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.While these Cassandras were obviously misguided, their predictions of disaster were not entirely off the mark; the wide variety of causes of early accidents demonstrated the difficulty for those running railways of considering all potential risks but, by and large, each railway system became safer as experience was gained from investigations into the background of every accident.This was by no means a smooth process as railway companies were often unwilling to learn from these disasters because of the cost implications and consequently independent regulatory authorities emerged in most countries.The public outcry over accidents forced governments to create these bodies and put pressure on the rail companies to reduce the number of accidents.Basic braking and signalling systems were only introduced after considerable pressure and countless deaths, even in developed countries like the UK and the US with their extensive railway networks.In less-developed countries, the process was far slower, as witnessed by the long list of huge disasters on the Indian subcontinent, with tolls often in the hundreds.The railroads in the United States were particularly disaster-prone in the mid-nineteenth century because the lines had been built so cheaply and as traffic intensified the disasters multiplied.In a period of just a couple of weeks in the spring of 1853, two major accidents, with death tolls of twenty-one and forty-six respectively, highlighted the inadequacies of the railroads’ safety regime.After the Civil War had ended in 1865, there was renewed public outcry over a series of seventeen fatal accidents in the single month of August which killed a total of eighty-eight people.The US railroads did not use any external signalling on the lengthy sections of single line but relied on a despatch system that was dependent on communication between the controllers, a method still widely used today, and the result of any error was, all too often, a ‘cornfield meet’.In the United Kingdom, it took a particularly deadly disaster, the Armagh collision in 1889 in which eighty-eight people, mostly schoolchildren, were killed when the train carrying them rolled back down a hill into the path of another, to force the government to ensure that passenger trains were equipped with continuous automatic brakes and that signalling systems kept them apart.It was in America that the technology for safer braking had been developed by Westinghouse, but it was slow to be adopted universally and the implementation of a fail-safe system in the UK was delayed by arguments over what sort of brake – vacuum or air – should be adopted.Even in the US, despite some railroads fitting continuous brake systems throughout the train, it was not until the 1890s when federal law specified the adoption of the air brake that real progress in rail safety began to be made.Although railway accidents in the nineteenth century, like today, were front page news, the industry was nevertheless relatively safe.A rare early study of the rate of railway accidents found that in France, between the introduction of the railways in 1832 and 1856, 642 people were killed, which gave a rate of around one fatality for every two million journeys, around seven times safer than travel in stagecoaches.42 France did, later, have what was the worst ever accident in Europe and possibly in the world, when an estimated 800 soldiers were killed in an overladen train which lost control descending from the Mont Cenis Tunnel in 1917.Indeed, in the long litany of catastrophic rail accidents across the world, it is noticeable that a high proportion occur to specials, such as excursion trips or troop trains, partly because these are not in the normal schedules and partly because they were often carrying far more people than normal in old rolling stock.In Russia however, an accident black spot throughout its early history, not even luxury was a guarantee of safety.In October 1888, the Russian Imperial Train jumped the tracks at Borki, 400 miles east of Moscow, because of poor maintenance and killed sixteen members of the Tsar’s court.The Tsar himself was in the dining car and escaped unhurt, but ordered a much more solid version of the Imperial Train to replace the wrecked coaches.This accident was an exception, though [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]