2-995-803 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The recent railway accident at Granton, near Edinburgh - the engine on the beach - from a photograph by Truefitts, 1860. Derailment on the Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee Railway, '...by which four lives were lost...There were on the engine and tender at the time of the accident six persons...[including] the engine-driver's son, a boy of about eight years of age...The engine...was proceeding rapidly along the line, which at that point runs close to the sea on a high embankment, when, from some unknown cause, the engine and tender went off the rails...and dashed over the embankment into the sea, a distance of about thirty feet, carrying with them the railing of a bridge...Mathieson, the engine-driver, his son, his brother-in-law, and Morgan, the pointsman, were killed on the spot; Bolan, the stoker, who jumped off immediately before the engine went over the embankment, escaped with a dislocated shoulder...The accident also resulted in injury to several persons who happened...to be sitting on the stone bulwarks beneath the railway...some of whom narrowly escaped with their lives. Within three-quarters of an hour...Sheriff Gordon was on the spot, as were also Mr. List, Chief Constable of the county, and Mr. Brown, Deputy Procurator Fiscal'. From "Illustrated London News", 1860.