Mr. Fenton, general manager, and Mr. Driscoll, an inspector of the company, having been examined as to the improvements made in the ventilation of the tunnels, and the absence of complaint from employés of the company, or from passengers with respect to the atmosphere, the jury, almost without hesitation, returned a verdict of “Death from natural causes.”
The singular fact was elicited at the inquest that the peculiarly “pungent smell” of the tunnel is due rather to the friction of the brakes, than to any other cause. The partial combustion of the wood produces a pyroligneous carbo-hydrogen, as Dr. Letheby styled it, together with a small amount of sulphurous acid gas. These the nose and lungs will detect sooner than the most delicate chemical tests, and they are the real producers of the coughing and unpleasant feeling experienced by some passengers. Such vapours, however, only affect delicate people. This will account for the fact that people, travelling through ordinary tunnels, are free from irritation and coughing. The Metropolitan Railway is the only tunnel in which, owing to stoppages at intermediate stations, it is necessary to put the brakes on.
The efforts made by the company to ensure the best ventilation and purest atmosphere possible, are unremitting. Before the opening of the line an extended series of experiments was made with various specimens of coke supplied by all the leading coke manufacturers in the kingdom. That which best bore the crucial tests, to which the specimens were submitted, is the coke supplied by Messrs. Straker and Lowe from their Brancepeth Collieries near Durham. Coke for locomotives, and other purposes, is usually burned seventy-two hours. When coke of a very superior quality is required (so that all sulphurous and noxious vapours may, as far as possible, be consumed) it is burned ninety-six hours, but all coke used on the Metropolitan Railway is burned twenty-four hours more—that is 120 hours. Special ovens have been built for burning it, and when the process of combustion is completed, the coke is, what is well known in railway locomotive phraseology, “hand picked.” Thus, only the bright coke of each burning is allowed to be sent to London; any outside or dirty coke, however good it may be in reality, being kept back. It is, therefore, impossible to procure, in the whole range of fuel, any more free from ingredients likely to produce unpleasant smell, or to affect respiration.
A few words must be said with respect to the peculiar construction of the engines. In the first place the parts are so arranged that no steam whatever escapes into the tunnel. This is accomplished by having a large tank on each side of the engine. These tanks together contain about 1,000 gallons of water. The exhaust steam is turned into them, instead of through the funnel in the ordinary way. The second peculiarity of the engines is that they are constructed with large heating surface. The steam is raised to a pressure of about 130 lbs. at starting, and by the time the journey through each tunnel, between station and station, is performed, it has been reduced to about 80. The damper is kept on during the entire journey. It will thus be seen that the combustion of fuel in each tunnel must be very small indeed, the fire being simply kept in, without any draft through the fire box.
Recently, the directors of the company, with the view to satisfying public feeling in every possible way, forwarded to the Vestries of St. Marylebone and St. Pancras, applications for permission to effect openings to the external air at several points of the Marylebone and Euston Roads—where important roads cross this thoroughfare—by means of handsome and ornamental hollow columns, which should be connected with the railway, and would support street lamps similar to those now placed at frequented crossings in various parts of the town.
It is a fact beyond all question that, unvaryingly, there are fewer persons belonging to the staff of the Metropolitan Railway, in proportion to their numbers, absent from duty on account of illness, than on other railways. We have seen returns, fully confirming the statement to this effect. We believe they were published by Mr. Myles Fenton, in the newspapers a few months ago.
During the year ending the 30th of June, 1867, the enormous number of 22,458,067 passengers[142] were conveyed by the Metropolitan Railway Company without accident, injury, or (as far as the world knows) ill effects to any one of them.
There is a source of danger in connection with travelling through a long tunnel with a bad gradient, that a recent occurrence in the Dove Hole tunnel of the Midland Railway (a tunnel to which special reference is made at page 372), suggests. The accident is so extraordinary in its character that a brief account of it at present will not he out of place. It appears that on the 9th of September last, a ballast train had gone into the tunnel with the intention of the permanent way men supplying it with ballast. Whilst it was at a stand-still and the men were at work, a cattle train, consisting of twenty-seven trucks, and drawn by two powerful goods’ engines, was permitted to enter the tunnel. This cattle train came into collision with the ballast train, when, among other results, one was that the coupling chain which connected the cattle trucks to the engines broke. The trucks thus freed began to descend the incline, which, as already stated, is 1 in 90; their impetus increased each moment, and by the time they emerged from the tunnel, on the wrong line, they were travelling at express speed. Notwithstanding a slight change in the gradient, they went on at that rate for eight miles, continuing always, of course, on the wrong line. At that point the trucks came in collision with the engine of an express train from Manchester, which had been standing on its own proper line waiting for the signal it should receive before proceeding onwards. The driver of the express train engine perceiving in a moment what was occurring, reversed his engine, put on full steam, and then jumped off, very unfortunately for himself. But the engine had not sufficient speed upon her to prevent a collision with the cattle trucks. The greater part of these latter were literally crushed to atoms; and, perhaps, fortunately, the cylinders of the express train engine were burst by the collision. This allowed a great escape of steam, and it was ultimately, combined with the presence of mind of a pointsman, the means of the engine not doing more mischief than shaking some and frightening all the passengers travelling in the train belonging to it. Not so five drovers who were in the brake-van of the cattle train: they were killed, and, apparently, their deaths were instantaneous. Such an accident as this is not likely to happen in the tunnel of the Alps; but, suppose a coupling iron broke, and with it the coupling chains, on the French or ascending side, would the brake power attached to the carriages be enough to check their downward speed? At all events, it must not be forgotten that the average gradient on the French side of the tunnel is 1 in 45 (117 feet in the mile), or exactly double as steep as that of the Dove Hole Tunnel, and that the Modane entrance of the tunnel of the Alps is 1,216 feet above St. Michel, consequently there is an average fall per mile during the whole twelve miles of 1 in 101, or at the rate of 50 feet in the mile, and as there will be no intermediate station, carriages if they came to be detached, and had not sufficient brake power to arrest their progress, might continue to run the whole of this distance at high speed, and on the wrong line.
[For minute details relating to the construction of the Tunnel of the Alps, up to 1862, and to the means of supplying ventilation during its progress, the reader is referred to the interesting report of Mr. Storrow, embodied in that of the Commissioners of the State of Massachusetts on the Troy and Grenfield Railroad, and of the Hoosac Tunnel, dated the 12th of March, 1863; also, to an article on the Tunnel, in the Edinburgh Review for July 1865, No. 249.]