58 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
CHAPTER VI.
THE VERSAILLES ACCIDENT.
GOING back once more to the early days, a third of a century
since, before yet the periodical recurrence of slaughter had caused
either train-brake or Miller platform to be imagined as possibilities,
before, indeed, there was yet any record of what we would now
consider a regular railroad field-day, with its long train of
accompanying horrors, including in the grisly array death by crushing,
scalding, drowning, burning, and impalement,going back to
the year 1840, or thereabouts, we find that the railroad companies
experienced a notable illustration of the truth of the ancient
adage that it never rains but it pours; for it was then that the
long immunity was rudely broken in upon. After that time disasters
on the rail seemed to tread upon one another's heels in quick
and frightful succession. Within a few months of the English catastrophe
of December 24, 1841, there happened in France one of the most
MAY 8, 1842. 59
famous and most horrible railroad slaughters ever recorded.
It took place on the 8th of May, 1842. It was the birthday of
the king, Louis Philippe, and, in accordance with the usual practice,
the occasion had been celebrated at Versailles by a great display
of the fountains. At half past five o'clock these had stopped
playing, and a general rush ensued for the trains then about to
leave for Paris. That which went by the road along the left bank
of the Seine was densely crowded, and so long that two locomotives
were required to draw it. As it was moving at a high rate of speed
between Bellevue and Meudon, the axle of the foremost of these
two locomotives broke, letting the body of the engine drop to
the ground. It instantly stopped, and the second locomotive was
then driven by its impetus on top of the first, crushing its engineer
and fireman, while the contents of both the fire-boxes were scattered
over the roadway and among the debris. Three carriages crowded
with passengers were then piled on top of this burning mass and
there crushed together into each other. The doors of these carriages
were locked, as was then and indeed is still the custom in Europe,
and it so chanced that they had all been newly painted. They blazed
up like pine kindlings. Some of the carriages were so shattered
that a portion of those in them were enabled to extricate themselves,
but the very much larger number were held fast; and of these such
as were not so fortunate as to be crushed to death in the first
shock perished hopelessly
60 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
in the flames before the eyes of a throng of lookers-on impotent
to aid. Fifty-two or fifty-three persons were supposed to have
lost their lives in this disaster, and more than forty others
were injured; the exact number of the killed, however, could never
be ascertained, as the piling-up of the cars on top of the two
locomotives had made of the destroyed portion of the train a veritable
holocaust of the most hideous description. Not only did whole
families perish together,in one case no less than eleven
members of the same family sharing a common fate,but the
remains of such as were destroyed could neither be identified
nor separated. In one case a female foot was alone recognizable,
while in others the bodies were calcined and and fused into an
indistinguishable mass. The Academy of Sciences appointed a committee
to inquire whether Admiral D'Urville, a distinguished French navigator,
was among the victims. His body was thought to be found, but it
was so terribly mutilated that it could be recognized only by
a sculptor, who chanced some time before to have taken a phrenological
cast of the skull. His wife and only son had perished with him.
It is not easy now to conceive the excitement and dismay which
this catastrophe caused throughout France. The railroad was at
once associated in the minds of an excitable people with novel
forms of imminent death. France had at best been laggard enough
in its adoption of the new invention,
THE RETURN FROM THE FETE. 61
and now it seemed for a time as if the Versailles disaster
was to operate as a barrier in the way of all further railroad
development. Persons availed themselves of the steam roads already
constructed as rarely as possible, and then in fear and trembling,
while steps were taken to substitute horse for steam power on
other roads then in process of construction.
The disaster was, indeed, one well calculated to make a deep
impression on the popular mind, for it lacked almost no attribute
of the dramatic and terrible. There were circumstances connected
with it, too, which gave it a sort of moral significance,contrasting
so suddenly the joyous return from the country fete in the pleasant
afternoon of May, with what De Quincey has called the vision of
sudden death. It contained a whole homily on the familiar text.
As respects the number of those killed and injured, also, the
Versailles accident has not often been surpassed; perhaps never
in France. In this country it was surpassed on one occasion, among
others, under circumstances very similar to it. This was the accident
at Camphill station, about twelve miles from Philadelphia, on
July 17, 1856, which befell an excursion train carrying some eleven
hundred children, who had gone out on a Sunday school picnic in
charge of their teachers and friends.
It was the usual story. The road had but a single track, and
the train, both long and heavy, had been delayed and was running
behind its schedule time. The conductor thought, however, that
the next station
62 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
could yet be reached in time to meet and there pass a regular
train coming towards him. It may have been a miscalculation of
seconds, it may have been a difference of watches, or perhaps
the regular train was slightly before its time; but, however it
happened, as the excursion train, while running at speed, was
rounding a reverse curve, it came full upon the regular train,
which had just left the station. In those days, as compared with
the present, the cars were but egg-shells, and the shock was terrific.
