character, especially a law prohibiting the passage over any bridge of two locomotives attached to one passenger train. The fact, however, seems to be that, except in its superficial details, the Tariffville disaster had no features in common with that at Ashtabula; as nearly as can be ascertained it was due neither to the weakness nor to the overloading of the bridge. Though the evidence subsequently given is not absolutely conclusive on this point, the probabilities would seem to be that, while on the bridge, the second locomotive was derailed in some unexplained way and consequently fell on the stringers which yielded under the sudden blow. The popular impression, therefore, as to the bearing which the first of these two strikingly similar accidents had upon the last tended only to bring about results worse than useless. The bridge fell, not under the steady weight of two locomotives, but under the sudden shock incident to the derailment of one. The remedy, therefore, lay in the direction of so planking or otherwise guarding the floors of similar bridges that in case of derailment the locomotives or cars should not fall on the stringers or greatly diverge from the rails so as to endanger the trusses. On the other hand the suggestion of a law prohibiting the passage over bridges of more than one locomotive with any passenger train, while in itself little better than a legal recognition of bad bridge building, also served to divert public attention from the true lesson of the disaster. Another newspaper precaution, very favorably considered at the time, was the putting of one locomotive, where two had to be used, at the rear end of the train as a pusher, instead of both in front. This expedient might indeed obviate one cause of danger, but it would do so only by substituting for it another which has been the fruitful source of some of the worst railroad disasters on record.[10]
CHAPTER XII.
THE PROTECTION OF BRIDGES.
Long, varied and terrible as the record of bridge disasters has become, there are, nevertheless, certain very simple and inexpensive precautions against them, which, altogether too frequently, corporations do not and will not take. At Ashtabula the bridge gave way. There was no derailment as there seems to have been at Tariffville. The sustaining power of a bridge is, of course, a question comparatively difficult of ascertainment. A fatal weakness in this respect may be discernable only to the eye of a trained expert. Derailment, however, either upon a bridge, or when approaching it, is in the vast majority of cases a danger perfectly easy to guard against. The precautions are simple and they are not expensive, yet, taking the railroads of the United States as a whole, it may well be questioned whether the bridges at which they have been taken do not constitute the exception rather than the rule. Not only is the average railroad superintendent accustomed to doing his work and running his road under a constant pressure to make both ends meet, which, as he well knows, causes his own daily bread to depend upon the economies he can effect; but, while he finds it hard work at best to provide for the multifarious outlays, long immunity from disaster breeds a species of recklessness even in the most cautious:—and yet the single mishap in a thousand must surely fall to the lot of some one. Many years ago the terrible results which must soon or late be expected wherever the consequences of a derailment on the approaches to a bridge are not securely guarded against, were illustrated by a disaster on the Great Western railroad of Canada, which combined many of the worst horrors of both the Norwalk and the New Hamburg tragedies; more recently the almost forgotten lesson was enforced again on the Vermont & Massachusetts road, upon the bridge over the Miller River, at Athol. The accident last referred to occurred on the 16th of June, 1870, but, though forcible enough as a reminder, it was tame indeed in comparison with the Des Jardines Canal disaster, which is still remembered though it happened so long ago as the 17th of March, 1857.
The Great Western railroad of Canada crossed the canal by a bridge at an elevation of about sixty feet. At the time of the accident there were some eighteen feet of water in the canal, though, as is usual in Canada at that season, it was covered by ice some two feet in thickness. On the afternoon of the 17th of March as the local accommodation train from Hamilton was nearing the bridge, its locomotive, though it was then moving at a very slow rate of speed, was in some way thrown from the track and onto the timbers of the bridge. These it cut through, and then falling heavily on the string-pieces it parted them, and instantly pitched headlong down upon the frozen surface of the canal below, dragging after it the tender, baggage car and two passenger cars, which composed the whole train. There was nothing whatever to break the fall of sixty feet; and even then two feet of ice only intervened between the ruins of the train and the bottom of the canal eighteen feet below. Two feet of solid ice will afford no contemptible resistance to a falling body; the locomotive and tender crushed heavily through it and instantly sank out of sight. In falling the baggage car struck a corner of the tender and was thus thrown some ten yards to one side, and was followed by the first passenger car, which, turning a somersault as it went, fell on its roof and was crushed to fragments, but only partially broke through the ice, upon which the next car fell endwise, and rested in that position. That every human being in the first car was either crushed or drowned seems most natural; the only cause for astonishment is found in the fact that any one should have survived such a catastrophe,—a tumble of sixty feet on ice as solid as a rock! Yet of four persons in the baggage car three went down with it, and not one of them was more than slightly injured. The engineer and fireman, and the occupants of the second passenger car, were less fortunate. The former were found crushed under the locomotive at the bottom of the canal; while of the latter ten were killed, and not one escaped severe injury. Very rarely indeed in the history of railroad accidents have so large a portion of those on the train lost their lives as in this case, for out of ninety persons sixty perished, and in the number was included every woman and child among the passengers, with a single exception.