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Updated: May 23, 2025
In another case the surface-men attempted to extricate a woman, by sawing the broken carriage, under which she lay, but the more they sawed the more did the splinters appear to cling round her, and when at last they got her out she was dead, while another passenger in the same carnage escaped without a scratch.
We would not prolong a painful description which may, perhaps, be thought too long already yet within certain limits it is right that men should know what their fellows suffer. After all the passengers had been removed to the special train the dead into vans and horse-boxes and the living into carriages the surface-men set to work to clear the line.
These he looked at in passing, but Garvie was not among them. Leaving them under the care of the surgeons, who did all that was possible in the circumstances for their relief, he ran and joined the surface-men in removing the broken timbers of a carriage, from beneath which groans were heard. With some difficulty a woman was extricated and laid tenderly on the bank.
The travelling inspectors had under them a large body of "surface-men" or "plate-layers," men whose duty it was to perform the actual work of keeping the line in order. They worked in squads of four or five each squad having a foreman or gaffer, who was held responsible for the particular small portion of the line that he and his squad had to attend to.
Meanwhile a telegram had been sent to Clatterby, and, in a short time, a special train arrived with several of the chief men of the line, and a gang of a hundred surface-men to clear away the wreck and remove the dead and injured. Many of those unhurt had made singularly narrow escapes. One man was seated in a third-class carriage when the concussion took place.
The surface-men were all gathered round now, the tip-men, and the yard-men, and those from the coke-ovens, all looking wild and pale. "I am going down," Jack said; "we may find some poor fellows near the bottom, and can't wait till some headman comes on the ground. Who will go with me? I don't want any married men, for you know, lads, there may be another blow at any moment."
Edwin went at once to the spot where the surface-men were toiling at the wreck in the fitful light of the fires, which flared wildly in the storm and, as they had by that time gathered intense heat, bid defiance to the rain. There were several passengers, who had just been extricated, lying on the ground, some motionless, as if dead, others talking incoherently.
The average number of surface-men was about two to the mile so that the entire staff of these men on the line numbered over two thousand.
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