CLAPHAM JUNCTION.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3502, 26 June 1884, Page 2

CLAPHAM JUNCTION.

If you want to eee what the traffic of London is like go to Clapbam Junction, where the great railway systems connect. The rails lie together like the wires of a grand piano, System and organisation have done their best, and sixteen hundred trains a day pass over them. It is a bewilderment. In and out, coming, going, slow trains and fast trains; on one side of you halts a train, while you watch its wheels slowing, an express rushes past on the other side like a tornado of iron ; no shrieking of whistles or clanging of bells, as on the United States railways—they keep their signals for their officials, and outsiders must expose themselves at their own risk—only a rush, a blast of wind that almost takes away your breath or draws you into its edey when it has gone by, a torrent of carriage windows, and yon see the rear of the last carriage shrinking before your eyes *as it leaves you, and the fast express has come and gone in a space of time which you could hardly find on the dial of your watch, Up ana down the lines you see signal posts and semaphores—arms working; by night —lamps, green, red, white, the language of the railway, but no confusion, every man knows his place, or forgets it at his bodily peril. Yon ask the official when your train is due; ‘ln two minutes,’ and as the clock hands point the train comes. He knows to the second when it left the last station, whether it be on time or behind it, every movement is recorded, and every train has its place and moment. A tunnel-way for passengers connects the whole, so that no one is allowed to cross the rails except the officials, who grow foolhardy, and now and then come to grief. The guard at the junction one day told of the killing of one of the porters, who undertook to cross the line in front of the fast express, and was struck midway the rails by the full front of the locomotive, He was knocked twenty feet like a ball, and when they reached him there was no quiver even in bis flesh. If a shot from a 36-ton gun had hit him it could not have expunged life more completely and instantaneously. It is a saying of the denizens about Glapham Junction, that on the average one man is killed every six weeks. One wonders, after having watched the traffic a half hour, that someone is not killed every day.