Railway Accidents: A new start?

On 3 November 1838, merely four days after the opening of the first Prussian railway line from Berlin to Potsdam (having a length of roughly 34 km), the Prussian Railway Act was passed. The King of Prussia had heard of the railway accidents in England, which were killing about 30 passengers a year. He wanted to have an effective law, which provided compensation to the victims of such accidents. Under the Prussian law, the railway company was liable for any injury to a passenger or other person injured during transport by rail unless it could show that the injury resulted from the person’s own act or from some unavoidable external cause.

The original government proposal had suggested that the victim ought to sue the employee responsible for the accident first and the railway company would be liable if he could not pay. But a leading academic lawyer and government adviser, Savigny, argued that it was impractical for the victim or his family to sue the employee. In a complex organisation like a railway company, the victim would not be able to identify the employee responsible. In addition, he argued that the company should be liable without proof of fault; otherwise, there would be no effective safeguards for passengers or third parties in cases where the reason for the accident was a purely technical one, such as unforeseeable defects in material or the like. On this, see also, “A Burning Issue” in the “Technological Changes” Legal Case Study.

This law was copied in Italy. But in England and France, railway passengers still had to prove fault.