I ask because I read that Mark Twain’s brother was killed on a river boat-the boiler exploded and the boat was set on fire. I know that boiler standards were lax back then, and captains frequently would disable safety release valves to gain more speed. Are there any records to suggest that river boat travel was very risky/-say compared to trains?
At one point, when I was researching one of my ancestors who was an Ohio River boat captain, I ran across historical documents that contained newspaper blurbs about the steamboat traffic on the river. There were an alarming number of boiler explosion incidents and other accidents. FWIW, not all river boats were big stern wheelers; my ancestor owned what was called a “steam packet”, which transported goods on the river.
Another data point - the Sultana:
http://www.tn.gov/tsla/exhibits/disasters/sultana.htm
That’s an extreme example, but safety regulations were lax, particularly during the early part of the era, and a significant number of boiler explosions did happen. Another high profile incident, the Lucy Walker, prompted some of the first regulation of the industry:
The wiki on Mississippi steamboats gives this figure:
Now, there were A LOT of steamboats on the river by 1850, but the safety record still counts as “bad”.
To get an answer to Ralph’s Q we’d also need to know a bit about the safety record of contemporary trains. About which I have zero facts, but an intuitive belief that “Bad” would be a pretty good description for them as well.
It’s not that standards were lax, so much as that technology / metallurgy was not quite reliable enough to make reliable pressure vessels, nor did they know exactly how to check for quality or deterioration. Today steel mills do quality tests on their products, and boilers and pipes are often x-rayed for quality.
Safety standards were almost non existent. The captains could order the chief engineers to gag safeties and over pressure the boilers. An engineer became an engineer with OJT no set standard and there were no licenses. So an engineer could blow a boiler one day and get another job the next day if he survived.
One of the early engineer’s association pushed for standards and testing of engineers. Originally the US Department of Commerce set the standards and testing and inspections. A captain no longer could order around the engineering department. If an engineer put a gag on a safety he could loose his license. That ment he not only lost his job but also his profession. Ships and boats began to be operated with safety in mind.
By the way the safety margin in 1970 was 2:1. That is every part of a boiler is rated at its maximum operating pressure. And that pressure is 1/2 the calculated bursting pressure. Boilers now are inspected yearly and all boiler mountings are inspected every 4 years by being removed from the boiler. And the studs holding the mountings are replaced every 8 years or one stud in each mounting flange is failure tested.
Trains did not have the boiler failure rate river boats did. The speed competition on the rails was not the same as the rivers. So over pressurizing the boiler did not happen.
Well consider that a steamboat operated in a river that sometimes was only a few feet deep and running into submerged objects was quite common.
The steamboat Arabia, was sunk in 1856 when it hit a submerged log. It was dug up a few years ago and put into a museum. The owners of the Arabia have maps showing dozens of wrecks on the Missouri river. LINK
I understand, though, that in the same era, things on rail could be decidedly hazardous for various other reasons. A to me very scary item, in the book Early Railways by J.B, Snell, published 1964, tells of a problem in the very early days of railroads in the US, before the idea of cross-ties was hit on. Initially, the rails were spiked on to timber boards laid end to end, also running longitudinally. “The rolling action of the wheels tended to bend the iron strap rails so that after a while they became sprung. Then the spikes would not hold, and the end of the rail with its sharp point rose high enough for the wheel to run under it, rip it loose, and send the pointed end through the floor of the car. This was called a ‘Snake’s Head’, and the unlucky person sitting over it was likely to be impaled against the roof.”
(In early times, there was no small number of horrendous rail mishaps east of the Atlantic also. It was a hard learning curve.)
I remember reading about some train wreck in early England, just when things were getting industrialized. the train basically ran through the end of the rails at high speed (or was it, jumped the track on an urban curve?) killing everyone in the locomotive and a large number of others.
It was this accident and the mystery surrounding why it happened that compelled English safety standards. The best guess was that some sort of steam accident incapacitated everyone on the locomotive so they never applied the brakes nearing the end of the run.
Rings no bell – can you be more specific? I have the picture that everywhere where railways developed, it was throughout the 19th century, a learning-the-hard-way process: ghastly accident or two happened, demonstrating how such-and-such a practice was fallible; measures put in place to try to stop that particular thing from going wrong; something else went wrong, with hitherto-unenvisaged horrible consequences; appropriate measures then put in place – and so on.
Old railroaders’ saying now applied to aviation: Every rule is written in blood. :eek:
It was an article about the first(?) horrific high speed crash in a major city (London?). The train simply failed to slow down and nobody was sure what happened. I suppose the lesson was about the new and horrific possibilities that new technology could bring. Trains had only recently started travelling high speeds (60mph?) so it was a completely new experience that something like this could happen.
I have the book Red For Danger by L.T.C. Rolt, which gives a history of major railway accidents in the British Isles – and their causes and the safety measures which they gave rise to – from the very beginning of public railways, to about 1960. The closest match I can find there re the happening you describe, is not very close. Chronologically later on than you appear to be looking at: three freakishly similar, mysterious accidents in the years 1906 and 1907 (when railways were well established, and a steam loco had been recorded as reaching the speed of 100 mph). Each in a different location, on the lines of different respective railway companies: but all involving curves / junctions near the stations of respective small cities, in the midst of the trains’ scheduled runs, taken far too fast with derailment ensuing. With – chiming in with your description – in each case, the loco crew seemingly having ceased to be in control / charge of their machine. In each accident, the loco crew was killed: so no light to be shed first-hand, on precisely how the situation came about.
Going back to the OP, Twain mentions a river-boat boiler accident in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn chapter 32. Finn is trying to explain to Aunt Sally, who thinks he is her awaited-for nephew Tom Sawyer, why his boat arrived late:
Remember the song over the closing credits of *Maverick? *
Riverboat, ring your bell;
Fare thee well, land of hell