Evening star., 1915-01-31

fore and the rail had held. Its time
had not come; the first train was only
a freight. bearing but few men. so
the leprous, silvery spot inside the
rails heart waited
The two heavy engines of the tram
passed over safely, did the first five
ears. Only the rear trucks of the
sixth car left the rails. But the eight
that followed toppled off the track.
off the enbankmert and down into the
bed of Il waterway forty feet below.
When the railway company and its
surgeons made UP the roll of victims,
twenty men and women were
dead and sixty-two others were in
jurcd.
And all because of that little, silvery.
shining cancer in the hidden heart of
the rail- that had eaten and spread and
weakened the rail, all unseen and un
Seea BILE, until. under the train S weight,
the tlvcnty-four feet OF cold steel
steel so hard that you might. with
fragment of il, grave your name on
u sheet of plate glass-Snapped into a
score of fra Ements.
The wreck mentioned above occurred
last August in New York. The report
OF the interstate commerce commission
on the disastrous affair is the first of
the commissions publications in which
the Slatter.ng of apparently perfect
steel rail into fragments Was laid at the
Coor OF that bugaboO Of railmakers, rail-
Toatis and railroad men known as trans
verse assures Name-fully descriptive
it is, too-Cf the defect that begins Il
little silvery spot in the inner structure
OF the rail itself. and eats its way in
every direction from that center, no big
ger, at first. ma be, than the thumb nail,
urtIl ii has become a transverse itssure'
that causes the rail to give way under
strain. ahatter into bits and h2rl flying
train to destruction and that trains pas
SenyerS 10 eternity.
or course, railroad disasters due to
other causes stiil occur. Misunder-
stood or misread orders still result in
collisions. and always will as long as
the element OF human fallibility re-
mains. which viii he until that time
when mere men become infallible. But
such disasters might be guarded
against. they might be prevented by
the exercise of just little more care.
All the block systems ever invented.
however. all the double tracks ever
laid. all the eagle-eyed inspection ever
put into effect viii not, canno: keep
steel rails containing hidden, unseen
transverse assures from getting into
the tracks. once there, it is only
question OF time until such rails fly In
to bits and wreak disaster.
That is the horrible feature of it, that
nobody, not even the keenest-eyed
track walker or inspector, can detect
in such a rail the hidden inner cancer
that some day is going to cause it to
snap into scores of pieces and become
the sinister cause of d disaster that
VIII bring forth the newspaper extras
and throw a pail of grief over scores
of homes.
A huge, heavy freight train may pass
safely over the track at 10 O'Clock
with never an indication that anything
is wrong. At II o'clock passenger
train comes driving along, bearing it's
burden of human life. 1t strikes the
rail that Is eaten within with the thing
that railroad men now call a trans
verse hssure, and in the winking of
an eye the rail that had seemed just
as strong, just as unyielding, just an
capable of doing it's work any of
the other rails, flies into bits. The tele-