Terrible Railway Accident in Germany.

Auckland Star, Volume XVI, Issue 3807, 21 October 1882, Page 1 (Supplement)

Terrible Railway Accident in Germany.

A terrible and deplorably fatal railway accident has taken place in Germany, a country, ■which, as a general rule, baaata an almost entire immunity from tbis particular form of disaster. It appears that an excursion train, carrying the extraordinarily largo number of twelve hundred passengers, started from Ifrcibuvg, in the Black Forest, ou Sunday evening, bound for Colmar. and that when near a village called Hugstetten the engine and carriages left the line, owing to a telegraph-post haviog fallen in the way of the train. During a hurricane the post had been blown down, and the locomotive must have run into the obstruction iv the darkness, whilo the engine driver was ia perfect ignorance that any danger was to be apprehended. The results, as were hitherto reported, arc most calamitous. Accounts direct from Germany stato that fifty persons havo been killed outright, while eighty others were injured, and nine carriages were dushed to pieces. A report received in Paris, and, we nope, exaggerated, just doubles these figures, it is not stated in the German telegrams what was the exact character of the line at the spot where the engine left: it, whether there was a steep embankment down which'the coaches wtre precipitated, or whether the tram Golii.'ed with the buttress of a brirl»c ."-panning the.way. Some such explanation scurrs needed to accountfortbc terrible deviation anl) loss of life wrought by this a6p tiling affair, and it appears to be supplied by th'a Paris report, which says that part i.f the tfaiu. wag shot down an embabknient in: oasSvamp. The huge freight of pas eogeis bormi by: the train, of course, rraJc the )i tot killed and injured greater than it would otherwise have proved ; but in thisca'oit does not appear to have been the fact' o( the train b:ing an " excursion " .which occasioned the catastrophe. TeWgraph posts are liable to be b'own down in front of all trains, if the power of the wind is sufficiently great. \\ hatevcr may have been the cause, there is sure to be a searching investigation in Germany into the v.ry worst railway accident that ever occurred in tho Fatherland. ' With the exception of the entirely unique and unutterably awful Tay Bridge accidont, no railway catastrophe in Great Britain itself has been attended with so heavy a sacrifice of human life as this one at Hugstetten. Tho accident on the Great Western line at Oxford, which took place on Christmas Kve some years ago, resulted in tho deaths of over thirty passengers; but this id the largest number of human beings that has ever perished through prevcntible or unpreventible causes on any railway south ot tbo Tweed. Kailway accidents abroad are happily rare, owing to the comparative small number of trains run and the slower rate of speed ; but, when they do occur, as at flugstetten, and as in the disaster Dear Paris just over a year ago, tho havoc wrought may be surprisingly terrible;