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South Canterbury Times, Issue 5006, 14 May 1889, Page 4

A telegram from Odessa announces that while a train on the Transcaspian Railway was passing through a tunnel it ran off the rails, with the result that the seventeen carriages of which it was composed were smashed to atoms, while fifty of the were killed or seriously injured. The disaster is explained to have been caused by a band of robbers, who destroyed the line with a view to plundering the pasengers. A sufficient number of the passengers escaped serious' injury, however, to capture the desperadoes who perpetrated this diabolical outrage. With a Remington type-writer, Mr Frank McGurrin, a stenographic writer in Utah, recently wrote to dictation at the rate of 112 words per minute, and when blindfolded succeeded in writing at the rate of 105 words per minute. But to show that still more rapid work can be done, he thumped away on the keys against time with this one sentence : “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party; ” and the rate of manipulation was 162 words per minute. In a sustained contest he wrote two and a quarter newspaper columns in an hour, being at the rate of 76 words per minute.