Page:A voice from the signal-box.djvu/11

7 He complains loudly of the system practised by the railway companies, of harassing their signalmen with letters of inquiry respecting paltry delays to trains at busy junctions. This, he emphatically asserts, is productive of many accidents by causing the men to be too anxious to get trains past their boxes without detention. For they often allow trains to follow each other with too short an interval of space between; or permit two trains to cross a junction almost simultaneously, to the destruction of one or other of them. The collisions near Bolton on the Lancashire and Yorkshire line in December last, occurred under circumstances similar to those above described.

He states that signalmen are wretchedly underpaid; that promotion is invariably denied them; and that their occupation is calculated to “impair the strongest of minds, and make them careworn and melancholy.”

He calls attention to the fact that in foggy weather signals fixed at a considerable distance from the ground are of no use whatever, because the enginemen of many express trains are obliged to rush by them without noticing whether they are on or off. To remove this shortcoming he considers it desirable that a second signal arm and lamp should be fixed on each post about the height of the driver on his engine. There would then be no difficulty whatever