Accident
"It is safe to say that no previous railway accident in this country
has resulted in such a mass of distorted and wrecked rolling stock."
The disaster occurred at 1:45pm when the express failed to negotiate a 183 m radius curve in a deep cutting known locally as Straw Cutting, shortly after crossing the Six Mile Creek between Hyde and Rock and Pillar. The train derailed, with the engine coming to rest against the side of the cutting 60 m from where it derailed; the boiler burst, extinguishing the fire in the firebox but severely scalding the fireman. The carriages piled up around it; all seven passenger carriages had left the tracks, with the second overturning and coming to rest in front of the locomotive while four of the other carriages telescoped together. The force of the crash was such that the undercarriage of one was twisted into the form of a letter "S" and one passenger who survived was thrown out of their carriage, struck the side of the cutting, and bounced back in through another window. The guards van and two goods wagons at the rear failed to derail. Bits of the train were scattered throughout the surrounding farmland and the cutting contained a mass of splintered wood, bent steel, and broken seats; an attending doctor described it as resembling "the result of a bomb blast".
Due to the remote location, it took approximately ninety minutes for rescuers to arrive. Reports reached Middlemarch of an accident where there "were possibly a few injuries" and medical personnel did not initially travel in a hurry to the disaster, but upon catching sight of the disaster from a rise in the road half a mile away, they proceeded swiftly. In the intervening time, the injured were tended by the passengers from the relatively undamaged rear carriages and by local farmer Pat Kinney who owned the property through which the cutting ran; his son Frank had boarded the train at its last stop in Hyde and was one of the deceased. Some passengers were trapped in the wreckage for several hours and medical personnel - with the assistance of railway maintenance staff - worked until it was too dark to see.
Read more about this topic: Hyde Railway Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word accident:
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—Paul Valéry (1871–1945)
“A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment,—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.”
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—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)