Abstract

On September 12, 2008 a Los Angeles commuter train collided with a freight train, killing 25 people and injuring another 135. In chapter 56 of Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, a passing train collides with a character, running him over and casting "his mutilated fragments in the air."The first of these we might well call an accident. No malicious human agent was at work in that fatal Los Angeles encounter; whenever you have large numbers of vehicles traveling on shared tracks with massive inertial force, then occasionally there will be fatalities—certainly there have been since the dawn of the railway age. Indeed, it was precisely the public's lurid and sensational interest in those railway fatalities that made ..