Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1880 — Railway Signals. [ARTICLE]

Railway Signals.

The great improvement in safety in railway traveling that has been brought about in this country in the last twenty years is a fact admitted by all who travel much; but few persons really comprehend how safe a place a seat in a car on a well-managed railway train really is. In the eight years from 1870 to 1878 there were 1,165 lives lost from railway accidents in the State of Massachusetts, which is an average of only 146 a year; while the accidental deaths in the city of Boston alone from 1868 to 1878 were 2,587, or at the rate of 259 a year. Boston has a population of 350,000, and the State of Massachusetts a population five times as great. Besides, the num ber of passengers carried on railroads in Massachusets is ten millions a year. When, therefore, it is remembered that of ten million persons carried in railway cars, a year, only 146 lose their lives, while nearly double that number lose their lives every year by accidents in the single city of Boston alone, it will be seen to a minimum the hazard of railway travel has been reduced. But Massachusetts railway statistics reveal another interesting fact, viz.: That a majority of deaths on railways come, not from the hazards of railway traveling, but from walking on and driving across the track. It may not be generally known, but it is a fact that persons have no right to walk on a railway track, and when they do so they are liable to be dealt with as trespassers. Some of the best roads in the country are carefully ballasted with rough broken stone, difficult to walk upon, for the purpose of discouraging trackwalking. But in spite of all that can be done, tramps ana persons of a better grade, women and children, persist in a habit which is attended by great danfer and which contributes at least onealf to the number of lives lost by railway accidents. There is no subject that railway people give more careful study to than that of signaling with a view to avoid accidents. Various systems have been tested, and some of ■them adopted. Each possesses merits of its own, but none of them come up to the standard of what railway people demand. The very best of them require to be supplemented with diligent track-walking and individual inspection. “What we want,” says an experienced railway superintendent, “is a signal that will operate all the time without failure. If it fails one time in a hundred, it will not do.” Such a signal has not yet been devised, but railway men hope that it will be.— Missouri Republican.