- Joined
- Aug 27, 2011
- Location
- Central Massachusetts
With the ending of the war, the army was demobilized, and tens of thousands of soon-to-be discharged men wend their way home, most of them travelling by rail. But, the journey was not always a happy one. A rash of railway accidents, too often resulting in soldier fatalities swept the country. Not only soldiers died, of course, and even small branch lines, not as affected by the sudden increase in passengers, also seemed to face increasing numbers of accidents. The situation was such as to inspire a series of newspaper editorials, perhaps the most bitter of which appeared in the New York Herald on August 25, 1865: