Mark Twain's numbers may not exact, but the gist of what he is saying is absolutely accurate. Up until the 1878 invention of the "closed loop track circuit" by Dr. Robinson - and the resultant widespread developement of automatic block signal systems, railway accidents did claim the lives of many thousands per year.

With political pressures mounting for the government to do something about it, the railroads were seaching desperately for solutions to the loss of life caused mostly by human error. This new track circuit, which was essentially failsafe in its manner of operation, provided the needed technology. Also, government mandates of all sorts began to come into being about then; which made it possible for any railroad to apply expensive safety measures, which otherwise wouldn't be competitively practical unless all competing railroads were doing the same. Federal law eventually evolved to cover all sorts of safety issues, from signalling and track standards to passenger car crashworthinees regulations.

From that time on, the safety of rail travel improved steadily, and dramatically - to near zero deaths per year. Not only were colisions reduced to only a few per year, the severity of each that still did occur was signficantly reduced. One very graphic illustration of this is the accident that occured at Chase Maryland in 1987. A Corridor Amtrak train (The colonial, if memory serves) collided with an errant Conrail Light Engine move. With an impact speed of well over one hundred miles per hour, of the 585 passengers on board, 40 were hospitalized and 16 died (including the Amtrak engineman of head brakeman). The rest? - minor or no injuries at all!

If it were not for the tough American safety standards, most all of the 585 passengers would have been killed; as was alluded to in the Twain quote. We also fairly recently witnessed the awful carnage of the ICE wreck in Germany (it might as well have been an airplane crash), and many others in Europe and Asia, where standards are not nearly so tough.

To date, these American standards have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But they were originally written in much blood - we should guard them zealously.

For those with interest in more data on this subject, one source is the book "The Search For Safety" c1981, by Mary Brignano and Hax McCullough (ISBN 0-9606202-0-6). Having loaned out and lost my 1981 copy, I recently found it again on the Amazon used book market. they had several copies at the time.

OPB