Railroad Mismanagement

Author : Charles Wilson Felt
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781391190228
Total Pages : 30 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

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Download or read book The Eastern Railroad of Massachusetts written by Charles Wilson Felt and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Eastern Railroad of Massachusetts: Its Blunders, Mismanagement and Corruption Massachusetts General Hospital, when Mr. Loring was urging forward the work of recruiting, and sending his son, bearing his own name, to the front. This road was managed for the first ten years without injuring a passenger, but since that time it has suffered doubtless more severely, in proportion to its length, than any other railroad, either in Europe or America; and all the great calamities have been directly traceable to gross carelessness and trifling with human life. In 1848 a train containing Marblehead passengers was nearly destroyed at Castle Hill. Within the limits of Salem, killing six passengers, and wounding forty more. In this case the railroad Company could only offer that a man was ordered to be at the spot in case the trains met at the switch, and stop one of them; but it was proven that the man was to perform this duty at midnight, and to encounter all the contingencies of a walk of a mile alone. He failed to stop the train, and the Company was held to have made insufficient prevision, and paid heavy damages to the sufferers. This accident placed the Eastern railroad at the bottom of the list of Massachusetts railways in point of safety twenty live years ago, a position from which it has not recovered, but latterly it seems to have made a plunge downward Worse even than ever before. There was in 1862 a collision at Hamilton, near Salem, five persons being killed, or dying from the effects of the collision, and about thirty five were injured. This occurred after a long series of minor accidents and narrow escapes, which should have proved sufficient notes of warning, and enforced a high degree of carefulness. But the superintendent, Jeremiah Prescott, negligently gave orders for one train to meet another without notifying the second train to wait for the first, there being only a single track. His defence was that he meant to have given verbal notice to the conductor, but forgot it. In other Words he deliberately wrote an order for one train, and left the other to chance. Prescott was forced to resign. It came before the grand jury of Essex County, and had the subject been investigated it would doubtless have led to measures which would have prevented the Revere disaster. No one had the nerve to press forward an investigation. The newspapers had nothing to say about this criminal blunder, but helped to cover it up. The record of the inquest had to be searched out at the coroner's house in Ipswich, and every possible obstacle seemed to prevent that investigation which the safety of passengers demanded. This was taken advantage of, and a man who had been employed upon the railway was sent about with a petition asking for the reappointment of Prescott. Many refused to sign it, but no notice was taken of their protests. Prescott was reappointed, if indeed the resignation was anything more than an attempt to deceive the public. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.