The Express.
London, England, 1861-08-27 00:00:00

TO OUR READERS.

!WOWING VITELLIG EWE.

A !Ate edition of the Lepriee is publiAhed every
eveui..g during the mai eireou, cuntaining the
'auk,: tit the day's ram.

Ter. Railway accident season has act in with a
terrible suddenness and severity, on nee of the
best managed, meat frequented, and prosperous
lines in the country. It seems to be one of the
incidents of an imperfect state of what is caned
" progress," that as the sports and gaieties have
their times and seasons of periodical recurrence,
so, too, have these wholesale disasters which make
travellers feel that all men are less mortal than
themselves. In the good old days which are now
almost forgotten even by sentimentaliats, there were
fre.luent accidents, but tow travellers, and when the
coach was upset or run away with, two or three
broken collarbones, or half-a-doxen fractured ribs,
seldom got beyond a paragraph in the nearest local
paper, unless the sufferers were county people.
The casualties in coach travelling, whether in
number or in kind, bear no relation to the
catastrophes with which every autumn makes
the present generation more and more familiar.
Resides, thirty years ago news travelled no faster
than the passengers. Now-a-days, the shock of
an accident in one part of the country is instantly
felt by the whole community, and multiplied and
magnified by a thousand echoes. Statisticians,
no doubt, can tell us to a nicety how many
railway travellers will be crushed, or torn, or burnt
to death in an average of years: they might have
done as much for travellers by coach a quarter of
a century since. But no statistical averages will
satisfy the public that a collision of two trains in a
tunnel is a periodical occurrence which, however
painful t i the victims, is in perfect accordance with
natural laws. The truth is that, with very few ex-
ceptions, railway accidents are traceable to one
cause, or rather to one set of causes. The season
of excursions is the season of accidents, and en
" extra" train is almost always a principal actor
or sufferer in the mischief. There are accidents,
no doubt, attributable to other and more perma-
nent sources of danger, but where the line is under
proper inspection these are rare. The worst acci-
dents are also the most avoidable, the most directly
chargeable to the characteristic recklessness and
impatience of • public always in &hurry, to which
railway directors, also in a hurry, minister with
equal recklessness. The Brightou line has borne a
high and just repute for careful and efficient ad-
ministration ; and no administration, perhaps, has
been more severely tested by demands on its vigi-
lance, activity, and prudence. It would have been
strange, indeed, if the Brighton Railway had
erred on the aide of excessive caution, carrying, as
it does, daily to and fro the " tartest " nieu in
England, and being, in fact, as common a thorough-
fare for the London public as Holborn or the
Strand. But no railway promote a better speci•
men of those English qualities which are seen in'
their exaggeration and excess among our cousins
beyond the Atlantic. No line has been more ex-
posed to the besetting sins of English and Ameri-
can locomotion. At this time of year the demand
for extra and excursion trains can hardly be sate
fled, especially on Sunday and Monday. Trains
are timed to a hair's breadth, and thousands of
people are swept along within an inch of
their lives, at the mere}, of a signalman
or a pointsman. This may, indeed, be
said to be more or lass the case on all lines ; but
when three trains are starting in the same direr).
tion within a few minutes of each other, it is evi-
dent that if either of them start& " won after "
the time appointed, the slight difference in the
minute-hand may be ea serious as a mistaken
order on a field of battle. This catastrophe in the
Clayton Tunnel is appalling in its simplicity.
First, there is an "excursion" Portsmouth train;
then the "regular" Brighton train; then another
Brighton " excursion" train—all leaving Brighton
for Loudon in the space of little more than half an
hour, the first being all but punctual in starting,
but all three reaching the Clayton Tunnel within
a very few minutes of such other. The first of
these trains enters the tunnel " all clear ;" when
the second cornes up, the signalman, finding " to
" his horror " that the signal of the passage
through the tunnel by the first had
not worked, shows a red danger flag, not
in time to prevent the train from entering the
tunnel, brat in time to make its driver beck out'
again. The signal from the London end of the
tunnel, that the first train has passed through, is
mistaken by the signalman at the Brighton end, who
lets the third excursion train pans at full speed
into the tunnel se the second is backing out. The
result is a disaster probably unsurpassed in the ca-
lendar of railway accidents. The engine of the second
train runs over and falls upon the last carriages
of the first train, and crushes the scalded pas-
sengers to death. In the awful darkness of that
tunnel twenty-two people were put to death in the
most hideous tortures. The first question every
one uks in such a cam is, who is to blamer The
signal-man appears to be fixed upon in the present
instance, since it was undoubtedly through his
failure and mistake that the third train was allowed
to peas into the tunneL It does not appear that this
man had lost his presence of mind when he found
his signals out of order, for he exhibited a danger
flag instead ; yet when the third train came up
he mistook the signal from the other end. It is
an alarni.ng consideration that the lives of thou-
sands of passengers should hang on a signalman's
presence of mind, or on the working order
of his gear. But there are too many alarming
considerations in railway travelling which would
put an end to railways altogether if they were