THE THORPE RAILWAY COLLISION.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 156, 3 December 1874, Page 3

THE THORPE RAILWAY COLLISION.

[From the Spectator.'] The carnage in the Thorpe collision is such as rarely, if ever, occurs in war. Rather more than one in three of the 220 passengers involved were killed or wounded. Of these, 22 are dead and 60 under medical treatment. But the wonder is, considering the tremendousness of the shock and the damage done to the rolling-stock, that the proportion of accidents to passengers was so small. Out of the 27 carriages composing the two trains, 12 were utterly smashed, six seriously injured, and not one quite escaped damage. The horrors of the event were in some degree diminished by the circumstance, unprecedented in its way, but again suggesting the parallel of war, that the carnage was, though but for a short time, foreseen and provided against. The Norwich officials knew, immediately after the express had started, that the collision was inevitable, and displayed energy in summoning surgeons and workmen, and despatching carriages to the scene of the disaster. There, by the light of bonfires made of the wrecked carriages, the doctors and porters toiled through the night at their grievous task. The coroner’s inquest and Board of Trade inquiry are ’still pending, and we shall not anticipate their decision ; but we may presume to predict that there is an end of single lines of railway so situated that a mail train and an express may, by any chance, meet full tilt on them. First-class passengers, it seems, suffered least in proportion,—the moral of which has its compensation for the directorial mind, aggrieved by the prospect of a possible dividend utterly cancelled by huge claims for compensation. But if it is true that the lower and middle-class carriages served as buffers for the first-class, then, as the House of Commons is not the Commune, first-class carriages may not in future be placed next the engine ; but it is probable that a certain amount of padding will be compelled in the second and third classes to prevent avoidable accident by splintering.