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Updated: June 22, 2025
For a moment in the jar and confusion we did not realize what had happened, then we saw a great locomotive lying on its side, and a line of Pullmans, sunk to the axles in the soft earth. The whole "Montreal Express" was derailed, here in the flat land at the grade crossing. The thing had been done some time. The fire had been drawn from the engine; there was only a sputtering of steam.
Another train disaster of an even more tragic character occurred near Waterval, fifteen miles north of Pretoria, upon the last day of August. The explosion of a mine wrecked the train, and a hundred Boers who lined the banks of the cutting opened fire upon the derailed carriages.
"A luggage truck which was standing on the platform fell between two of the carriages and derailed one of them," explained Whiteside. "The only passenger who was hurt was a Miss Stevens. Apparently it was a case of simple concussion, and when the train was brought to a standstill she was removed to the Cottage Hospital, where she is to-day.
Even the next car was derailed and badly smashed. The Alcomotive, too, reclined upon one side and blazed merrily, a fitting tailpiece to the scene. But not a soul had been killed we learned that from one of the groups which swarmed from the express, after a muster had been taken of our own passengers. It was a marvel but a fact. Hawkins and I edged away slowly.
It was a lonely journey, and you were much in my mind. My greatest apprehension was that we might be derailed and the despatches captured; for as fast as our army had advanced, the track of it had closed again, like the wake of a ship at sea. Guerillas were roving about, tearing up ties and destroying bridges.
At noon the following day a slightly bigger and more prolonged jolt caused the curious among us to look from the window. The engine, tender, and luggage van were derailed. As the speed of the trains never exceeds twenty-five miles an hour, such little contretemps which occur from time to time do not ruffle the serenity of those concerned.
First it was a carload of steel accidentally derailed and dumped into Quartz Creek at precisely the worst possible point in the lower canyon, a jagged, rock-ribbed, cliff-bound gorge where each separate piece of metal had to be hoisted out singly by a derrick erected for the purpose a process which effectually blocked the track for three entire days.
The tender and the baggage car were also derailed, and lay beside this mutilated engine, which rattled, groaned, hissed, puffed, sputtered, and resembled those horses that fall in the street with their flanks heaving, their breast palpitating, their nostrils steaming and their whole body trembling, but incapable of the slightest effort to rise and start off again.
Yet no American seems to have any scruple about adding an extra hundred weight or two to an already villainously overloaded horse-car; and I have seen a score of American ladies sit serenely watching the frantic straining of two poor animals to get a derailed car on to the track again, when I knew that in "brutal" Old England every one of them would have been out on the sidewalk to lighten the load.
Instead, these derailed professionals went to swell the hosts of those who had been wronged and disinherited by the injustice of the law.
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