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Lyttelton Times, Volume LXVI, Issue 8034, 6 December 1886, Page 4

A promising mystery lias just been spoilt in London. We refer to the strange accident to a railway passenger, of which we published a description some days ago. The passenger, a Mr Moritz Fischer, was found on the floor of a London railway carriage covered with blood and desperately wounded on the head. Imagination naturally concocted a story of robbery and attempted murder. The train, however, had passed through a tunnel near the Edge ware road station, and an inspection of the sides of the tunnel soon explained the accident. A spot was found much marked with blood. Measurements showed that a passenger, by leaning out of the upper part of a carriage window, could just strike this spot with his head. That is to say he could do so if, like Mr Fischer, he were a tall thin man with a long neck. Why anyone, not sincerely bent on suicide, should stretch himself two feet six inches out of a railway carriage to touch the wall of a tunnel is the only part of the Fischer mystery which has not yet been explained. It is said that the unlucky man was singularly fond of poking his head out of the window when travelling by rail. Perhaps he had some eccentric habit like that which made Dr Johnson touch every lamp-post he passed in his morning walk up Fleet street. Most people, when they put their heads out of railway carriage windows, do so because they want to look at something, and do not, therefore, usually select a tunnel for the operation. The atmosphere of London on an autumn evening is, however, sometimes such that the passenger might well be excused for looking outside his carriage to make sure whether he was in a tunnel or out of it. In any case Mr Fischer seems to have been the victim of a kind of accident which no by-laws or regulations can possibly prevent. Railway passengers, whose movements are not controlled by common sense, must always run risks. In this country, people are allowed, not only to look out of windows, but to stand on the platforms of carriages. Their only protection from accident is their own reason. How slender this protection occasionally is, in the case of even experienced railway travellers, the Edgeware road accident reminds us. But we see no other possible kind of protection. Travelling human beings cannot be packed like glass or china, or trucked like sheep and cattle, under the auspices of any Society for the Prevention of Cruelty.