Page:Fagan (1908) Confessions of a railroad signalman.djvu/153

Rh at Haverhill, N. H., the other day, five employees were instantly killed, through the alleged carelessness or oversight of a fellow employee. Such instances, of course, are particularly painful topics for discussion among railroad men, and yet this is the kind of an accident one reads about in the newspapers almost daily. But in twenty-four hours the reading public will forget the very worst of these accidents to employees. Their frequency takes the edge off their significance. During the year 1907, on a single American railroad, 104 employees were killed outright, and 3575 were injured. The cost of these accidents to the railroad in question was something like $285,000. With an employers’ liability law in force and operation, as in countries abroad, the increase in total paid to employees alone on this road would have carried the aggregate to half a million dollars. The magnitude and importance of the safety problem in relation to employees is still more evident when we consider that for the year ending June 30, 1907, the casualty list on American railroads shows a total of all persons killed, from all causes, of 5000, and injured 72,286; the totals for employees alone being 4353 killed and 62,687 injured.

The following figures in regard to actual train accidents and the casualties resulting therefrom show a rather discouraging state of affairs, from the fact