Excerpt from Special Report by the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners: To the Legislature, in Relation to the Disaster on March 14, 1887, on the Dedham Branch of the Boston Providence Railroad It is a down grade all the way from Roslindale to the Forest Hills station, the grade being fifty feet to the mile. Professor Swain estimated that with the given grade and curvature, allowing for ordinary friction, a train impelled simply by gravity from a position at rest at Roslindale would have acquired a speed of about twenty miles an hour when it reached the bridge. Walter E. White, the engineer, testi fied that he had about ninety pounds of steam and worked steam with the throttle open two or three notches all the time after leaving Roslindale, but that he had not, in his Opinion, acquired a speed of about more than fifteen miles an hour, because the air brakes came off slowly and retarded the train. The condition of the wreck indicated that the train must have been going considerably faster than the engineer supposed. The experts generally placed the rate at thirty miles an hour or more. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.