engine if more carriages were added and had been refused by the station master, as none were available; McGrath (in supplementary evidence given "through the railway company's officers") denied this. The station master's evidence was that the discussion was about adding further carriages to the fifteen with which the locomotive had arrived. The general manager's chief clerk was to accompany the excursion; he suggested that the engine of the routine train that would be following twenty minutes behind could assist the excursion up the bank, or that some carriages could be left to come on with the routine train. Following his conversation with the station master, however, McGrath refused the assistance. The train therefore set off with fifteen carriages, containing about 940 passengers. The carriages were full, and some passengers travelled with the guards. Tickets were checked before setting off and to prevent people without tickets joining the excursion; once each compartment had been checked its doors were locked. Initially the train made progress up the steep gradient at about but stalled about before the top of the gradient. Dividing the excursion train To prevent the train rolling back, the brakes were applied. The train did have continuous brakes, (i.e., all carriages had brakes which could be operated by the driver), but they were of the non-automatic vacuum type. They were applied by creation of vacuum in the brake pipes and released by admitting air to the pipe. This was the opposite of the arrangement preferred by the Board of Trade ('automatic continuous brakes') in which brakes were held off by vacuum (or compressed air) generated by the engine, so that on loss of vacuum (e.g. from a leaky connection or a connection parting) the brakes came on automatically. The two brake vans, however, (one immediately behind the engine tender, the other at the rear of the train) also had hand-operated brakes, each under the control of a guard. These were applied. The chief clerk directed the train crew to divide the train and proceed with the front portion to Hamilton's Bawn station, about away, and leave that portion there, and return for the second portion. Owing to limited siding capacity at Hamilton's Bawn, only the front five vehicles could be taken on there; so the rearmost ten vehicles would have to be left standing on the running line. Once this rear portion was uncoupled from the front portion, the