LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week" paragraphs. Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym, and the latter must be accompanied by the name and address of the author, which will be treated as confidential.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR.] TRAINS OF WOOD OR STEEL [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—As a reader for many years of The Spectator I have developed a profound respect for its impartiality and a con-

viction that it seldom " presumes " unless the presumption is supported by reasonable evidence. I was not a little per- plexed, therefore, to read in a reference the week before last to the Castlecary railway disaster : " It is to be presumed that the death roll would have been reduced had the carriages been constructed of steel."

It is interesting to note the evidence given subsequently before the Ministry of Transport enquiry held on the 16th instant by Sir Nigel Gresley, who is recognised as one of the greatest living railway engineers :

" It is not possible to make a carriage which will withstand the impact of a great engine rushing into it at fifty miles per hour unless of solid armour plating. Were a train, however, so constructed the energy imparted to the next carriage and so on throughout the train would mean that there would be no injured—everybody would be killed by the impact. It is evident from the result of this collision that if the pillars had been made of steel angles instead of teak, and if the outside panels had been one-sixteenth inch steel instead of three- eighth inch teak, that the steel members would have had no chance whatsoever of withstanding the impact. Even the great heavy under- frame was completely bent up."

I do not propose to enter into the merits or otherwise of any particular form of railway coach construction, for a decision may be safely left to those engineers who have given the subject lifelong study, and whose judgement is not likely to be deflected by the clamour of that small section of the dilly Press which is concerned more with sensation and circula- tion than the science of mechanics and ballistics.

Reference might, however, be made to a statement following upon the collision at Warrington in 1935 by Sir Josiah Stamp, Chairman of the London Midland and Scottish Railway

Company : " We have studied the experiments in America and on the Continent and we find that the kind of steel used provides no reason to regard steel coaches as superior to wood."

At the official enquiry into the collision at Battersea Park on April 7th, 1937, a witness stated : " It is more than likely

that rigid steel stock would not have ' given ' as these two coaches did, and that there might have been a great deal of derailment and in fact a coach might well have gone over the parapet into the river."

In the House of Commons in July of this year Mr. W. W. Wakefield, M.P. for Swindon, asked the Minister of Transport if his technical advisers were satisfied on the grounds of sAfety with the latest railway practice of using a combination of wood and steel in the contruction of main line rolling stock.

Mr. Burgin replied that his technical advisers were of the opinion that there was no justification on grounds of safety for pressing the main line companies to depart from the present practice.

Many hardwood timbers are, weight for weight, stronger

than steel, and—what is far more-important—they are more resilient.

An extraordinary feature of the Castlecary accident was that passengers in one of the rear coaches remained for some minutes in their seats unaware of any serious happening, and only later realised the extent and horror of the disaster. This would seem to establish the claim that wood is shock-absorbent to a far greater extent than steel, and also to confirm an experiment recently conducted in the United States of America relative to the comparative safety of wood and steel for auto-

mobile bodies. In this experiment a pressure of 30,000 lbs. was applied to a steel body and to a wood body of similar

weight and size. The steel body became distorted to the extent of eight inches and the wood body to the extent of four inches. Upon release from the pressure the steel body remained crushed and all the doors were so distorted that none could be opened. The timber-constructed body—owing to the great elasticity of wood—reverted back to within one inch of normal and all the doors could be readily opened. The importance of a point yielded by this experiment may be seen in the evidence of a witness at the enquiry into the accident at Welwyn in 1935: " I am told that in this par- ticular carriage " (referring to a timber-constructed carriage) " nobody was killed, and that the passengers were able to get out of the doors which were nearly facing the sky."

In coaches which are made of steel, extrication of the injured is extremely difficult owing to the need for oxy-acetylene lamps, whereas in the case of wooden coaches all that is necessary is a hand-saw, carried as part of the equipment of the train.—