| The
Great Kipton Train Disaster
 On
April 19, 1891 the first mail train known as No.4 was coming west
on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad in Kipton,
Ohio. At Elyria, 25 miles from Cleveland, the engineer and the
conductor of the ACCOMMODATION were given orders to let the fast
mail pass them at Kipton, a small station west of Oberlin, the
University town.
From the time the
train left Elyria until it collided with the Fast Mail at Kipton,
the conductor, as he admitted afterward, did not take his watch
out of his pocket. He said that he supposed the engineer would
look out for No.4. But the engineer's watch stopped for four
minutes and then began running again, a little matter of life and
death of which he was unconscious. There were several stations
between Elyria and Kipton, but the engineer pounded his train
slowly along in the belief that he had time to spare. Leaving
Oberlin, he supposed he had seven minutes in which to reach the
meeting point. Of course, he had only three minutes. Had the
conductor looked at his own watch he could have prevented the
accident. The trains came together at Kipton, the Fast Mail at
full speed and the ACCOMMODATION under brakes, because it was
nearing the station. The collision killed the engineers of both
trains, and the rescue workers pulled the dead bodies of nine
clerks from the kindling wood and broken iron of the postal cars.
 As
a result of the accident, the railway company hired Webb C. Ball, a well-known
Cleveland jeweler to investigate watch use on its lines. When his investigation
showed that railroad employees weren’t operating any time and watch standard,
he created a new set of standards for railroad pocket watches
which included being accurate to within 30 seconds
per week, having 15 jewels, and having a white face and black Arabic numerals
with each minute shown, although some watches had silver faces until the 1920s.
The watches also had to be temperature compensated because variations in
seasonal temperatures could cause a watch to speed up or slow down.
He also required that railroad engineers have their watches inspected
regularly, upon which they were issued a certificate that guaranteed the watches’
reliability. If an engineer’s watch was faulty, he had to pay for the repair
himself, and while it was being repaired, he borrowed a loaner watch from the
jeweler. Having an accurate watch was a requirement for his job. It was vitally
important for everyone’s watch to show the correct time since most railroad
lines had only one track for trains traveling in both directions. The Kipton
disaster proved that even if an engineer’s watch was off just a few minutes,
the result could be deadly. Ball’s promptness and accuracy was the origin of
today’s well-known phrase, "on the ball."
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