On March 20, 1916 Mrs. Louisa House died. Her death called to mind other, more dramatic deaths in the House family. Her husband, George House, was killed in 1885 at the age of 50 when the engine of the train he was tending suddenly blew up in the trainyard at Godfrey Illinois. His fireman William Ryan, another Bloomington man, was so impressed by his own narrow escape that day that he gave up railroading. At the time of Mrs House's death Ryan was a janitor at the schools in Joliet. (21 Mar 1916) Being a railroad employee was a perilous way to earn a living. The Pantagraph was regularly filled with stories of men killed, maimed or crippled working on the railroad in the early years of the twentieth century.
The terrible death of their father did not prevent George's sons from following in his footsteps. William, who was born in their native country of Canada, was killed in a train wreck near Gardner Illinois when he tried to leap out of the way but was crushed by a misdirected car ten years after his fathers death. (4 Nov 1895) He died leaving a wife, Maggie, and 2 year old son.
Only three other sons could be traced. One more was a railroad man. Fred House was an engineer, retiring from the railroad in 1939. He is the second man sitting on the left side of the photo. He was an Alton engineer and was on the Joliet oil run when he retired from working life.
A study of U S railroad injuries demonstrates the incredibly dangerous nature of railroad work. Records for the period between 1902 and 1911 indicate that 33,761 railroad employees were killed as a result of accidents in the work place in that nine year period. Over half a million were injuried in some way. The terrific rate of deaths and injuries was related to the many miles of track and the popularity of rail travel and shipping. In 1890, a little over 500,000 passengers were carried by rail, but in 1922 over 500 million passengers were carried by rail. Although there were different safety mechanisms and measures that were invented or developed by the 1879, these new technologies were not adopted by the railroads until federal law required their adoption. It was through the labor organizations, which had been in existence since the 1870's, that attention was drawn to the loss of life and limb in railroad work. Passengers were also subject to railroad accidents and a public outcry further caused the government to turn its attention to the problem. So the fact that two men of the House family would die on the railroad was not so unusual, although Fred House lived through the more dangerous era of railroad work.
An Evaluation of Railroad Safety, Office of Technology Assessment, available digitally:
https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1978/7808_n.html