The Express.
London, England, 1861-09-04 00:00:00

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TO OUR READERS.

SPORTING INTIMLIGINCE.

A !ate edition et the &press is published every
"wee g during the racing aseaosi, containing the
results ol the day's mesa

IN the days when our American cousins were at
peace a topic of conversation among them
was " the last explosion." Brisk competition,
cheap fares, and smart captains, combined to make
the ',uniting of the boilers a vulgar incident of
Mississippi steam navigation. It seems as if from
very weariness of peace and safety, from imps-
tieiwo of humdrum steadiness and tedious pros-
penty, the old country were beat upon a little
murderous excitement at any cost—something,
say, of the havoc and horror of civil war brought
to our doors. The " dead season" must have its
Great Fires, and a rapid succession of railway acci-
dents, by way of an atrocious interpretation of
the phrase. Lists of lilted and wounded, reports
front the limpet:as, ambulances, taunts °lithe field
these things are an annual "sensation" to thousands
of people for whom there is no hunting or shooting
season. Is it that a country without earthquakes,
insurrections, or pestilences, and in which life is
so will looked after, and the increase of popula-
bon is so regular, is sick of the absence of calamity,
and sighs for the excitement of great diameters?
Is it that we are even jealous of the loss and blood-
shed which our kinsmen are suffering on the other
side of the Atlantic, and for which Southern Italy
has to thank the fitter FATHrR ? However this
stay be, our railway Whip/AIWA are striving not
unsuccessfully to brace the nerves of a public
languid from excess of ease and comfort.
They are improving the "dead season" by
experiments on large masses of excursionists,
whose " vile bodies" are the targets in this new
art of war. Within a fortnight of the ope gof
their autumn campaign Vie list of casualties is sonic
forty killed and amore than a hundred maimed for
life. To talk of railway " accidents" is an abuse
of language ; railway " actions" is the true de-
scription of these charges and onsets of opposing
trains, rushing upon each other like two regiwento
of the nuns army canon to blows in the dark.
t►ne might have thought that the catastrophe on
the Brightou Line could hardly be surpassed in
directness and simplicity. The Inquest, it is true,
in a praiseworthy spirit of zeal and curicsity, has
already thrown around the plain and central facts
of the case such a superfluity of concurrent and
contradictory evidence, and such a confusion of
irrelevant details, that the causes of the collision
are almost submerged in the circumstances. The
state of the signalmen and of the signal-gear, and
the precise terms of the blundering message that
the Curried man at one end of the tunnel sent to
the flurried man at the other, fill up columns Ce
question and answer, and divert the attention of
the public from the primary causes of all
such disasters. All this subsidiary evi-
dence no doubt points in one direction,
and strengthens the conclusion which the
common instinct drew at once from the simple
facts. But the duty of theme who comment upon
those " accidents," in the public interest, is to
fix attention upon the system which covers
all the hurry, and recklessness, and confusion,
when it is not on its trial for the donee-
The public are partly responsible for
the dangers they encounter when they tempt a
railway company to tax its resources beyond
its powers of safe control. Railway companies
pander recklessly to a reckless demand, and
trust to ordinary and calculated precautions
against extraordinary and incalculable riaka. The
moral of the Brighton accident, so far as the
public safety is concerned, it needs no Inqu. t to
discover, though the blame may be ever so ri-
gorously and ingeniously distributed among the
minor agents.

The collision on the Hampstead Junction line is
eren more terribly simple than the Brighton
" accident." What can be more simple than a
passenger train running at full speed into a
station on a dark evening, and coming into colli-
sion with a ballast-train at work across the
line ? Surely this is just one of those
appalling probabilities which must have visited the
dreams of every railway traveller. The collision
of an omnibus with one of l'texridat's vans, on
a caual bridge, is equally imaginable, and would
be scarcely less disattruus in proportion, if we
suppose the van deliberately stuck across the
bridge, and waiting to be charged by an omnibus
full of passengers. Multiply an omnibus full of
passengers by thirteen or fourteen railway car-
riages full, and magnify the van to the dimwit-
sions of a ballast train, and wo approximate the
casualties of the collision at Kentish-town. The
spot was certainly well chosen for such an acci-
dent. Four hundred yards from a station, close
to a signal staff, just at a curve, and on the top
of a steep embankment—here wore all the condi-
tions for a railway accident on the largest scale,
or rather for several varieties of " accident "
lumped into one. The passenger train on
this occasion also was an "excursion" train,
though perhaps, nothing is to be said against the
principle of excursion trains in this instance, unless
the incredible statement should be confirmed, that
excursion trains on the Havipstearl Junction and
North London hues come and go as they list, in an
off-hand, desultory, and promiscuous manner, chit-
out information of their movements being given
or expected along the line. Otherwise, it is evi-
dent that any ordinary train might have met with
such a fate. It appears that the engine driver
of the ballast-train saw the passenger train
approaching, and then began to shunt, "in the
" hope of getting clear" of the up line. It appears,
too, that the engine-driver of the excursion-train
" supplised," and had reason to suppose,
the line all clear. Does the blame, then, lie