The Hammock Papers: Lost.

22 October 2016

Lost.

October 22th 1895, Accident de la Gare de l’Ouest

At 4pm exactly, being five minute late, the train n°56 from Granville arrived in the Montparnasse train station in Paris at a speed surpassing 40km/h - 25mph, in part due to the pilot and mechanic trying to make up lost time and also maybe from a faulty air brake, causing panic in the station.

The locomotive pulverized the three wooden buffers -ejecting the pilot from the cabin, ran through the 30m long platform’s end, going through a newspaper kiosk before piercing the 60cm thick stone wall and the ledge behind it and falling ten meters below on a tramway stop of the place de Rennes.

A newspaper seller was crushed by falling masonry and parts of the engine, and was the only casualty of the accident - by a stroke of luck the tramway was about to leave when the horses, scared by the locomotive’s commotion, ran away farther down the place with the passengers safe inside.

Seine’s police prefect Louis Lépine mobilized a hundred policemen and twenty more on horses to manage the accident’s scene, with the direct aftermath seeing considerable attention from both the press and regular folks flocking the train station to take a peek at the fantastic sight, going so far as to buy tickets to nearby destinations for a few Francs to get access to the platform where the train stayed for two days for the police investigation.

The locomotive was removed after two failed attempt with a 250t winch, and was found to have suffered little damage - unlike the train station.

CONNECT

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL