The discreditable condition of many of the smaller railway- stations
in London has been illustrated this week by a deplorable accident. Enormous crowds, as usual, visited Hampstead Heath on Easter Monday, and rain coming on in the afternoon, a few thousands of them tried to get home by the station on the
London and North-Western Railway. The managers of that railway had, however, made no special preparation for them. The crowd flowed, as usual, down the staircase on to the plat- form; as usual, a ticket-collector's box occupied half the door- way; and when the platform filled, there was a dangerous crush, hundreds trying to descend upon other hundreds who could not move. Two adults and six children were accordingly squeezed to death, most of them dying upright, and thirteen more were seriously injured. When the deaths were perceived, the crowd on the platform took fright, and rushed across the metals to the other side, and but that the officials succeeded in stopping an incoming train, three or four hundred lives would have been taken. There was no one specially to blame, the truth being that the suburban stations and the Metropolitan stations were not built for the awful crowds which on holidays throng into them. The Companies might go to more expense in the way of barriers and police, but to be safe, the stations want rebuilding. The staircases are used both for ascent and descent, and are, therefore, death- traps ; and the platforms are frequently mere knife-boards, from which, if a panic of five seconds occurred, hundreds of passengers would be flung under the wheels of advancing engines. The danger has been pointed out a hundred times, but it will not be removed till, after some great massacre, a jury has fined a Railway Company half its year's dividend.
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