December 4 – The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits is founded in Brussels. December 29 – Ashtabula River railroad disaster: Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway Train No. 5, The Pacific Express, collapses the Ashtabula River bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio, dropping eleven passenger cars into a fire started by the car stoves. Of the 159 people on board, 92 are killed and 64 injured, the worst train disaster in the United States to date. Unknown date events The Atjeh Staats Spoorwegen, a narrow-gauge railway on Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, opens between Banda Aceh and its port of Ulèë Lheuë. The first regularly operated compound locomotives, a series of small 2-cylinder compound 0-4-2 tanks, are built to the design of Anatole Mallet by Schneider of Le Creusot for the Bayonne–Biarritz Railway, France. Classification yard opens at Mülheim-Speldorf in Germany. Ohio Falls Car Manufacturing Company, later to become part of American Car & Foundry, is founded in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Accidents January 21 – The Abbots Ripton rail accident on the Great Northern Railway (England) kills 13 and injures 53. The accident occurs after a blizzard has reduced visibility and disrupted the signaling system, causing the Special Scotch Express to collide with a coal train and an express train travelling in the other direction to run into the wreckage. Births April births April 24 – Yury Lomonosov, Russian-born locomotive engineer (d. 1952). May births May 27 – William Stanier, Chief mechanical engineer of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway 1932–1944 (d. 1965). June births June 19 – Nigel Gresley, Chief mechanical engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway 1923–1941 (d. 1941). Deaths June deaths June 2 – Charles Beyer, German-British steam locomotive manufacturer, co-founder of Beyer, Peacock & Company (born 1813). References