Page:Fagan (1908) Confessions of a railroad signalman.djvu/206

178 missioners of the State of New Hampshire. These gentlemen were assisted in their duties by the attorney-general of the state, their legal adviser. Replying to the direct question of the board, “How do you think this accident happened? What occasioned it?” the general superintendent of the Boston & Maine Railroad, himself an operator and train dispatcher, testified as follows:—

“I would say, in my thirty years’ experience, closely connected with the dispatching of trains,—we run something like 700,000 trains a year,—I have never known a similar error to be made and I never have heard of it. The error certainly was made, and due, as I believe, to a failure of the mental process, either in the brain of the dispatcher at Concord, the operator at Canaan, or both, and it is utterly impossible for me to determine which one made the failure, or whether or not they both made it.”

Such was the opinion of an expert railroad man, recognized as such by the commissioners themselves. Thereupon the general superintendent, at the request and for the benefit of the board, entered into a minute and exact account of the methods employed in moving and handling trains on the Boston & Maine Railroad, in so far as this was necessary to explain the situation at the time of the accident. The narrative of the general superin-