Christmas Eve was marked by a railway calamity surpassing in
its fatality, if not altogether in its horrors, any which the history of railway accidents in this country, the Abergele accident not excepted, has recorded. A train of thirteen closely-packed carriages left Oxford for Birmingham about noon on the 24th December, and within about six miles away, near Shipton-on- Cherwell, at a time when the train was going nearly at the rate of forty miles an hour, the tire &tree off a wheel of one of the carriages, the carriage was thrown off the rails, taking the others with it and ploughing up the rails, and the whole train became a wreck ; thirty people were killed on the spot, and their:corpses strewn over the ground, while more than seventy, of. Whom four have died since, were more or less severely injured. Parts of the-destroyed carriages were soon converted into bon- fires to warm the survivors. In that dismal, wintry scene, the extemporised bonfires -ainid the snow, the ghastly array of the dead, the shrieks of the injured—not a few of whom bad to wait for forty or fifty minutes before aid arrived to deliver them from their perilous positions under collapsed carriages—and the general ruin of the wrecked train, combined to present a scene which will be closely, associated in the minds of thousands for years to come with the somewhat unreal festivities of the English Christmas. i Tha-efficiency and energy of the medical men who volunteered, .aear aid from Oxford and the neighbourhood are said to have been beyond all praise, and of the seventy or seventy-one who survived the immediate shock, it seems likely that not less than sixty may recover. It was a ghastly prelude to the joviality of the season.
