Accidents
The most serious accident in the history of the line occurred on 3 June 1884 when the 4.33pm Salisbury-Weymouth train detached from the engine and derailed about 1 and a quarter miles south of Downton. 41 people were injured and 4 died. Three of these drowned after a carriage overturned into a drainage ditch. The LSWR Locomotive Superintendent, William Adams, claimed that the crash had been caused by a broken coupling between the leading brake van and the first carriage. However the subsequent Board of Trade inquiry, led by Colonel JH Rich, rejected this theory. Colonel Rich stated that the cause was inferior passenger rolling stock travelling too fast over a track not designed for that speed.
Another accident occurred on 2 November 1904; when the final 13 wagons and two brake vans from a Salisbury bound freight train broke away just south of Downton station. The wagons were stopped by a guard in one of the brake vans but the 7.58pm train from Salisbury crashed into them at 20 mph. There were no fatalities and only two people were injured.
Read more about this topic: Salisbury And Dorset Junction Railway, History
Famous quotes containing the word accidents:
“Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)