3-053-801 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Railway Disaster near Guildford: wreck of a first-class carriage, 1873. '...the express up train on the South-Western Railway from Portsmouth to London...ran against a bullock, which had strayed from the neighbouring high road and had got on the line...All the carriages were thrown off the rails. Some were overturned down an embankment and were crushed to pieces. Three persons - one a baby in its mother's arms - were killed instantly, and many others were injured. The engine and tender, breaking the chains by which they were coupled to the train, sprang over the body of the animal...There were ten carriages in the overturned train; they rolled down the embankment, a height of eight or nine feet, into two adjacent fields. The destruction was terribly complete in two of the carriages - a first-class smoking-carriage, about the middle of the train, and a second-class carriage, the third from the engine. The wrecks of these two carriages, as they lay not long after the accident, are shown in our Illustrations, from photographs taken by the Surrey Photographic Company'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.