WELL DESERVED | AdventAI

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · March 11, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 11

WELL DESERVED.

The wonderful immunity from accident and death, and the absolute freedom from danger of either, upon the railroads of this country, demonstrate that railroad management here has practically reached perfection. It may be truly said that a passenger whirled through space at the rate of forty miles an hour in one of the coaches of the Northwestern Railway Company is in less hazard and less liable to accident than he would be in walking the streets of Chicago, and as safe from possible injury as he would be if seated at his own fireside. For the first twenty years of railroad travel in the United States, as we learn from the report of the Rhode Island Railroad Commissioner, there was on an average one passenger killed of every two millions carried, while in the succeeding twenty years there was but one killed of more than six millions carried. If we recognize the further fact that more than ninety per cent of the passengers killed meet their death by their own recklessness or by their disregard of the rules of the railroad companies, we might say that a number of passengers equaling the country’s population are annually transported over our roads without a fatal accident that can be attributed to the fault of the railroad officials.

A sense of security on the part of the passenger, and the constant study of the railroad official to invoke every possible aid to promote the safety and the comfort of patrons, make railroad travel a pleasure indeed. The newly invented air-brakes, the patent platforms and couplings, the improved methods of tie and rail laying, and the perfect system of signals, combine to produce this extraordinary absolution from accident or injury.

We are led to these reflections from an intimate acquaintance with the workings of one of the best managed roads in the United States—the Chicago and Northwestern, whose operations extend from Chicago to the British Possessions, and whose branches permeate every considerable point of traffic throughout the great Northwest, and even to the Pacific coast. No ordinary mind can master the details of operating a huge corporation like this, whose hundreds of trains, passenger and freight, arrive and depart with the regularity of the clock; whose millions of passengers are transported, each with the self-assurance of a speedy, a safe and a comfortable transit; whose officials without exception are men of long experience and excellent judgment in all things pertaining to the business in hand. There is not in all this country a company which maintains a better corps of conductors, many of whom the traveling public have met for twenty years past, and all of them gentlemen in the strictest sense of the term.

To the management is solely due the general excellence of this great highway, and we are glad to know that the vast business which the company is now doing, indicates the public appreciation of the efforts of these gentlemen to serve them.—The Herald, Sept. 1, 1879.