These and numerous other cases of fires, murders, assaults and indecencies had occurred and filled the columns of the newspapers, without producing the slightest effect on the managers of the railway companies. No attention was paid by them to the Board of Trade circulars. At last Parliament took the matter up and in 1868 an act was passed, making compulsory some "efficient means of communication between the passenger and the servants of the company in charge" of railroad trains. Yet when six years later in 1874 the Shipton accident occurred, and was thought to be in some degree attributable to the absence of the very means of communication thus made compulsory, it appeared, as has been seen, that the associated general managers did not yet consider any such means of communication either required or likely to be useful.
Meanwhile, as if in ironical comment on such measured utterances, occurrences like the following, which took place as recently as the early part of 1878, from time to time still meet the eye in the columns of the English press:--
"A burglar was being taken in a third-class carriage from London to Sheffield. When about twelve miles from Sheffield he asked that the windows might be opened. This was no sooner done than he took a dive out through the aperture. One of the warders succeeded in catching him by a foot, and for two miles he hung head downward suspended by one foot and making terrific struggles to free himself. In vain he wriggled, for although his captors were unable to catch the other foot, both held him as in a vise. But he wore spring-sided boots, and the one on which his fate seemingly depended came off. The burglar fell heavily on the foot-board of the carriage and rolled off on the railway. Three miles further on the train stopped, and the warders went back to the scene of the escape. Here they found him in the snow bleeding from a wound on the head. During the time he was struggling with the warders the warder who had one hand free and the passengers of the other compartments who were witnessing the scene from the windows of the train were indefatigable in their efforts to attract the attention of the guards by means of the communication cord, but with no result. For two miles the unfortunate man hung head downward, and for three miles further the train ran until it stopped at an ordinary resting place."