[24] Speaking of the modifications introduced into his brake by Westinghouse since 1874, Mr. Thomas E. Harrison, civil engineer of the North Eastern Railway Company in a communication to the directors of that company of April 24, 1879, recommending the adoption by it of the Westinghouse, and subsequently ordered to be printed for the use of Parliament, thus referred to the triple valve: "As the most important [of these modifications] I will particularly draw your attention to the "triple-valve" which has been made a regular bugbear by the opponents of the system, and has been called complicated, delicate, and liable to get out of order, etc. * * * It is, in fact, as simple a piece of mechanism as well can be imagined, certain in its action, of durable materials, easily accessible to an ordinary workman for examination or cleaning, and there is nothing about it that can justify the term complication; on the contrary, it is a model of ingenuity and simplicity."
[25] During the six months ending June 30, 1879, some 300 stops due to some derangement of the apparatus of the Westinghouse brake were reported by ten companies in runs aggregating about two million miles. Being one stop to 6,600 miles run. Very many of these stops were obviously due to the want of familiarity of the employés with an apparatus new to them, but as a rule the delays occasioned did not exceed a very few minutes; of 82 stoppages, for instance, reported on the London, Brighton & South Coast road, the two longest were ten minutes each and the remainder averaged some three or four minutes.
[26] In Massachusetts, for instance, where no official pressure in favor of any particular brake was brought to bear, out of 473 locomotives equipped with train-brakes 361 have the Westinghouse, which is also applied to 1,363 out of 1,669 cars. Of these, however, 79 locomotives and 358 cars are equipped with both the atmospheric and the vacuum brakes.
[27] This period did not include the Wollaston disaster, as the Massachusetts railroad year closes on the last day of September. The Wollaston disaster occurred on the 8th of October, 1878, and was accordingly included in the next railroad year.
[28] General Report to the Board of Trade upon the accidents which have occurred on the Railways of the United Kingdom during the year 1877, p. 37.
[29] During these five years there were in Great Britain four cases of collision between locomotives or trains at level crossings of one railroad by another; in America there were 79. The probable cause of this discrepancy has already been referred to (ante pp. 194-7).
[30] The other side of this proposition has been argued with much force by Mr. William Galt in his report as one of the Royal Commission of 1874 on Railway Accidents. Mr. Galt's individual report bears date February 5, 1877, and in it he asserts that, as a matter of actual experience, the principle of self-interest on the part of the railway companies has proved a wholly insufficient safeguard against accidents. However it may be in theory, he contends that, taking into consideration the great cost of the appliances necessary to insure safety to the public on the one side, and the amount of damages incident to a certain degree of risk on the other side, the possible saving in expenditure to the companies by assuming the risk far exceeds the loss incurred by an occasional accident. The companies become, in a word, insurers of their passengers,—the premium being found in the economies effected by not adopting improved appliances of recognized value, and the losses being the damages incurred in case of accident. He treats the whole subject at great length and with much knowledge and ability. His report is a most valuable compendium for those who are in favor of a closer government supervision over railroads as a means of securing an increased safety from accident.
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.