NEWS: Items from the Tyrone Herald, February 11, 1915, Blair County, PA

Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by JRB 

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Railroad Death Statistics.

  If every one of the million trains operated on the Pennsylvania 
Railroad System in 1914 had arrived and departed on time, each one 
moving over its own particular route without a semblance of a train 
accident, 19 people classed in the Interstate Commerce Commission's 
accident reports as passengers would have been killed.
  As it was, not a single passenger was killed in a train accident on 
the entire Pennsylvania System of 26,198 miles of track.  Yet nineteen 
so-called passengers were killed.
  This is the way they lost their lives on the Pennsylvania railroad in 
1914:
  Six people in falling, jumping or slipping from moving cars or 
trains;
  Two in attempting to get on moving trains;
  Two, slipping off station platform in front of trains;
  Two, standing too close to edge of station platform and being struck 
by trains.
  One, jumping off ferry boat;
  One, throwing himself between cars of moving train.
  Three, crossing tracks at stations in front of trains.
  One, struck by coach and thrown under train;
  One, assaulted by another passenger and thrown from train.
  The railroad was powerless to prevent these fatalities.  It is 
railroad accidents of this kind that help to swell the accident 
statistics of the carriers of the country.
  Three hundred and one human beings who were or might have been useful 
men and women - people who trespassed on the property of the 
Pennsylvania railroad - were killed in 1914.  These deaths are charged 
to so called "railroad accidents," yet the railroad was powerless to 
prevent them.
  Those killed in 1914 on the Pennsylvania railroad while trespassing 
include people from all walks of life: students, lawyers, painters, 
salesmen, miners, soldiers, stationary engineers, and others.
  The Pennsylvania railroad has for many years conducted an aggressive 
campaign against trespassing and the dangerous practice of stealing 
rides on trains.  Some idea of the awful waste of human life caused by 
trespassing on railroad property - an evil to which thousands of death 
are due every year - can be gained from figures showing the fatalities 
from that cause on the Pennsylvania road east of Pittsburgh alone in 
the past eight years.  This is the record:

Year.    Number Killed.
1907               572
1908               475
1909               410
1910               336
1911               338
1912               255
1913               311
1914               301

  The railroad management will re-double its efforts this year to 
reduce the practice of trespassing.  To this end it will seek the co-
operation of all county, city and borough authorities along its line.

Tyrone Herald, Tyrone, Pa., Thursday, February 18, 1915