The proportion of accidents due to each of these causes, taken at random from one hundred cases on English roads, (American reports do not detail such information with accuracy,) were,—
Collision 56 56
Breakage of machinery 18 18
Failure of road 14 14
Misplaced switches 5
Obstacles on rails 6
Boiler explosions 1
__ ___
88 100
Eighty-eight per cent. being from those causes which are aggravated by increase of speed; and if we suppose the amount of aggravation to augment as the speed, the danger of travelling is eighty-eight per cent. greater by a fast than by a slow train.
These are the direct evils of high speeds; there are also indirect evils, which are full as bad.
All trains in motion at the same time, within a certain distance of the express, must be kept waiting, with steam up, or driven at extra velocities to keep out of the way.
Where the time-table is so arranged as to call for speed nearly equal to the full capacity of the engine, it is very obvious that the risks of failure in "making time" must be much greater than at reduced rates; and when they do occur, the efforts made to gain the time must be correspondingly greater and uncertain. A single example will be sufficient to show this.
A train, whose prescribed rate of speed is thirty miles per hour, having lost five minutes of time, and being required to gain it in order to meet and pass an opposing train at a station ten miles distant, must necessarily increase its speed to forty miles per hour; and a train, whose prescribed rate of speed is forty miles per hour, under similar circumstances, must increase its speed to sixty miles per hour. In the former case it would probably be accomplished, whilst in the latter it would more probably result in failure,—or, if successful, it would be so at fearful risk of accident.
However true it may be that many of our large roads are well, some of them admirably, managed, it is none the less a fact that the greater portion are directed in a manner far from satisfactory,—many, indeed, being subjected to the combined influence of ignorance and recklessness.
Many people wonder at the bad financial state of the American railroads; the wonder is, to those who understand the way in which they are managed, that they should be worth anything at all. It is useless to disguise the fact, says a writer in one of our railroad-papers, that the great body of our railroad-directors are entirely unfit for their position. They are, personally, a very respectable class of men, (Schuylerisms and Tuckermanisms excepted,) —men who, after having passed through their active business-lives successfully, and after retirement, are, in the minds of some, eminently fitted to adorn a director's chair. Never was there a greater mistake. What is wanted for a railway-director is an active, clear-headed man, who has not outlived his term of activity. We want railway-directors who know how to reduce the operating-expenses per mile, and not men who oppose their bigoted ignorance to everything like change or improvement, who can see no difference between science and abstract ideas. It would seem that the only question to be asked with regard to the fitness of a man for being a director is—Is he rich and respectable? If he has these qualities, and is pretty stupid withal, he is in a fair line for election. We tell our railway-readers, that, if they desire to make their property valuable, and rescue it from becoming a byword and a reproach, they have got to elect men of an entirely different stamp,—men of practical experience, in the best sense of the term, who have intelligence enough to know and apply all those vital reforms upon which depends the future success of their undertakings,—the men of the workshop, the track, and the locomotive. And we shall yet see the more intelligent of them taking the place, at the directors' board, of the retired merchants, physicians, and other respectable gentlemen, who now lend only the names of their respectability to perpetuate a system of folly that has reduced our railroad-management below contempt. As at present constituted, our boards are a very showy, but very useless piece of mechanism. The members attend at meetings when they feel just like it, and sign their names to documents and statements which have been prepared for them by others, without much knowledge of what the contents are; their other duties consisting chiefly in riding over their own and connecting roads, free of charge.