A very striking illustration of the vast increase of safety secured
through this improved car construction was furnished in an accident,
which happened in Massachusetts upon July 15, 1872. As an express
train on the Boston & Providence road was that day running to Boston
about noon and at a rate of speed of some forty miles an hour, it
came in contact with a horse and wagon at a grade crossing in the
town of Foxborough. The train was made up of thoroughly well-built
cars, equipped with both the Miller platform and the Westinghouse
train-brake. There was no time in which to check the speed, and it
thus became a simple question of strength of construction, to be
tested in an unavoidable collision. The engine struck the wagon, and
instantly destroyed it. The horse had already cleared the rails when
the wagon was struck, but, a portion of his harness getting caught
on the locomotive, he was thrown down and dragged a short distance
until his body came in contact with the platform of a station close
to the spot of collision. The body was then forced under the cars,
having been almost instantaneously rolled and pounded up into a
hard, unyielding mass. The results which ensued were certainly
very singular. Next to the locomotive was an ordinary baggage and
mail car, and it was under this car, and between its forward and
its hind truck, that the body of the horse was forced; coming then
directly in contact with the truck of the rear wheels, it tore it
from its fastenings and thus let the rear end of the car drop upon
the track. In falling, this end snapped the coupling by its weight,
and so disconnected the train, the locomotive going off towards
Boston dragging this single car, with one end of it bumping along
the track. Meanwhile the succeeding car of the train had swept over
the body of the horse and the disconnected truck, which were thus
brought in contact with its own wheels, which in their turn were
also torn off; and so great was the momentum that in this way all of
the four passenger cars which composed that part of the train were
successively driven clean off their rolling gear, and not only did
they then slide off the track, but they crossed a railroad siding
which happened to be at that point, went down an embankment three or
four feet in height, demolished a fence, passed into an adjoining
field, and then at last, after glancing from the stump of a large
oak-tree, they finally came to a stand-still some two hundred feet
from the point at which they had left the track. There was not in
this case even an approach to telescoping; on the contrary, each car
rested perfectly firmly in its place as regarded all the others, not
a person was injured, and when the wheel-less train at last became
stationary the astonished passengers got up and hurried through the
doors, the very glass in which as well as that in the windows was
unbroken. Here was an indisputable victory of skill and science over
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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