3-053-802 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Railway Disaster near Guildford: wreck of a second-class carriage, 1873. '...the express up train on the South-Western Railway from Portsmouth to London...ran against a bullock, which...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...were killed instantly, and many others were injured...The destruction was terribly complete in two of the carriages - a first-class smoking-carriage, 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...Among the passengers were two of the inmates of the Convaleseent Lunatics' Home at Witley, a branch establishment of Bethlem Hospital...one of the patients, a young man who was a medical student before his affliction of mental disease, exerted himself with great zeal and intelligence to relieve the less fortunate passengers...An inquest on the dead was opened next day...the jury gave a verdict of accidental death, with a recommendation that there should be a communication between the first and rear van, and continuous breaks'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.