In the history of Windsor, published in 1996, L.S. Loomer writes that there were accidents on the railway almost from the first day. In 1855, two years before the projected line from Halifax was supposed to reach Windsor, a locomotive named the Mayflower went off the track. The damage was minimal but it was the first recorded incident and one of many that would plague the railway as the line was extended to Windsor and west through the Annapolis Valley.

Some of the early accidents on the line, written about by Loomer, were fatal. Three, possibly four brakemen were killed in separate accidents, Loomer said, when their heads struck a footbridge the railway built over Wentworth Road in Windsor. The footbridge eventually was replaced by a standard crossing, but too late to save the lives of the brakemen.

Like Loomer, Marguerite Woodworth records various accidents in her history of the Dominion Atlantic Railway. All the incidents made the news, even the trivial accidents, and usually with plenty of detail by the newspapers of the day.

At one time it apparently was a given that no details were to be spared in reports to the public. Along the railway line, from Halifax to Windsor, and down through the Annapolis Valley, the newspapers were explicit in reporting about how many legs and arms were lost in accidents The reports told of accident victims being mangled beyond recognition, the remains spread along the railway tracks. It made for gory reading, to say the least, but this was a common newspaper practice at one time.

Prime among the newspapers giving explicit details on railway accidents was the Kentville newspaper, The Western Chronicle. For example, on July 2, 1890, a circus train leaving Windsor struck and killed a man who was walking on the tracks. The paper reported that he was a farmer named O’Brien and “his remains were scattered along the tracks for a mile.” A few months later the paper reported a fatal accident in Cambridge when a railway worker fell off the station as the train was approaching. Unnecessarily, the paper reported that “several cars passed over him, cutting off a leg and an arm.”

Sparing no details, in a follow-up story the newspaper wrote that “the wheels of the cars passed over the victim, cutting both legs completely off and otherwise mangling the poor fellow.” Another example of how explicit newspapers were in the early days of the railway: reporting that a train ran over a man who fell on the rails in an alcoholic stupor, The Western Chronicle said that “not a stitch of clothing was found on the mangled remains.”

From reading old newspapers, I found this kind of reporting was the norm when the railway arrived. The railway was new, and accidents along the line, the derailings and fatalities, had never been experienced before. This probably explains why papers like The Western Chronicle reported every railway incident in detail, leaving nothing to the imagination of readers.