The locomotives struck each other, and, after rearing themselves
up for an instant, it is said, like living animals, fell to the
ground mere masses of rubbish. In any case the force of the shock
was sufficient to hurl both engines from the track and lay them
side by side at right angles to, and some distance from it. As
only the excursion train happened to be running at speed, it alone
had all the impetus necessary for telescoping; three of its cars
accordingly closed in upon each other, and the children in them
were crushed; as in the Versailles accident, two succeeding cars
were driven upon this mass, and then fire was set to the whole
from the ruins of the locomotives. It would be hard to imagine
anything more thoroughly heartrending, for the holocaust was of
little children on a party of pleasure. Five cars in all were
burned, and sixty-six persons perished; the injured numbered more
than a hundred.*
*A collision very similar to that at Camphill
occurred upon the Erie railway at a point about 20 miles west
of Port Jervis on the afternoon Of July 15, 1864. The train in
this case consisted of eighteen cars, in which were some 850 Confederate
soldiers on their way under guard to the prisoner's camp at Elmira.
A coal train consisting of 50 loaded cars from the hanch took
the main line at Lackawaxen. The telegraph operator there informed
its conductor that the track was clear, and, while rounding a
sharp reversed curve, the two trains came together, the one going
at about twelve and the other at some twenty miles an hour. Some
60 of the soldiers, besides a number of train hands were killed
on the spot, and 120 more were seriously injured, some of them
fatally.
This disaster occurred in the midst of some of the most important
operations of the Rebellion and excited at the time hardly any
notice. There was a suggestive military promptness in the subsequent
proceedings. "T. J. Ridgeway, Esq., Associate judge of Pike
County, was soon on the spot, and, after consultation with Mr.
Riddle [the superintendent of the Erie road] and the officer in
command of the men, a jury was impanneled and an inquest held;
after which a large trench was dug by the soldiers and the railway
employees, 76 feet long, 8 feet wide and 6 feet deep, in which
the bodies were at once interred in boxes, hastily constructedone
being allotted to four rebels, and one to each Union soldier."
There were sixteen of the latter killed.
THE CAMPHILL COLLISION 63
Of this disaster nothing could be said either in excuse or
in extenuation; it was not only one of the worst description,
but it was one of that description the occurrence of which is
most frequent. An excursion train, while running against time
on a single-track road, came in collision with a regular train.
The record is full of similar disasters, too numerous to admit
of specific reference. Primarily of course, the conductors of
the special trains are as a rule in fault in such cases. He certainly
was at Camphill, and felt himself to be so, for the next day he
committed suicide by swallowing arsenic. But in reality in these
and in all similar cases,both those which have happened
and those hereafter surely destined to happen,the full responsibility
64 RAILROAD ACCIDENTS.
does not rest upon the unfortunate or careless sub. ordinate;nor
should the weight of punishment be visited upon him. It belongs
elsewhere. At this late day no board of directors, not president,
nor superintendent has any right to operate a single-track road
without the systematic use of the telegraph in connection with
its train movements. That the telegraph can be used to block,
as it is termed, double-track roads, by dividing them into sections
upon no one of which two trains can be running at the same time,
is matter of long and daily experience. There is nothing new or
experimental about -it. It is a system which has been forced on
the more crowded lines of the world as an alternative to perennial
killings. That in the year 1879 excursion trains should rush along
single-track roads and hurl themselves against regular trains,
just as was done twenty-three years ago at Camphill, would be
deemed incredible were not exactly similar accidents still from
time to time reported. One occurred near St. Louis, for instance,
on July 4, 1879. The simple fact is that to now operate single-track
roads without the constant aid of the telegraph, as a means of
blocking them for every irregular train, indicates a degree of
wanton carelessness, or an excess of incompetence, for which adequate
provision should be made in the criminal law. Nothing but this
appeal to the whipping-post, as it were, seems to produce the
needed mental activity; for it is difficult to realize the
THE STIMULUS OF PROSECUTION. 65
stupid conservatism of ordinary men when brought to the consideration
of something to which they are not accustomed. On this very point
of controlling the train movement of single-track roads by telegraph,
for instance, within a very recent period the superintendent of
a leading Massachusetts road gravely assured the railroad commissioners
of that state, that he considered it a most dangerous reliance
which had occasioned many disasters, and that he had no doubt
it would be speedily abandoned as a practice in favor of the old
timetable and running-rules system, from which no deviations would
be allowed. This opinion was expressed, also, after the Revere
disaster of 1871, it might have been supposed, had branded into
the record of the state the impossibility of safely running any
crowded railroad in a reliance upon the schedule.* Such men as
this, however, are not accessible to argument or the teachings
of experience, and the gentle stimulant of a criminal prosecution
seems to be the only thing left.
* Chapter XIV, XVI.
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