Those cars were of the most approved form of American construction, but here, as at Shipton, the violent application of the train-brakes and reversal of the locomotives had greatly checked the speed of the forward part of the train, while the whole rear of it, comparatively free from brake pressure, was crowding heavily forward. Including its living freight, the entire weight of the train could not have been less than 500 tons. There was no slack between its parts; no opportunity to give. It was a simple question of the resisting power of car construction. Had the train consisted of ten cars instead of twenty-two a recent experience of a not dissimilar accident on this very road affords sufficient evidence of how different the result would have been. On the occasion referred to,--October 13, 1876,--a train consisting of two locomotives and fourteen cars, while rounding a curve before the Randolph station at a speed of thirty miles an hour came in sudden collision with the locomotive of a freight train which was occupying the track, and while doing so, in that case also as at Wollaston, had wholly neglected to protect it. So short was the notice of danger that the speed of the passenger train could not at the moment of collision have been less than twenty miles an hour. The freight train was at the moment fortunately backing, but none the less it was an impassable obstacle. The three locomotives were entirely thrown from the track and more or less broken up, and three cars of the passenger train followed them, but the rest of it remained in line and on the rails, and was so entirely uninjured that it was not found necessary to withdraw one of the cars from service for even a single trip. Not a passenger was hurt. This train consisted of fourteen cars: but at Wollaston, the fourteen forward cars were, after the head of the train was derailed, driven onward not only by their own momentum but also by the almost unchecked momentum of eight other cars behind them. The rear of the train did not leave the rails and was freely moving along them. By itself it must have weighed over 200 tons. The result was inevitable. Something had to yield; and the six forward cars were accordingly either thrown wholly to the one side or the other, or crushed between the two locomotives and the rear of the train. Two of them in fact were reduced into a mere mass of fragments. The disaster resulted in the death of 19 persons, while a much greater number were injured, more than 50 seriously. In this as in most other railroad disasters the surprising thing was that the list of casualties was not larger. Looking at the position of the two cars crushed into fragments it seemed almost impossible that any person in them could have escaped alive. Indeed that they did so was largely due to the fact that the season for car-warming had not yet arrived, while, in some way impossible to explain, all four of the men in charge of the locomotives, though flung violently through the