The Railway.
“Depend upon it, whenever this new mode of travelling comes into operation, we shall become altogether a faster people,” was the vaticination of a common-sense observer some thirty years since; and experience has proved the soundness of the opinion. Increased facility of moving from place to place must, more or less, affect every one except the recluse shut up in his chamber from choice, or the less fortunate one prostrated on the bed of suffering, or age—
“Lies he not bedrid? And again does nothing
But what he did, being childish.”—Shakspeare.
This quickening of locomotion has multiplied our desires by adding to the means of gratifying them; a greater number of incidents and opportunities of observation is thus gained; but, being crowded into the same length of existence, the wear and tear becomes greater; the knife wears out the sheath; and men grow old before they reach mid-age; or rather, the finer portions of existence are lost, and the residue approaches a caput mortuum.
Meanwhile, the Railway is yet an incomplete invention; and it is contended that our passenger-trains are deficient in the requisite accommodation for the comfort and even health of the passengers, who are still exposed to an unnecessary vibration which, in the course of continual travelling, produces nervous diseases. Mr. Bridges Adams, the engineer, and therefore a practical authority upon the subject, maintains that the railway companies are so fettered in their operations as to be unable to make feasible improvements: were these restrictions removed, Mr. Adams contends the public would receive the advantage in many forms, in easier and cheaper transit, and in reciprocal relations of town and country, such as involve a revolution in our national economies. The same acute writer anticipates the time when our towns shall have their railway-streets, which may become a fact at no very distant future. London has already its subterranean railway; above, the air is grilled with the electric-wire railway; and the street-system is being commenced upon the banks of the Thames, and the stream is already bridged with viaducts.
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.