The accident ten years later at Carr's Rock, sixteen miles west of Port Jervis, on the same road, was again very similar to the one just described: and yet in this case the parting of the couplings alone prevented the rear of the train from dragging its head to destruction. Both disasters were occasioned by broken rails; but, while the first occurred on a tangent, the last was at a point where the road skirted the hills, by a sharp curve, upon the outer side of which was a steep declivity of some eighty feet, jagged with rock and bowlders. It befell the night express on the 14th of April, 1876. The train was a long one, consisting of the locomotive, three baggage and express, and seven passenger cars, and it encountered the broken rail while rounding the curve at a high rate of speed. Again all except the last car, passed over the fracture in safety; this was snapped, as it were, off the track and over the embankment. At first it was dragged along, but only for a short distance; the intense strain then broke the coupling between the four rear cars and the head of the train, and, the last of the four being already over the embankment, the others almost instantly toppled over after it and rolled down the ravine. A passenger on this portion of the train, described the car he was in "as going over and over, until the outer roof was torn off, the sides fell out, and the inner roof was crushed in." Twenty-four persons were killed and eighty injured; but in this instance, as in that at Des Jardines, the only occasion for surprise was that there were any survivors.
Accidents arising from the parting of defective couplings have of course not been uncommon, and they constitute one of the greatest dangers incident to heavy gradients; in surmounting inclines freight trains will, it is found, break in two, and their hinder parts come thundering down the grade, as was seen at Abergele. The American passenger trains, in which each car is provided with brakes, are much less liable than the English, the speed of which is regulated by brake-vans, to accidents of this description. Indeed, it may be questioned whether in America any serious disaster has occurred from the fact that a portion of a passenger train on a road operated by steam got beyond control in descending an incline. There have been, however, terrible catastrophes from this cause in England, and that on the Lancashire & Yorkshire road near Helmshere, a station some fourteen miles north of Manchester, deserves a prominent place in the record of railroad accidents.
It occurred in the early hours of the morning of the 4th of September, 1860. There had been a great fête at the Bellevue Gardens in Manchester on the 3d, upon the conclusion of which some twenty-five hundred persons crowded at once upon the return trains. Of these there were, on the Lancashire & Yorkshire road, three; the first consisting of fourteen, the second of thirty-one, and the last of twenty-four carriages: and they were started, with intervals of ten minutes between them, at about eleven o'clock at night. The first train finished its journey in safety. Not so the second and the third. The Helmshere station is at the top of a steep incline. This the second train, drawn by two locomotives, surmounted, and then stopped for the delivery of passengers. While these were leaving the carriages, a snap as of fractured iron was heard, and the guards, looking back, saw the whole rear portion of the train, consisting of seventeen carriages and a brake-van, detached from the rest of it and quietly slipping down the incline. The detached portion was moving so slowly that one of the guards succeeded in catching the van and applying the brakes; it was, however, already too late. The velocity was greater than the brake-power could overcome, and the seventeen carriages kept descending more and more rapidly. Meanwhile the third train had reached the foot of the incline and begun to ascend it, when its engineer, on rounding a curve, caught sight of the descending carriages. He immediately reversed his engine, but before he could bring his train to a stand they were upon him. Fortunately the van-brakes of the detached carriages, though insufficient to stop them, yet did reduce their speed; the collision nevertheless was terrific. The force of the blow, so far as the advancing train was concerned, expended itself on the locomotive, which was demolished, while the passengers escaped with a fright. Not so those in the descending carriages. With them there was nothing to break the blow, and the two hindmost carriages were crushed to fragments and their passengers scattered over the line. It was shortly after midnight, and the excursionists clambered out of the trains and rushed frantically about, impeding every effort to clear away the débris and rescue the injured, whose shrieks and cries were incessant. The bodies of ten persons, one of whom had died of suffocation, were ultimately taken out from the wreck, and twenty-two others sustained fractures of limbs.
At Des Jardines the couplings were too strong; at Port Jervis and at Helmshere they were not strong enough; at Carr's Rock they gave way not a moment too soon. "There are objections to a plenum and there are objections to a vacuum," as Dr. Johnson remarked, "but a plenum or a vacuum it must be." There are no arguments, however, in favor of putting railroad stations or sidings upon an inclined plane, and then not providing what the English call "catch-points" or "scotches" to prevent such disasters as those at Abergele or Helmshere. In these two instances alone the want of them cost over fifty lives. In railroad mechanics there are after all some principles susceptible of demonstration. That vehicles, as well as water, will run down hill may be classed among them. That these principles should still be ignored is hardly less singular than it is surprising.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE REVERE CATASTROPHE.
The terrible disaster which occurred in front of the little station-building at Revere, six miles from Boston on the Eastern railroad of Massachusetts, in August 1871, was, properly speaking, not an accident at all; it was essentially a catastrophe—the legitimate and almost inevitable final outcome of an antiquated and insufficient system. As such it should long remain a subject for prayerful meditation to all those who may at any time be entrusted with the immediate operating of railroads. It was terribly dramatic, but it was also frightfully instructive; and while the lesson was by no means lost, it yet admits of further and advantageous study. For, like most other men whose lives are devoted to a special calling, the managers of railroads are apt to be very much wedded to their own methods, and attention has already more than once been called to the fact that, when any new emergency necessitates a new appliance, they not infrequently, as Captain Tyler well put it in his report to the Board of Trade for the year 1870, "display more ingenuity in finding objections than in overcoming them."
