The engine and trucks stopped, the men shouldered their tools and tumbled out, and we followed them.

A few hundred paces in front of us was a railway bridge, over which a road passed, and under which the rail went at a sharp curve.

The snow had drifted heavily against the bridge, with its high earth embankment, making manifest at a glance the cause of the disaster.
The bridge was crowded with human figures, and on the line below men were working in the drift, amid piles of debris and splintered wood.

The wrecked train had all been slightly draped in snow; the engine alone, barely cold, lying black and grim, like some mighty giant, formidable in death.

A sheet of glass ice near it showed how the boiler had burst.
Some of the hindermost carriages were still standing, or had fallen comparatively uninjured; but others seemed to have leaped upon their fellows, and ploughed right through them into the drift.