Off the Tracks! : Deadly Railway Accidents, Markets, and Morality, 1850-1893

Abstract

This thesis explores railway accidents and safety from the 1850s through the Railway Safety Appliance Act of 1893. Historians have shown, through political, economic, and to some extent, legal examination, throughout much of the latter half of the nineteenth-centry the responsibility of railway safety remained in the hands of railroad companies naming that form of regulation as "volunteerism." This thesis builds on those works by examining the intellectual underpinnings of "volunteerism," and of those who criticized the safety record of railroads.